6: Trust Falls and Building Trust

• Episode 6: The Importance of Trust

Welcome: 00:00

Welcome to Mt Nebo's Leadership Podcast Leaders Lift. This is episode 6: Trust Falls and Trust. I'm your host Greg Cunningham and I look forward to spending the next little bit talking about trust.

Intro

In last week's episode we talked about a few foundational topics related to building relationships. Today I want to talk about trust. I'll share an interesting story from when I was much younger that relates to trust (and maybe just a bit of insanity). For today's little lift, I have another book to recommend related to today's discussion. Before diving into n trust in general, I want to talk about a recent Forbes article about the decline in high-quality leadership. Then we will dive into trust in our personal and professional lives.

Story Time: 00:49

Trust Fall at scout camp - one boy sitting wrong but everyone did it. Camp leader was terrified as he didn't know us as well.

I loved scouts as a kid. There was nothing better than camping and just having fun with all my friends. My dad was almost always one of our leaders. The first year I could go to a full scout camp was absolutely one of my favorite experiences. We went to Camp Maple Dell in Utah and it was an amazing camp. Zip lines into the lake, canoeing, an Olympic sized swimming pool. Every night we would have night games and also probably spent way too much time pranking other scout troops and the camp leaders.

That year we had an amazing troop and won almost every competition they had. We were also a big handful for the camp leaders as our pranks were epic. That's probably because our leaders helped us plan them out. Everything from cooler raids to the final day prank of re-organizing all of the signs around the camp. We were also pretty good about protecting ourselves from retaliation. One night another troop decided to run through our camp in a raid. They didn't realize we were prepared and most of them ended up on the ground due to the rope we had strung around the camp.

Ok. I know that's not very leadership oriented but no one was hurt and it was a lot of fun. But one of the memories burned into my brain actually relates to our topic today.

Most of you probably know what a trust fall is. We were first introduced to this concept at the camp's obstacle course. Part of the course had a three foot wall where you stood on top, crossed your arms and fell backwards and the rest of the troop caught you.

One day back in our camp, someone suggested that the pole on which the name of our campsite was hung would make a great trust fall. We of course thought that was a good idea.

Before I go any further, just a disclaimer that today I would never let this happen with any group that I was a part of and no one listening should try this under any circumstance.

The reason for the disclaimer is that the pole that the sign was hung on required anyone, even the adults, to actually climb the tree to reach it. I don't know how high up it was, but it was too high.

But when you are young and the leaders are onboard with it, you don't think about the danger. I don't know how many kids did the fall and I can't even remember if I did it (probably not), but let me share a couple of things I do remember.

In order for this trust fall to work, all of the individuals on the ground had to stand shoulder to shoulder and interlock arms. And the person doing the fall had to stay stiff and keep their arms in. We had enough boys and leaders on the ground that if those two things happened, it was going to be ok.

One young man fell backwards just fine but threw out one arm and ended up giving someone on the ground a bloody nose. Not a huge deal but it did make folks a bit gun shy. After that another young man went and instead of falling straight back he basically sat down and threw both of his arms out. When that happened, most everyone scattered on the ground. I remember my dad (who was a pretty big man) standing there with that young man in his arms. If my dad had stepped out of the way he would have landed seat first on the ground and there would have been significant damage. But my dad stood there and did what he had said he would do.

That's the first lesson here: once we agree to do something, we need to do it. And we shouldn't agree to it if we don't think we can follow through. Both the person falling and those on the ground had agreed to do their part to make sure things were safe. If either party didn't follow through, someone was going to get hurt. Think about that in your own life. While it may not lead to physical harm, anytime we don't follow through on something we committed to there is damage - to the project, to the relationship, etc. Think about a young kid that you promise to take out for ice cream. You had better follow through or you are teaching them that it's not important to keep our word and you are eroding the inherent trust kids have in us. More to come on this later in the episode.

