Simple and Difficult: Earning Trust in the Workplace
A few weeks ago, a fellow manager asked me a strange question:
Have you written anything about earning trust from people? Y’know… the mechanics of it?
A little part of that strangeness is because it’s still a weird feeling to have managers ask me for advice after twenty or so years of not listening to it. But that feeling comes with any sort of question and isn’t worth an article.
This question was particularly strange because it was wrong. Not wrong in its phrasing or the context in which it was asked. Managers should care about earning trust from people. It was wrong in the way that Lovecraftian horrors are wrong (though with a bit less madness). My brain recoiled from it because it was based in some reality that was not my own. It was akin to some software design that I know is wrong even though I can’t initially articulate why.
After some thought, the wrongness can be summed up simply: When are we not earning trust from people?
Before we get there though, there’s an important concept that you should know so that we’re talking about the same thing. People don’t trust people. We say it all of the time: “I trust you”. But that’s a quirk of language. People trust people to do things. For example, you might trust me to use a few too many sentence…
