Ailian Gan | >140

Why we trust some people and not others

I’ve been thinking about trust. Trust as a kind of foundation that makes social and professional transactions much easier. 

A colleague once made the remark that there is no way we can explain all the details of our product to our clients. And we should not have to. It should not be their job to worry about all the details. What we need is to get them to trust us and trust the product. The rest will take care of itself. 

So trust must be the goal (the outcome) of what we do (the tasks). There is no one action that secures trust. It must be earned through a consistent pattern of behavior. Be responsive. Be transparent. Listen to what they really care about. Look out for their best interests. Admit when you’re wrong. Be thorough so they don’t have to be. 

In the same way, I’ve been thinking about how it works when you’re on the same team, as colleagues or classmates or group members of some kind. Why do we trust some people more than others?

At a base level, there is a competence requirement. You need to believe that the other person is competent, if not excellent, at their job. You respect their competence. The lack of respect leads to contempt, which will destroy a working relationship faster than just about anything.

Then there is the reliability factor. You need to know that they will always be there to do their job. Bonus points for going above and beyond their job scope to help you out when you really need it.

Then there is whether or not you understand and agree with their motivations. Here again, it is the patterns that count. It doesn’t really matter what you say - lots of people are good at saying the right things - it’s what you do. Do you defend people in their absence. If you are deeply frustrated by someone’s actions, do you still regard them fairly. If someone screws up, do you assign blame or do you help share the responsibility for fixing it. And all that adds up to whether you sincerely want the team to succeed. Everyone’s interests are supposed to be aligned. But I’ve seen so many instances where team members sabotage the team’s success because they were unwilling to let go of personal gain and pride. 

You can’t trust someone if you know they’re always worried about establishing trustiness, which is the attempt to appear trustworthy as opposed to actually being trustworthy. Many people go for trustiness or try to reverse engineer authenticity because that’s easier. You just have to do enough to get away with it. It’s much harder to be the real thing through and through. But that’s why the payoffs are huge, because in the long run people always recognize it. The real thing wins.