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Transformative Trust Begins with the Choices You Make Right Now

The potential for dishonesty, secrecy, lies, contempt, and rejection can live within all words spoken and all deeds done, from the daily minutiae to the defining moments. These are the things that damage or break trust. 

And in times of change the possibility of distrust and mistrust increases significantly.

Broken trust is difficult to talk about and even harder to recover from. It often feels easier to abandon relationships rather than invest in rebuilding them. This is #cancelculture, after all.

Why do we avoid it? Because the work of repairing trust requires a leap into the unknown. Our minds can talk us out of nearly anything because they are hard-wired to protect us. But the society we live in today is not the one our minds have evolved for. There is no saber-toothed tiger in the conference room or on the other end of the phone—just a relationship that needs to be repaired. 

Even if we desire to rebuild trust, we don’t often have the skills—yet. 

This is exactly why you should keep reading.

When You’re Wrong, Admit it.

Achieving success doesn’t mean you never fail or disappoint others. To learn and grow we must possess the capacity to recognize when we are wrong. Stubborn, inflexible refusal to accept when we are wrong puts us in disharmony with change and leaves us feeling frustrated.

“This disharmony creates suffering for us and those around us,” says Dr. Mike Brooks, a psychologist specialized in helping people find greater balance in an increasingly hyperconnected world. “There is great, untapped power in the flexibility inherent within the admission: “I am wrong.’”

This is where repairing trust begins.

When Others Are Wrong, Grow Together.

We hear it everywhere and all the time: nobody is perfect. Everyone occasionally does something that, on reflection, they aren’t proud of.

Studies have shown that humans have a natural tendency to move toward growth. And there’s no better way to show someone whose trust we have damaged that we’ve grown by making—and keeping—a new commitment. This is the most powerful way to mend a broken trust.

In supportive social contexts, people’s natural tendency toward growth is supported—and defensive behaviors are thwarted. This means that supportive social contexts are critical to repairing trust. Connection, one of our 8 Pillars of Trust, plays an overwhelming role in creating these environments and facilitating the work of repairing trust. 

Re-connection Is Just as Critical as Connection

Leaders can create environments of connection—and the inherent collaboration it brings—in three ways:

• See people as humans. Not just people like you or people at work, but people who are in a constant state of growth and transformation. 
• Assume Positive Intent. Giving the benefit of the doubt goes a long way in building and rebuilding relationships.
• Show you are listening. Put the phone down and really listen. In fact, take it off the table. Put it away. People can tell when you’re really present and that leads to stronger bonds, greater grace, and more opportunities to remind ourselves that the good in others almost always outweighs bad choices, mistakes, and disappointments. 

Building stronger connections is a compounding activity: the more interaction you have, the deeper and greater connection you have. And the higher likelihood you are building trust that stands the test of human behavior.

Building Cultures of Connection

There is also a correlation between your satisfaction at work and your willingness to be vulnerable. Owning up to our mistakes and nurturing connections not only improves our relationships with others, it leads to deeper satisfaction in our work and personal lives.

According to the 2023 Populace Success Index, most Americans believe that success is about a meaningful life, not getting rich. The Index’s findings also show we believe that others perceive the opposite. 

At the end of the day, we all want to build resilient relationships. Growth, flexibility, connection, and harmony are born from the work of repairing trust—and it generously goes both ways. If you’re looking for a great resource for helping you to rebuild trust, check out “The Trust Edge: How Top Leaders Gain Faster Results, Deeper Relationships, and a Stronger Bottom Line”—chapter thirteen is all about rebuilding trust.

As you move on with your day, it is highly likely you have relationships that you are avoiding the work of rebuilding trust. It could be with a friend, a partner, a team, or your customers and clients. If you don’t take the first step to reconnect and rebuild, who will?Our Trust Edge Certification Program gives you the tools, training, and a thriving community to build satisfying cultures of connection. Are you interested? Schedule a 15-minute discovery call today to take your place in our Trust Edge Certified Partner Directory.

Being different isn’t always easy. In organizational settings, small differences can lead to big problems if managers are unable to recognize, accept, and address the challenges posed by differences among their workforce. The tradeoff for creating an environment that embraces and supports diversity, however, is enormous: increased innovation, performance, and resilience to name just three. 

The World Economic Forum, OECD, UNICEF, and other global agencies deeply invested in the workforce of the future have each defined numerous transferable skills that are most necessary for a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous future. 

And well-functioning diverse workforces can deliver on ALL of these skills.

The Power of Diversity Lives in What We Value

Alignment is created when we can connect on common ground. This means shining a light on shared values like work ethic and commitment to the company mission. Shifting culture doesn’t happen overnight, but it can grow quickly when a forum for candor is created by a leader who is willing to acknowledge where differences exist and how they are getting in the way. Without first addressing differences, a leader can easily become mired down in arguments and conflict.

People of all ages value feeling seen, heard, and safe. Creating an environment of trust requires helping people identify and elaborate on shared values. Highly productive working teams function well together because of what they have in common—not because of what they don’t.

Leaders who build their teams based on alignment rather than differences will foster the benefits of diversity. In so doing, their workforce can flourish and grow with them, future-proofing their organization in the process.

