Trust – ElPropósito3 min de lectura

A passing effort?

The Royal Spanish Academy defines confianza, trust, as the firm hope we place in someone or something. How can we trust that the future will be better? How do we keep that hope alive in someone or something? Several questions come to mind right away. An organization can hardly trust in a better future if it doesn’t trust its own capabilities, its people and its ability to unlock their full potential. Personally, we can’t ask for what we don’t have, and here I mean self-trust. How can we expect anything from anyone if we don’t even trust ourselves?

I see this over and over. Trust goes beyond the hope I place in someone. Let me explain. The value proposition of many organizations clearly reflects the trust their customers place in them, which shows in how they come back to buy again and again. The customer trusts that the organization will always deliver. On a personal level this idea strikes me, because building self-trust requires us to notice how many times we’ve kept the promises we made to ourselves, through discipline, commitment, dedication, passion and so on. Trust looks at the present as well as the future. Every time we stay disciplined in our habits, we make it more likely that this trust will be honored.

One value that’s usually left unspoken, and should be stated outright in many teams, is trust. Why unspoken? Because we often assume we trust one another, and that isn’t necessarily true. It should be addressed honestly and openly from day one. Trust is the oil that keeps a team’s engine running, and like any good lubricant it has to be kept in top condition for the engine to deliver full power. Keeping a close eye on the condition of that oil is essential, because without trust there’s practically no team. The same holds personally: without self-trust there are no results, and there can be no discipline or habits if we don’t trust ourselves. So the question is how trust gets built.

A team doesn’t start trusting each other overnight. That’s exactly why I insist that trust is a value, one worth writing on the wall to make it explicit and, above all, one we must keep calling for whenever we notice it’s missing. In many teams I keep seeing one or two members the others simply don’t trust, with no openness to talk about it candidly. We first need to identify what makes trust possible, and then what makes direct communication possible, so these issues get resolved in time.

Finally, I believe, and always have, that trust is earned, earned again and again, and it comes sooner than we think when a person or a team reaches its goals while working toward a common purpose. Why do I believe this? Because trust is a value people can feel.

Warm regards and all the best,

Rodrigo Baccaro

Author: Rodrigo Baccaro

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