“Who can you trust?”
Ghostbusters? Your mom? Your boss? Your teammate? Yourself??
Trust involves one person’s willingness to be vulnerable to another — one’s perception of another’s ability to actually DO what they SAY they will do.
TRUST involves 3 components:
•Ability
•Benevolence
•Integrity
Without all three, trust won’t exist.
Ability: I believe you have the ability to fix my car, so I will trust you to do it. I believe you have the ability to make the final shot, so I will give you the ball in the final seconds. We trust those we believe have the ability to come through for us.
Benevolence: I need to believe you have my best intentions at heart, that you care about me, about helping me, about pleasing me. Without believing you have good intentions for me, I cannot trust you.
Integrity: I must see that you adhere to a certain set of principles and values in life that I also perceive to be important. I need to feel a partnership about where we both stand on our values. I must also see that you keep your word.
Trust is often established over time, due to shared experiences and realization of values you and your trustworthy mate hold together. Leaders always have the trust of others. It’s an imperative to leadership at any level.
We trust our friend to keep a secret, our parent to pick us up from school, our business partner to handle the company finances, our company leadership to make sound decisions, our society to protect us. We even need to be able to trust ourselves to make good decisions, to perform well in sports, to honor a promise that we made to someone else.
So much is at stake with trusting another person that, when trust is broken, the impact is large and often, largely irreparable.
The key to repairing trust is to identify in which of the 3 areas it was broken, because one area is better to “break” than others.
If I fail to make the final shot once, I can regain your trust by making the shot the next time. Trust in Ability can be regained.
Breaking trust through lack of BENEVOLENCE and INTEGRITY is a very different story. If I sense that you don’t care for me by your actions or you show a lack of adherence to the values I thought we both shared, trust is much harder to regain, if not impossible!! The best you can hope for is to restore trust to close to the former level over time and that often takes a very long time.
Don’t take the trust others have established in you lightly.