The second lesson this story teaches is that trust doesn't just happen overnight. One of the camp leaders (someone we didn't know but had been with us for a few days during the camp) decided they would give this a try. Many of the boys in the troop had already taken the fall with no issues so you would think it would have been easy for him to do this. He was also older than most of the boys so that should have made it easier as well. Nope. He climbed the tree just fine but as he shuffled out onto the pole we could see his knees just shaking. It was so bad that it started to shake the pole and the tree's it was attached to. He did not do the fall. He just couldn't get the courage to do it. So why would he not do it when boys much younger had no problems? It was because those boys knew everyone that was on the ground to catch them and rapport and trust had been built up for quite some time. This camp leader had only known us for a few days and that was just not long enough to build up the trust needed.

Again, do not try doing this under any circumstance. Just learn the lessons by hearing the story. You don't need personal experience with this one.

Little Lift: 05:51

Continuing on the trust them and related to some of the items later in the episode, I want to recommend a book called Winners Never Cheat by John M. Huntsman (amazon affiliate link in the show notes). This is a great book about the need for integrity and building trust. He shares several stories about how he had to stay true to his word even when it was really tough.

Mini Topic

And that leads me into my mini topic for today and that's just a brief discussion about the challenges we have with trust in the world today. I don't want to dwell on the negative side too much and really want to spend most of our time talking about what trust is and how to build it. But I read a Forbes Article recently that talked about how research is showing a decline in high-quality leaders. Per the article (I'll put a link in the show notes) one of the keys to the decline is the eroding of trust.

If I think about stories in Winners Never Cheat and those that I have heard from older generations, we are certainly living in a very different world. It used to be that you could give your word or shake hands and that was considered as binding. Now even when we have signed, valid, legal contracts, there is always a concern about the terms being fulfilled.

While the world has become easier to navigate in some ways, it's also become more complicated and there are exponentially more pitfalls than there used to be. Online classified websites are a good example of this. While they make it easier to sell and then buy things that maybe you can't afford at full price, they also come with some huge risks. I had a friend that recently got burned buying a piece of technology from another individual. Where I live there is one classified service that is extremely popular. Every time I list something on it, I almost immediately get contacted by more than one individual trying to scam me. I've also had family members and friends fall victim to scammers taking advantage of their individual circumstances or lack of knowledge.

I'm not saying these circumstances didn't exist in the past, they did, but they just seem so much more prevelant today. It's such a big deal that huge companies, like Apple for example, stake their reputation on their trustworthiness.

We have in the headlines today government and business leaders that are putting their lack of integrity on public display, and worse than that, they seem to be ok with it.

My thoughts are that there are a few factors that this is becoming more and more of an issues. First is a lack of personal integrity and that is related to too much self-focus. The extreme version of this are those that are going to do whatever is necessary to achieve their goals and they don't care what damage it does to anyone else. You can see this in business when pension funds are stolen, financials are falsified and countless other situations. Outside of the corporate world you see it in the news every day. Children are taken advantage of, scammers targeting the elderly, politicians making decisions based on very narrow beliefs without looking at the larger picture and numerous other examples.

Another factor I see is the rise of social media and online communication. Even remote work can contribute to this. In previous generations, the majority of the interaction and communication was done face to face or at least verbally. Think about hand shakes to seal a deal. I still remember as a teenager talking on the phone (yes phones were designed for verbal communication) for hours with my girlfriends (who is now my wife). We didn't have text messaging or email or anything like that. Compare that with how many individuals build key relationships only through digital means. While not everything about digital communication is bad, most of it in fact can be used to enhance our relationships (remember the story about me facetiming my wife from on top of the mountain). But that only works if we don't replace in person type of communication with purely digital.

One of the negative impacts of all of this technology is that it really isolates us. We may have 1,000 friends on social media but how many friends do we have that we interact with in person or how many of those 1,000 friends would we trust with an important secret. The camp leader that didn't trust us to catch him is a good example of this. We were not yet part of his trust group so he couldn't do it.

Anyway, I don't want to dwell anymore on this. But I think we need to all be aware of what is going on with trust in our world today. This is another area where if we don't deliberate work to get where we want to be, we are leaving things to chance and it feels like much of the lack of trust and integrity in the world today is because there is not enough focus on those core values. Ok. I should probably move on now.

What is Trust: 10:33

Let's start off by defining what trust should be. If I'm out to dinner with my friends and leave my wallet on the table and walk away, it should be safe. That's one form of trust. Another form of trust is knowing that if someone tells you they will do something, it will get done. And yet another form of trust is being able to assume positive intent no matter the circumstances. Or to know that even if it isn't going well, that someone is doing their best. Those are just a few examples of different kinds of trust and hopefully you can think of others in the various aspects of your lives.