Diversity Fuels Higher Performance

Trust is the glue that holds diverse groups together. Knowing that your coworkers “have your back” makes you less fearful of taking risks. It also gives people the security the need to perform, create, and solve—and the correlation between this safeguard and high performance is clear.

Some of the benefits of a diverse workplace with shared values include:

• Improved critical thinking and reasoning
• Originality and innovation
• Complex problem-solving
• Increased resilience and adaptability
• Enhanced social influence

Data from our 2023 Trust Outlook, indicates that people from all over the world are embracing the benefits of a diverse workforce and want to align with others who share their values.

Featured Pillar of Trust: Competency

Staying the same doesn’t lead to growth—nor does it inspire it. Nobody wants to learn from a teacher who has been teaching the same things in the same way their entire career. Nobody wants to follow a leader who hasn’t adapted their leadership style to reflect the needs of their current team. Nobody seeks out a company with a reputation for maintaining an expired status quo.

People have confidence in those who stay fresh, relevant, and capable. This goes for entire organizations as much as individual leaders.

Trust Exercise: Make a habit of exposing yourself often to fresh information, opinions, and perspectives.

The humble, curious, and teachable person is always asking questions, learning new ways of doing things and staying current on trends and new ideas. Leaders who walk the proverbial walk can turn differences into alignment, and diversity into performance.

Invest in Trust-Building

Whether your organization has an established DEI program or is only beginning to see the value of these drivers, trust-building initiatives can help overcome the challenges posed by differences and elevate the benefits of diversity in your organization.

The Trust Edge Certification Program provides the tools, training, and—perhaps most valuable of all—the community to create high-performing cultures of trust. Interested in meeting some of our Trust Edge Certified Partners? Visit our Certified Directory.

Are you interested in the Trust Edge Certification Program? Schedule a 15-minute discovery call today to take your place in our Trust Edge Certified Partner Directory.

1. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/10/top-10-work-skills-of-tomorrow-how-long-it-takes-to-learn-them/
2. https://www.oecd.org/education/2030-project/teaching-and-learning/learning/skills/Skills_for_2030_concept_note.pdf
3. https://www.unicef.org/lac/media/31591/file/The%2012%20Transferable%20Skills.pdf

Building trust by Asking How

Working with one of the biggest healthcare organizations in North America, we’re with the, you know, it’s the top leaders. They’re losing HCAP funding, they’re losing patients and they said “Dave, we actually need to do something differently so we’re, you know, it’s the people with letters behind their name. They got CEO and MD and ADD, they got it all. And so we’re sitting there and the top leader says “clarity, “this is the pillar we need to work on “if we’re gonna build trust.” I said great.

He stands up in front of everybody and said “clarity. “That’s what we’re gonna work on.” I said “okay, how are you gonna do it?” He sat down and talked to his team. When he was ready, he stood up in front of everybody. “We’re gonna communicate more.” Great, I said “how are you gonna do it?” He sat down. He talked to his team.

When he was ready, he stood up in front of everybody and said “okay, we’re gonna “hold each other accountable.” I know what that means, not gonna do anything and gonna blame everybody else. I said “okay, how?” And they asked how seven times that day until they came up with something they were going to start to do differently today or tomorrow and eight years later, they point back to that moment changing the trajectory of their organization.

It’s Little things done consistently make the biggest difference, not the big things. If I’m overweight it’s because I’ve had too many mocha lattes over years, not ’cause they ate too much this morning for breakfast. If I’m a good husband, I’ve loved and honored my wife over years, not ’cause I gave her that one beautiful ring or package one time, not that that wouldn’t help.

If I’m a good leader, I’m doing the little things, little things consistently. If you’re a manager here and you’re not sharing these values every 14 days, nobody knows them so they’re not making decisions by ’em, so you don’t have consistency across the inside organization.

People say, oh, we got clarity. We got these three H’s. We got these five initiatives, we got these things. If you’re not talking about ’em, you just talk about ’em at the annual meeting, you lose.

Why You MUST Do The Little Things Consistently | David Horsager | The Trust Edge

Consistency is a challenge we are all facing whether it is at work or at home. Watch as David shares why you must do the little things consistently in your company, organization, family, and life.

Click Here to view David’s National Best Seller The Trust Edge

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How to get referred more:

So how do you get referred more? This is more common in business, but I’m gonna shout it out here, and I left it in for this one today because in business, there’s a big, big push to use Net Promoter Score, NPS, which asks the questions, basically you ask your client, will you recommend us? And I’ve been arguing for years, it’s not a referral question. It’s a trust issue. When trust goes up, we refer people.

We try to deal with the wrong issue. This is what I’ve been arguing with Best Places To Work, finally threw out engagement and put in trust as the number one metric for a best place to work because it’s not an engagement issue. You don’t have trust, you don’t get engagement.

How To Get Referred More | David Horsager | The Trust Edge

The Net Promoter Score has become a popular tool in companies and organizations. But when someone has a low NPS, they often think of it as an engagement issue or sales issue. But it isn’t an engagement issue or even a sales issue.

Click Here to view David’s National Best Seller The Trust Edge

Click Here to visit our YouTube Channel

Contact Us