Do you really love me?

There are all sorts of efforts that managers make all the time to build trust because, at some level, we all know how important it is. I think we all know how important aspiration is, genuine desire to learn, and we all know how important trust and you might say psychological safety is.

So, you see people doing things all of the time to build trust, but trust is a funny thing. It's one of those qualities I believe that, in some sense, the more you try to create it, the less likely it becomes. It's a little bit like, you know, someone who's insecure in a relationship, who keeps asking the other person, "Do you really love me?" You know, because every time they ask that, what they're really communicating is, "I don't think you love me." So it has the exact same effect.

If people say, "Hey, we're going to go off and spend a day, you know, rafting so we can build trust." Immediately, what does everybody hear in their mind? "Oh, the boss thinks we don't trust each other. Well, of course we don't trust - he's a jerk. We all know why we don't..." See, so it immediately brings out the opposite.

I've always thought for years that trust in a team or work setting is really analogous to happiness for the individual. If you ever find somebody who's trying to be happy, they're in big trouble because happiness is a sort of thing that if you try to be happy, you know, the more you try, the worse off you are. And yet many people are very happy, because happiness comes as a byproduct. You know, if you're really doing things you care about, and you're connected to the people around you in what you do, you'll be very happy. But the happiness is not something you're thinking about; it happens as a byproduct. I think trust is the exact same way. Trust arrives as a byproduct.

The most obvious strategy that creates conditions where trust can arise is honesty and truthfulness. Nothing destroys trust more quickly than lack of candor. If I know you have something on your mind, and we're sitting, talking about a subject that's relevant to what I'm convinced you think or feel and you don't tell me, I'll guarantee you, in that moment, trust goes down.

Conversely, when anybody discloses something, kind of becomes more open and honest, the odds are the trust can go up, with one important caveat. Let's say that I'm really angry at you about something, and I'm kind of holding on to it, and then finally, out of frustration, I go, "Well, let me tell you what I really think about you." Trust does not necessarily go up, even though I'm being more candid. So it's actually a little more than just honesty and candor, it's honesty and candor combined with a willingness to not just lay my crap on the other.

In other words, if I say, "Look, I'm really disturbed, and I think that there's something that I'm doing that's really contributing to it," that's totally different than saying, "I'm really disturbed, let me tell you what you're doing to disturb me." So trust is built by candor, but in the way we've come to learn and understand this in all the work for years on organizational learning, it's candor in the context of inquiry skills.

Good quality conversation creates trust. Good quality conversation always arises from openness and reflectiveness in the sense of I'm not just laying my junk on your shoulders, I'm expressing, you know, what's true for me, but I'm also really curious how maybe I don't see all of it and, two, how I'm really perhaps part of it. And if you get those qualities together, you have a great conversation. And great conversation will produce trust. It's the most reliable strategy I know of that produces trust as a byproduct.

- Peter Senge, Senge on Leadership