Trust is interesting because it seems like we are born with inherent trust - trust for those in whose care we are in. It's only over time and with experience that we realize that if you trust implicitly you are likely to get burned (to varying degrees). It's also in that experience that we could learn that it's ok not to be 100% trustworthy. I don't want to dwell on that but think about some of the examples of the lack of trust in the world - how many of those situations happen because at some point it become ok to have less integrity or to not fully keep our word.

If I think about the personal relationships that I have, I think about trust on multiple levels. I think about trusting someone with my life for example. But I also think about trusting that those close to me are looking out for me. That they will let me know if I'm headed down a bad path. That they will be there for me if I need them. That I can share my fears, struggles, weaknesses, etc. with them without fear of being criticized. Essentially I am trusting them to help me get the most out of life. I'm giving up come the control that I'd like to think I have over my life and putting it in their hands.

Let me give you an example of trusting my wife. Just the other day, as we were talking about some stuff that is going on she flat out told me that she did not like seeing me this frustrated and that I wasn't happy and had lost my drive in that area. What does that have to do with trust? Well first, she had to trust that if she told me something like that I wasn't going to take it the wrong way (we will talk about this later in the episode). I also had to trust that she wasn't just saying it to annoy me or something like that. This was her way of telling me something needed to change and I needed to trust that her goal was to see my happy. For those kinds of conversations to work, there has to be mutual trust that both sides are just trying to do what is best.

In a professional environment, a lot of the same principles apply but there also needs to be the ability to trust that those around you are going to do there best to do their part and that they want you to succeed. I had an example that made this very clear to me. My early mentor had left the organization and I was asked to be part of the hiring team to find her replacement. That was an interesting process. I will admit that I was disappointed that I wasn't the replacement as that is what she had been training me for. But that wasn't to be so I worked hard to try and find someone that would help us continue to move forward. I was only part of the hiring team and I believe I was the most junior. The team ended up selecting an individual to fill that role. It was not unanimous selection and I was one that said no. But you move forward and do your best.

A while after she was hired I had a one on one with her. She said that she needed my performance to be much higher than it was. No problem. I can do that. But her next statement was a bit of a shock. She hadn't been there very long and we were in two different states so hadn't had a lot of in person interaction. This was the first time she had visited my site. With that context, I was shocked when she indicated (she used hand gestures to demonstrate the gap and there was a significant distance between them) the gap in my performance and followed that up by saying "I'm not willing to help you get there". Any trust we had built was immediately destroyed. I went from working with a leader that was training me to be her successor to working for a an individual that made it clear that I had no future working for her. I resigned a few weeks later and moved on. This is an example of how to destroy trust in the workplace. I hope none of you are ever on either side of an interaction like this one.

A true leader would have wanted to build trust and to do so could have explained that I needed to improve and then say "let's figure out a plan to get you where you need to be" or even "based on this, I think we need to work together to find you another opportunity". Either of those would have still been tough to hear, but they would have set the stage to build trust as I would have thought that she was on my side and wanted to help.

Now before we take a quick break just one more thought. That is that trust is a two way street and because it happens between imperfect individuals, you are going to get burned. In the professional example above I felt completely burned. I don't know if someone had told her that I objected to her being hired or what but it was not good. I personally didn't feel we had been working together long enough for any such assessment to have been appropriate, especially with no warning. Getting burned can have a more lasting effect. A about a decade after this experience, I was asked to be part of hiring a new director that I would report to. I had to fight my instincts to going into immediate distrust mode.

When you do get burned, it's important to figure out if you need to salvage the relationship and rebuild the trust and if that can be done. In the case of the individual that didn't want to help me, I chose not to salvage the relationship and that was the right call. As a parent, you are most likely to face instances when your kids break your trust. In almost all circumstances, I'd suggest that just walking away from those relationships is not an option. So when you find yourself in a circumstance where trust has been broken by you or someone else and you want or need to restore the trust, it's time to roll up your sleeves and take the initiative to do so. After the break we will dive into ways that you can build or rebuild trust.

