The Trust Me Weekly Update

“Trust me.”

Uh oh. If I have to tell you I’m trustworthy, I’m probably not.

Would it surprise you to know that the average home delivery person (Amazon, Uber Eats, Skip the Dishes, Jungian Yoga Vegan Snacks) is more trusted than lawyers, economists, tv news anchors or the average man/woman on the street)?

Trust is the currency of the new economy. From news sources to brands to working from home, the degree to which we trust those around us is essential to success.

Trust has been in and out of the zeitgeist for years. Do you remember the trust fall game played in team building exercises? Never so beautifully captured as with this video:

Trust isn’t limited to people.

Dogs will judge whether their human is trustworthy. If the human points to something that isn’t there (e.g., fake throw the stick), the dog immediately starts to distrust the human. This effect is even more significant when it comes to being unreliable about food. In that way, dogs are just like the average teenaged human–but way more cuddly.

Machines are moving in on the trust economy too. Not machines like your self-refilling fridge, but benevolent Terminators powered by MIT geniuses.

By analyzing the round eyes and smiling mouths in portraits (the painted kind), researchers have been able to measure the change in social trust from 1500s – present. The result: people as portrayed in portraits have been getting more trustworthy over time, matching the rise of democratic values and decline in violence in Western Europe. Here’s what some classics might look like in more trustworthy times.

And isn’t it interesting that we feel the contrary in contemporary society–trust is decreasing and democracy is eroding. Perhaps friendly faces are harder to come by in portraits these days.

A portrait of the everyman, Tom Hanks is the most trusted actor in America, and the 12th funniest comic of all time (“source” ranker.com). The average age of the top 10 most trusted actors is just over 70 years. Ariana Grande has a long time to earn her way into that list.

Getting back to the point of this update…

Just like with dogs, predictability is the foundation of our trust in the remote workforce. We’re willing to be vulnerable–to expose ourselves to potential risk–when we have reason to believe that someone will not take advantage of us or disappoint us. This comes only when we think we can anticipate how others will behave.

Mark Mortensen and Heidi K. Gardner recently published an article in HBR that is a fascinating dive into the trust issue. Here’s the gist:

Two distinct kinds of trust are essential for people to work together effectively. First, they need to believe that others will deliver and that the work will be high quality (competence trust). Second, they need to believe that others have good intentions and high integrity (interpersonal trust). To trust colleagues in both of these ways, people need clear and easily discernible signals about them–what they’re doing (actions), why they’re doing it (motivations), and whether they’ll continue to do it (reliability).

Working in remote offices and dynamically shifting teams has made this information harder to come by. Less face-to-face time means that we have less opportunity to observe, for example, that a teammate consistently brings along prepared notes and diagrams to enhance the conversation.

We also have fewer shared sidebar conversations that build rapport and interpersonal trust, and we lack situational cues–like the leftover pizza boxes as evidence colleagues pulled an all-nighter–to understand others’ efforts and outputs.

This is a new way to think about the curation of our Zoom backgrounds. Rather than the neatly ordered bookshelf, we need Uber Eats receipts and Chinese food containers.

An increasingly common approach to dealing with decreased trust is to counter it with increased monitoring. Whether done through technology (like keystroke capture) or process (daily check-ins), monitoring is usually counterproductive.

This is because it never works. Any manager who thinks they can know everything their remote employees are doing is fooling themselves; there will always be gaps. Monitoring fails because it tries to solve the wrong part of the trust equation. The better approach is to build trust in the least risky way possible. Here are two key tips:

Recognize and leverage reciprocal trust. So often, when we talk about trust, we focus on how we develop it in other people. This misses the fact that trust is bi-directional and reciprocal–research shows that the more you trust someone and act accordingly, the more likely they are to trust you in return.

Engage in status-quo communication. Leaders know how important it is to communicate when things change. Now, as things are in a constant state of flux, leaders also need to communicate about things that aren’t changing. Given that trust depends so heavily on predictability, leaders must recognize the critical importance of helping employees understand what they can count on.

The people we work with fall into two broad categories: automatic trusters and evidence-based trusters.

Automatic trusters approach a new relationship with at least some level of trust as the default, initially trusting the other party unless something happens to break that trust.

Evidence-based trusters approach a new relationship with distrust as the default, not exposing themselves to risk until the other party has proven their trustworthiness. The lack of evidence characteristic of remote work makes it significantly more difficult to establish trust in virtual environments.

Do not assume that others build trust like you. Do the homework required to know both your own and your counterpart’s approaches to trusting and put in the effort to adapt accordingly.

Remote work is here to stay. We’ll need to develop new skills to build the trust economy. And we don’t want to wait until we’re 70-year-old actors to do so. Or we could all become home delivery drivers.

On the evidence of this newsletter, we hope you can trust that we’ll be here in a week to give you a smile and hopefully some food for thought.

Stay warm. Stay safe.