Trust Matters More than Ever

Why Trust Matters

Trust is your greatest asset.

EVERY HUMAN IS HARDWIRED to measure trust. A newborn baby first looks for faces, eyes, and mouths. By six months, their brains have "a perception of trustworthiness" based on facial recognition.1 This drive for connection does not disappear with age. These first impression judgments,2 as social psychologists call them, become more sophisticated as we grow older, but the question remains the same.

Can I trust you?

In your daily interactions with others, you might think the question in everyone's mind is, Do I like you? but the more important question, and the question everyone is actually asking is, Can I trust you?

Can I trust this Uber driver to transport me safely?

Can I trust this financial advisor to give me sound advice?

Can I trust this doctor to help me?

Can I trust this company with my personal contact information?

Can I trust this teacher to educate my child well?

Trust is the fundamental backbone of relationships, society, performance, and growth. We follow leaders we trust. We buy, learn, drive, get married, put our kids on school buses, take prescription medicine, and put money in the bank all because we trust. The greatest asset you have in every relationship is trust.

Think about it. The only reason I put a lock on my bike, gate, or mailbox is because I don't trust people. The cost isn't just the price of the lock, it's the time it takes to open...close...open...close...open...close...

How long does it take to text message someone you trust? Boom, you are done in no time. How long does it take to message someone you don't trust? FOREVER! You worry about every word and wonder: How will they perceive my message? How might they misconstrue it? A lack of trust costs in every way.

If you don't trust the friends your teenager is hanging out with on Friday night, it's a huge emotional worry. If you don't trust a colleague on your team, it's your biggest cause of stress. What is your quality of life like when you don't trust your boss or your spouse?

Everything takes longer and costs more when trust is low.

Nothing affects the bottom line more than trust. According to Deloitte,3 trusted companies outperform their market peers by up to 400%.

Our annual research publication, Trust Outlook®, has found:

• The majority of millennials say they would be more loyal to their employer, and they would put in longer hours, if they could trust their employer.
• The top reason people want to work for an organization is trusted leadership. It is rated higher than a raise, good benefits, more autonomy, or a fun work environment.
• More than 12 million Americans reported having invested $100,000 or more based purely on trusting someone else.
• When employees trust senior leadership, they offer more ideas and solutions, are better team players, and are significantly more loyal.

Defining Trust

Trust is a confident belief in someone or something. Trust itself is neutral; people can confidently believe in you for either positive or negative outcomes. If I am consistently late, you will begin to trust me to be late!

For the purpose of this book, we will define trust as:

A confident belief in a person to do what is good and right on a consistent basis.

Positive trust creates an enormous advantage and produces relationships that can significantly influence the people and the environment around them for the better. When you learn how to build trust-in yourself, your family, your team, your organization, and your community-you'll discover that everything else improves. Relationships, work performance, stress levels, confidence, physical health-everything starts with trust.

Organizations Don't Change. People Change.

It could be tempting to think of someone else who "really needs to read this book on trust." While you might be right, the only person you can actually change is YOU. Ultimately, the most profound impact I've witnessed from this work has been personal. It changed my work life and my home life. It changed me.

Trust Is Complex

It's easy to think we know it all about trust, yet people seem to have different pictures of what trust is and how it works. To broaden our understanding of trust, below are a few nuances to consider:

• Trust must be given, and it must be earned.
• Trust can be supported by evidence, yet it can be a feeling in your gut.
• Trust can be built or broken in seconds, or it can take years to accumulate or erode.
• Trust is built through transparency and through confidentiality.
• Trust takes vulnerability and is always a risk.
• Trust requires investment and is one of the most critical forms of capital.
• There are good reasons not to trust someone or something.
• Trust can be used for good and for bad. (A mafia boss can be good at building trust.)

The Impact of Trust

Trust is the currency of business and life. When trust increases, morale, productivity, and revenue follow suit. When trust decreases, everything is more costly, stressful, and slow.

Without trust, everything from relationships and businesses to whole economies and governments are vulnerable to collapse. "When people lose trust in leadership," according to Gallup, "their decisions are informed by suspicion and their actions by self-interest. Businesses become more vulnerable as fewer employees are motivated to act for the greater good."4

I've seen this happen repeatedly. At best, skepticism and suspicion restrict the flow of ideas and reduce the ability to solve problems. At worst, they undermine the entire mission of your organization. An institution can have a great vision and capable employees, but it will still fail if its leadership is not trusted.

"

When the Captain and I implemented the TELI material with our leadership team, we improved trust among the crew, which increased their ability to come to their leaders about sensitive mental health issues.

-Lawrence Comdeco, Jr., U.S. Navy Command Master Chief (Ret.)

"

We can intuitively see how trust, or lack thereof, impacts our time, our finances, and our emotional health. In work, just like in our personal lives, we often blame things that are actually just symptoms of the core trust problem. Business problems are never really about leadership, communication, sales, engagement, marketing, or finances. At the core, the solutions are always established through trust.

Problems exist-and persist- because of a lack of trust.

A Breach of Trust Can Destroy

International tensions. Business failures. Family divisions. Economic collapses. Political discord. Low trust magnifies broken relationships and systems and costs society an exorbitant amount of money.

• According to FDIC, the failure of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank in 2023 cost $22 billion.5
• The Catholic Church paid nearly $4 billion to victims of abuse in the past decade.6
• "Deflategate," the National Football League scandal alleging that the New England Patriots deflated (or knowingly used) deflated footballs during the 2014 AFC title game cost $22.5 million.7
• Volkswagen says their 2015 diesel emissions scandal cost them $34.7 billion.8

Saying, "Just trust me" isn't trusted. Trust is earned.

Paul J. Zak, director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies, conducted research on levels of oxytocin and stress hormones and how they affected a person's performance. Zak discovered, unsurprisingly, that stress is a strong inhibitor to trust.

Conversely, when trust levels at an organization are high, people report:

• 74% less stress
• 50% higher productivity
• 76% more engagement
• 40% less burnout.9

Trust Is a Leading Indicator of Success

We frequently look for leading and lagging indicators in business. In our global work, we have seen trust is always a leading indicator of success. Trust levels end up being a very accurate, predictive measure of either failure or success! That's why it's critical to actively prevent gaps in trust and close any breaches that already exist.

Trust is always the CORE issue!

Your Single Most Valuable Asset

Scan any company's balance sheet and you'll find a measure of trust behind every number. It's not something typically thought of as having an economic value, but when you scratch the surface of all those numbers, you will find that where trust is lower, the reported numbers are too.

For instance, with greater trust, customers will pay...