Mid-Roll

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Building Trust as a Leader: 16:39

Building trust is one of the most important things you can do as a leader. It doesn't matter if you are in a professional leadership position, are a parent, aunt, uncle, grandparent or have leadership responsibility in a non-professional organization. Let's talk about some of the things that you can do to build trust from the start.

First and foremost, you need to demonstrate integrity and help others do the same. Think about what integrity means to you. Does that mean never lying? Does it mean keeping your word and promises? Doing what you say you are going to do? Does it mean that you do your best to not be hypocritical? Am I true to who I aspire to be? Am I true to the kind of person I tell others I am? Is it a combination of all of these and more? Without integrity can there really be trust?

After integrity you can demonstrate things like reliability, consistency and sincerity. You also need to practice what you preach. That ties into both integrity and consistency. Do I tell others to be hard working and consistently work hard myself? Or do I tell others to work hard and most of the time don't pull my weight?

For sincerity, do those you lead feel like you are honest and sincere. When you say "let me know if I can help" do you really mean it or is it only an expression so it appears you want to be helpful.

You also need to practice transparency, humility and with those comes vulnerability. I've talked about this before, but to briefly reiterate. Do you share your weaknesses with those you lead? Do you apologize when you make mistakes? Do you make it ok for others to make the mistakes and share their weaknesses. If you think about it, there is a huge leap forward in trust when you apologize for a mistake. And then an even bigger leap when someone you lead owns up to a mistake and you don't throw them into the deep end for doing so.

To build trust, a leader needs to put the needs of others ahead of their own. In a personal relationship that may mean sacrificing something you want or need to take care of the needs of others. Think about the relationship of a child and a parent. The young baby wakes up in the middle of the night hungry and the parent gives up their own sleep to ensure the baby is fed and feels safe. There is a bond of trust that develops.

Another way that you build trust is allowing and even encouraging others to disagree with you. This is something that is very lacking in the professional world today. A major social media company with a new ceo has been constantly violating trust by demonstrating very publicly that anyone that disagrees with them will be punished. All that does is build a team of people that will say yes or just go along with every crazy idea because the only thing they can trust is that if they don't, things will go badly. Do the opposite. Encourage your team to challenge you. You don't have to agree with them but when they do push back, acknowledge their willingness to share their differing opinion and encourage them to continue doing so.

Another element of leaders build trust is having the right attitude is another great way to build trust. Who wants to be around someone that is always negative and down on life or whatever situation that comes up. It's just flat out hard to just someone that sees everything as glass half empty. Positivity and optimism are a choice an can go a long way to building trust.

And the last thing for this section is to stress that in order to build trust, you need to give it, even when it may not have been earned. This is not always the right approach but more often than not, people will rise to the level of trust you give them. If you never trust anyone in anyway, how could they possibly earn your trust. You have to take the risk of getting burned (it will happen) to get to where you want to be.

The mentor I have mentioned several times repeatedly showed trust in me when there was no real reason to do so. My first management assignment ever was to travel out of state to shut down a call center that we had just acquired. I had never managed a team. Had never traveled for business. All I did was ask for a chance to do more than take phone calls. I'm still not sure what she saw that made her feel like that would work out but it did and she was constantly giving me opportunities to learn and grow - constantly trusting me to take on the next big thing.

Think about one of your kids that misses curfew. Are you going to never let them leave the house again? I wouldn't recommend it. You have to let them have the opportunity to prove they can make a better choice next time.

That's several ways that we as leaders can work to build a foundation of trust in our personal and professional lives. Let's transition now to the topic of restoring trust. It's something we need to be able to do because no matter how hard we try, we will do things that diminish the trust of others and they will do the same. If we don't know how to restore trust, what kind of a world will we end up in.

Restoring Trust: 21:19

Let's transition now to working to restore trust. I know in the professional example mentioned earlier, I did not even try to rebuild what little trust had been shattered. In that circumstance it just didn't make sense for me. But more often than not, it does make sense to work on trust. This is especially true in our most important relationships. I've heard that those we love the most are most often the ones that we hurt. I'm not necessarily talking about real major things but it could be something as simple as having a bad day at working and not being a great person to be around at home that evening. Even small things like that can damage trust.

