Moving at the Speed of Trust
by Shawn Bohen
I was in San Francisco last week on a business trip, one of the first I’ve been on since Covid.
All week long, as I made my way through the airport, to my hotel, and through my client organization over several days, I was reminded how much easier and more natural it is to build trust in an in-person environment: holding doors open, shaking hands while looking people directly in the eye, asking someone how their day is going, seeing others in their three-dimensional glory.
Because while I do believe trust can be established and sustained virtually, it requires an enormous amount of attention and deliberate effort to offset the very un-human condition of trying to connect, two-dimensionally, through a screen.
And trust is essential in getting things done. As one participant in another client meeting put it recently while discussing potential solutions for their substantial structural financial deficit, “We can only move as fast as the speed of trust.”
Mistrust is Today’s Default Setting
Many entities I’ve had the privilege of working with over these last few years are undergoing a set of big transitions. All of that change is happening in the context of an intensely volatile world: Covid (still with us); climate change (holy shit); political divisions in the US and globally (democracy yes, though ugh); the insidious rise of deliberate misinformation efforts (WTF?). The list goes on and on.
People are tense, guarded, emotionally and physically tight.
Leading in this environment means that everyone you work with — inside, outside, and the leaders themselves — is feeling vulnerable and jangled. That includes you, too. How do you manage change (the only thing we can promise with certainty) under these circumstances?
To me, it all comes down to building trust. If you don’t trust the people you work with, you’ll never get the hard things done. And while we want to trust others, it has to be earned — these days, assuming good intent is no longer the presumptive starting point.
What to Do?
In the virtual, jangled environment that has become our norm, there are things we can do as leaders, for ourselves and others, to lessen mistrust and improve connection. Some suggestions…
#1. Recognize that everyone makes up their own story.
Although I know it would behoove me to, I don’t always assume good intent. In the absence of objective information — directly observable words, numbers, charts, tables, tones of voice, body language, etc. — exacerbated by virtual and hybrid work, we often make up stories to explain why things happen:
“My boss didn’t include me in the meeting because… I’m about to get fired; she doesn’t think I’m promotable; I made that joke last week about her shoes.”
What makes things even more complicated is you and I can be in the exact same meeting or read the same Slack entry and have entirely different interpretations. When we are jangled, we are especially quick to make assumptions and draw conclusions that assume the worst.
#2. Access the data below your neck.
Your brain can talk you into anything, from “I’m kicking ass” to “I’m a loser.”
Paying attention to what your body is telling you can provide access to what you are really feeling. Are your hands sweating? Is your breathing shallow? Is your foot tapping?
These kinds of things can give you insights that your thoughts alone may not provide.
As adults we are socialized to wear a mask of mature attentive listening — even if we are not really present and able to process what is going on. Authentic communication is at the heart of trust; your body can give you signs that you need to refocus. It is okay to say, “Can you repeat what you just shared? I got a little distracted.”
Recognize that all of this is going on in the minds of others, too; it can work at cross purposes to the trust we hope to establish. A below-the-neck check in helps get past faux attentive listening and can lead to authentic engagement.
#3. Watch what is going on with others.
Leadership means creating a space in which other people can act, an invitation for all of us to thrive around clear goals.
Sometimes, however, it’s easy to get so caught up in what we are doing and saying that we miss that the other person is crying (literally or not) and having trouble holding it together. We need to slow down, recap, pause, and ask, “How is this going?”
Trust emerges when we can offer flexibility, freedom, support, and reassurance that failing doesn’t have to be scary.
Start with Trust
Recently, for the first time in my life as an executive coach, I had someone say to me, “Because you were brought into the organization through the board chair and leadership, I don’t trust you.” I appreciated their willingness to be this candid, and it served to remind me how on edge we all are in today’s world, and in the workplace in particular.
Everyone is jangled these days. Whether we are in-person or working virtually, we can strive to actively, consciously, and explicitly convey what is going on in our heads and in our bodies, and encourage the same among those with whom we are working. Doing so will help to build, gain, regain, and sustain trust.