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What a Leader needs to understand on Trust

Written by: Dr. Martina Violetta Jung

Article Overview: In this financial and economic crisis, people has lost trust in their leaders. Why and how do they get it back?

What a Leader needs to understand on Trust

Where has the trust gone? How can we get it back?

Let us first take a good look at what trust is and how trust is created. In business, trust is an engagement between people who choose to work with each other. In this context, it is a conscious decision linked with the awareness that this might end with a disappointment; although, the latter possibility is mostly ignored. People actually do not speak about trust, until they have lost it.

Consciousness plays only a small part in creating trust; emotions and the sub-consciousness play a more vital part. We observe another person and his or her behaviour. How the person is dressed, the sound of the voice, the expressions of the face (mostly the eyes), which opinions a person holds -and based on that we develop an idea how this person “is”. In general, we overlook how fast we are in making this judgement. Prejudices, generalisations, our own experiences as well as expectations strongly influence this process. So, why someone else trusts or mistrusts us is mostly difficult for us to detect.

If you are honest with yourself and reflect for a few moments, you will discover that you have trusted people in the past for many reasons. Some relate to the person you trusted, even more relate to your own wishes and needs. Was a person someone you needed to achieve your own goals? Were there motives you did not openly express? I discovered that people who tell you that they cannot trust another person any more are secretly also embarrassed or even ashamed about their own contribution to this disappointment; be it that they started of with a wrong judgement or that they would like to hide wrong-doing on own their part. But making others or ourselves small does not help anybody. Our business world is complex and paradox. “Black and white scenarios” rarely exist. Our world is more “as well as”.

If you want to be trusted, you have to give trust away first. People who tell you that they do not trust (an)other person(s) are rarely trusted themselves. You are not only responsible for what you do but also for what you omit. Trust is neither result nor precondition: it is both! Thus, if you mistrust people, you will hardly meet a trustworthy person.

To break this vicious circle of distrust we need the “ethic of the second chance”. We have to realise that we overestimate our own trustworthiness and underestimate the trustworthiness of others. Conflicts of opinion, hidden agendas and disappointed expectations get mixed up with not having walked one’s talk and cultural differences. This is the real reason behind lack of trust and fortunately can be restored. So, please give those you have lost your trust a second chance. Most of them will be worth it and so are you!

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Article Tags: business trust, business world, conscious decision, consciousness, disappointment, emotions, experiences, expressions, few moments, judgement, latter possibility, motives, paradox, prejudices, scenarios



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