So when you have decided that you want to rebuild trust, what do you do? How can you take the initiative in the relationship? Let's start talking about that. Instead of talking about how to rebuild trust in a specific circumstance, I'd like to talk about tools you can put in your tool kit and use as needed. As always, I'll try and weave in some examples as we go along. Some of these principles apply to circumstances when you need to restore someone else's trust in you and others apply when someone else needs to regain your trust.

Let's start with when you need to restore trust. Again, I'm not going to try and address things like how severely trust was broken or anything like that. When you are the one that needs to regain someone else's trust, you need to start with a self-examination. First, you need to identify what you did to reduce trust. It could be something simple or something big. And then you need to figure out why it happened. And then figure out what you can do differently in the future. This might be easiest with an example.

Let's say you have a new coworker on the team. On their first day you tell them (like we do in so many circumstances) that if they need you help with anything just let you know. A couple of days later as you pass in the hall they ask if you would be willing to help them understand one of the projects that you will both be working on. You say sure and you agree to set up some time to discuss. A few days later you are in the project meeting together and you realize that you have not followed through. Now, this may not seem like something that would violate trust but think about it from the perspective of the new employee. What might they be thinking? They may think you really didn't want to help them or even worse that you are deliberately trying to set them up for failure. None of those could be true but since you really haven't work on building trust, any initial benefit of the doubt could easily be gone.

Your self evaluation in this case should identify that you didn't keep a commitment with a new co-worker and that got things off to a rocky start. As far as why it happened, maybe you didn't feel like you were the right person to help them get up-to-speed but you didn't want to say no. Or you just didn't have time. Or even that you forgot. All three of these reasons could lead to a different action plan for the future.

After the self-assessment, it's time to figure out what you can do (you can only control yourself) to set things straight. Whatever you do, it needs to be sincere and deliberate. A half-hearted, meaningless apology with no follow up will most likely make things worse. A sincere apology is required and that apology should recognize what happened and that you are taking ownership of it and what you are proposing to do to make amends and how you will do better in the future. Let's continue with our new co worker example.

Here is how I would suggest the apology and follow up play out. Right after the meeting you grab the new coworker and let them know that you realize you didn't follow through on what they requested and that you'd like to discuss it when they have a few minutes. When you do discuss it with them something like this would be appropriate: "I apologize that I did not set up time with you to talk about the project before the first meeting. I told you I would help you get up to speed and I did not do that. I got busy and forgot about it until we walked into the meeting. If you would still like to discuss the project, I am available at these times. I should have done a better job of following through with you and feel like I got us off on the wrong foot. I'll be more conscious of my commitments in the future. Besides this project, what else can I do to help you get settled and be successful?".

That would be a really good conversation, especially if you give them a chance to respond and don't make it one sided. And most importantly, whatever you agree to do, make sure you follow up on it.

Letting Others Regain Trust

Let's transition to helping others to work to regain your trust. Both of these scenarios are critical but helping others to regain our trust is probably more difficult than working to regain the trust of someone else. This is even more difficult if it really is a critical relationship and/or if the trust violation is deep. But if we expect others to trust us after we make mistakes, we must be willing to do the same thing.

The way I want to approach this is to assume that we as leaders are going to take the initiative to work on the restoration of trust instead of waiting for the other offending party to come to us.

The first key is going to be communication. Besides trust, communication is probably one of the most important aspects of any relationship. I don't know how you could build trust without communication. If you are taking the initiative, you will likely need to be the one to initiate communication. This is probably the most difficult and critical step. My early mentor did something one time that really upset me. It was definitely a trust violation. But we had worked for years on building trust and benefit of the doubt so my initial thought was that she didn't mean anything by it or that she didn't even realize she had done it. But it still bothered me. So I had to step up and go in and talk to her about it. It was 2 minute conversation but I can't tell you just how difficult it was. But after that conversation, everything was fine. Not all of these communications will go that well but they still need to happen.

So what needs to be a part of that communication - facts, honesty, transparency and sincerity. You also need to be willing to share what you are willing to do to help restore trust and what you would like them to do to restore trust. And then finally, you need to be willing to give them a real opportunity to make amends. That includes not writing them off when it doesn't go perfectly as quickly as you'd like or if you run into any other road bumps.

