Trusted
“In the context of building a team, trust is the confidence among team members that their peers' intentions are good, and that there is no reason to be protective or careful around the group. In essence, teammates must get comfortable being vulnerable with one another.“
- Patrick Lencioni
I am a numbers geek. A childhood disability that required surgery and then long term therapy put me a bit behind the other boys at a formative age. I didn’t dream of being a baseball player, I dreamt of being a sports statistician. I memorized lifetime batting averages and other statistics from the baseball almanac.
My dad gave me a book on speed mathematics by a Swiss mathematician and my ability to get answers for pretty much any calculation gave me a great head start on any math discipline.
It is probably why I ended up an institutional investor where finding correlations, patterns, and using mathematics to determine a more predictive future, is so valued. It is all about using probabilities to gain trust in the decisions you are making.
Lencioni, in the context of team building, describes trust in a very different way. It is about vulnerability and the comfort level with being honest about their challenges. It requires getting a “yes” to several unstated questions:
Are you for me?
Would you never do anything to hurt me?
Do you have the best intentions for me?
If the answer is “yes” to all three of those propositions, then you can say pretty much anything to others. And being really honest about where others are doing well and where they are not is invaluable to a team. It is the level of vulnerability that comes in a great long term friendship or healthy marriage.
Another leader describes trust as:
The probability that someone will do what they say they will do
minus
The probability they will do something to hurt you
I like that he incorporates the traditional understanding of trust but he factors in the newer Lencioni concept of trust in the context of a team. Both matter, but most people overlook the latter. And ironically, when I sometimes hear someone say that they don’t “trust” someone in a leadership circle, they are almost always referring to the second variable in that equation.
And who doesn’t want to be trusted? I would love to think that the probability that I can be trusted is very high because I do the things I say I am going to do and my intentions with everyone are always to help and not hurt. That my heart toward others is good. But everyone else gets to do the math about me and calculate their own answer.
And in reality, for some, I probably score very high and for others, I likely don’t. And knowing how I am rating with others is super helpful.
But don’t be confused, in every office, family, and team, everyone else’s trustworthiness is being calculated, whether they are math geeks like me or not. Everyone has an unstated but continuously calculated “trusted” coefficient. We raise that average by doing what we say and lower it when our behaviors show others we don’t have their best interests at heart.
And it doesn’t take much of the latter to completely erase the value of the former.
Consider
Do you think people trust you?
Do you think most people on your team are viewed as trusted?
What have you done to create that kind of environment?
Do you understand the incredible value of creating one if you haven’t?