What is trust? Most people think of trust as a 25 cent word that sounds great, but is never really put into practice. Trust is the act of believing in others. Trust is more than a feeling for a moment; it is a priceless component of character. It is a value that can be earned, but not bought. Trust can turn an impossible situation into a real success. Trust is an ingredient that wins championships, wins new clients, and that retains customers, and that builds enthusiastic work teams. Sheena, a fifth grader said, “Trust is knowing that someone will be there for you when you need them.” Even more simply, Emelio, a fourth grader, said, “Trust is doing what you are supposed to do, doing what you say you will do, when you say you will do it.” He continued, “Trust is something like if you were home alone and your mom doesn’t want you to go outside, she has to trust you to not go outside.”
At one point or another, we have all heard about the importance of trust between team members and that trust is a critical component of all high performance teams. Yawn. Sure, trust is important, we’d all agree, but what is it really worth to a team’s performance?
When asked if they trust the members of their team, many people would say yes. When we say that we trust our teammates, most people haven’t really scratched the surface of what trust can really do for a team. That is because our understanding of trust is limited to the low level of trust that we automatically grant to each other. We generally grant people a small amount of trust after meeting someone. For the most part, we are able to trust people until they betray the trust. That is not to say that we trust everyone we meet on the street, but once we have met someone and develop a transactional relationship with someone, we have a basic level of trust.
My father always told me “For the most part, we all grant each other a certain level of trust. From that basic level of trust, we continue to build trust over time by doing what we say we will do and by extending trust to other members of the team. But once you’ve lost it, trust is so difficult to get back again.”
When we say that we trust someone on our work team, we generally are referring to the moderate level of automatic trust that we grant to people that we interact with on a transactional basis. Real, deep underlying trust is built painstakingly slow over time and can be lost in the blink of an eye.
We often take for granted that certain minimal level of trust we have for others. On a work team, we trust our teammates to a certain level. Think about the co-workers on your team; how many of them do you really, truly trust to be there for the team at all times? What happens to that trust when one of your team members let the team down? When we think of trust, we rarely think about the genuine, deep trust that develops only after working at it over a sustained period of time. True well-developed trust revolves around completely trusting the character of others.
Purchase today!