Let's use a personal life example to try and illustrate this point. For those of you with independent teenagers you might relate to this example or hope to never face it.

Your teenage son comes home after school super excited about a party that night at a friends house. You don't really know the kid hosting the party but that's not a huge concern until you hear the words "and their parents won't be there". All the red flags go off and the end result is a discussion explaining that you aren't comfortable with the party being held without adult supervision. I'm sure you can imagine where this conversation could lead and if you are imaging a door slamming as part of the reaction you would not be alone.

Sunday at church you are talking to some friends and are asked what your son thought about the party Friday? You explain that he hadn't been allowed to go and then realize that by the look of confusion on your friends face that something had happened. They don't even need to tell you, but they do, that their son had talked about how much fun the two of them had at the party.

So is sneaking out to a party he wasn't supposed to attend a trust violation? Yep.

There are many ways you could react to this. Ankle trackers, grounding for life, voices raised conversations, etc. are all options. But I would question how effective any of those things are really going to be. Let's talk through an alternative based on the suggestions from just a couple of minutes ago.

First, take a bit before dealing with the situation. If you want to really work to rebuild mutual trust then it's not something to rush into. Here is how your conversation could go.

First, give him an opportunity to come clean. Not only does it make it less confrontational if he admits to it but that can also be part of giving him an real opportunity to rebuild the trust.

Second, in your conversation you should ask questions that try and help him understand why this is a big deal (most teenagers probably won't think it's a big deal). Then you can tackle some of the items I mentioned earlier.

The facts were that he was not allowed to go to the party because of the lack of adult supervision and that he snuck out and went anyway.

Honesty and transparency - deliberately disobeying makes it harder for me to trust you. While this one time thing may not seem like a big deal and nothing bad happened, it is still wrong and makes we wonder when you tell me other things if you are actually telling the truth.

Transparency - I don't want to feel like I can't trust you and have to do things to ensure that you are obedient. I want to know that even when we disagree that I can still trust that what you tell me is the truth.

Sincerity - We can work together to rebuild the trust that we used to have before this happened. I'm willing to do my part if you are willing to as well.

To rebuild trust, I'm willing to talk about what the consequences of this situation should be and to give you some input on those consequences. What I need from you is a commitment that you will not do something like this again. I also need you to be willing to talk to me when we do disagree rather than just storming away, slamming a door and doing what you want anyways. If we can do that over a period of time, then we can move past this.

So that's at least part of what should happen in the conversation. It's not an easy conversation to navigate especially if they push back and insist it wasn't a big deal and that there shouldn't be any consequences. But if you keep your focus on working to rebuild trust you can do it.

Knowing When You are In Over Your Head

Now what if you have done everything you know how to do and trust continues to be a challenge. If a personal relationship is critical to your life, then you might need to look for help to start rebuilding. There are many professionals that can help in those circumstances. You may also need help deciding if trust has been violated to the point that you should consider more drastic action. Again, get some help if you are at that point.

If you are in a professional environment, then you need to consider the resources you have at your disposal. That could be a manager, HR representative and even a confidential ethics line (a lot of companies have these types of resources). If you feel like none of those are options then it's probably time to start looking for another opportunity.

Wrap Up: 31:38

We have reached the end of this episode. I hope you have a deeper appreciation for the role that trust plays in our relationships and how important it is if we want to be a leader in any and all aspects of our lives. We have covered several things that we can do as leaders to build a foundation of trust. That includes having personal integrity and then techniques and skills that can be used. We've also talked about how we can restore trust and allow others to do the same. I can only imagine what our communities and the world would be like if we were able to build more trust in our lives. While this podcast may not change global trust, I do hope that it helps you to continue to build trust in those relationships most important to you. And for those of you leading in a professional world, I hope you take this principles and build that foundation of trust with your teams. Doing so will set the foundation for you to do some extraordinary things.

Post Roll

Thanks for sticking with me to the end of today's episode. If you want to be notified of future episodes, hit the subscribe or follow button or follow ldrslft on instragram. You can also visit mywebsite for more great content and resources to help you on your leadership journey.

Check out the show notes for all the relevant links and takeaways from this episode.

Thank you again for tuning in. Now go out there and build trust so you can lift others.