Why Trust and Friendship are Career Multipliers

Trust is the new productivity metric, leaders who ignore trust risk losing their best people and their competitive advantage.

As a leader, trust begins with you and in you. Do you trust yourself?

Leaders who cultivate self-trust will have a competitive advantage in building trusting teams. Instead of growing trust from the outside in by trusting others, start by trusting yourself.

Trusting others seems like the obvious place to start, because if teams cannot trust each other, how will they ever become a healthy and effective team? Trust is earned. Trust grows over time. Trust in a team is worth more than gold.

Once again, do you trust yourself?

In the face of fear and uncertainty, many leaders answer this question by sharing their list of expertise, experience, and education. Deep down, many leaders are ignoring the waves of self-doubt and trying to quiet the voices of fear or feeling like a fraud. Those critical voices can paralyze or derail a leader. Those fear-based voices can also be important data points that indicate something a leader is curious or passionate about or what a leader needs.

Trusting others begins with knowing what we, personally, need to trust and understanding how we, individually, contribute to trusting relationships. Leaders who understand trust as a multi-directional energy are the types of leaders who will excel. Noteworthy leaders demonstrate, “I trust myself” in a self-aware, non-aggrandizing way. Self-trust will not only enhance and expand a leader’s career, but the ripples of self-trust become a career multiplier for others.

Leaders know the importance of practicing the behaviors, attitudes, and skills needed to lead their teams effectively. Trustworthy leaders are those who practice trusting themselves through developing their potential, talent, and vision.

Trusting Ourselves

Trust is one of the most over-practiced and underappreciated characteristics of being human. We are beings who trust. We trust our hearts to beat and our lungs to breathe. We trust the chair to support us and the blanket to keep us warm. We trust baristas, surgeons, therapists, and rideshare drivers. We trust food to nourish and water to quench. Each of these known and trusted elements increases the quality and value of our lives.

We are built to trust, but experience tells us to trust carefully and thoughtfully because trust must be earned. Blind trust ignores the broken chair, symptoms of a weak heart, toxic chemicals in our food, and the gut feeling that someone doesn’t have your best interests in mind.

Trust is fundamental to being human, and yet leaders are often surprised when there is a lack of trust within their teams. This surprise is quickly followed by the assumption that the lack of trust is between others, and not toward oneself. Most executive leaders admit that they have had a season or many seasons when their teams and they themselves struggled with trust. The shaky trust negatively impacted their team, while the seasons of high trust bred high engagement, work satisfaction, and a healthy bottom line. Trust is never static; it is forever in flux.

Trust is not something found outside of us, beyond where we are and who we are. Trust is found on our insides, within each one of us. Trust is mapped out within our very nature.

A powerful practice to uncover one’s relationship with trust is to ask who starts from a place of trust and who believes trust needs to be earned. The answers from leaders tend to the “it depends” category, but when pushed to pick a side, the story behind the selection is an integral part of understanding where trust can be grown. Leaders who start from a place of trust could have grown up in trusting or abundant environments. Leaders who need to have trust earned could have had fractured trust in key relationships.

Teams don’t arrive at trust. Trust unfolds gradually and can tear in an instant. Environments and people contribute to the kind of context where trust can grow on teams.

Friendship

In the heart of friendship are elements of trust, support, and care. It is in the context of friendship where teams grow their care for themselves and others.

Sometimes we hear teams say they don’t have to be friends, but they have to get along. We think tolerating each other is a low bar of true teamwork. We agree teammates don’t need to be friends outside of work, but the best-of-the-best teams value the dignity and humanity of others, and extend the hand of friendship to others on their teams.

Leaders who emphasize, “we have a trust issue,” create an environment where building trust is threatened before it can be strengthened. When we identify trust as an issue to solve, we miss the point that trust is an opportunity for belonging. When trust is identified as an issue, leaders and teams begin to seek trust from a state of reactivity. Raising concerns for trust from a place of reactivity and sometimes with hostility, teams are taught that trust is a goal, not a grounding. This approach often backfires.

Trust is an invitation to grow in a relationship with oneself and others. The more familiar we become with our personal patterns and reasons for trust, we can enter into a unique friendship with trust. Trust is a feeling of confidence, security, and belonging. To be friends with trust is to understand how we as individuals are trustworthy, first with ourselves, and then with others.

Friendship is an expression of relational and emotional trust, providing the groundwork for the expansion of our identity. When we find ourselves in close friendship, we feel a sense of belonging not only with the one we are befriending, but with ourselves.

Imagine being an executive leader who understands with deep familiarity how to trust in themselves, how to trust others, and how to create a team culture of trust. What might that type of team become? To create this type of trusting environment, we must first understand the math of trust.

The “Math of Trust”: trust is a career multiplier

Do you remember the time when you first learned math? Did you use your fingers, memorization, or counting aloud? What about when you learned multiplication tables?

“The math of trust” is understanding and discerning the difference between practicing trust by addition and trust by multiplication.

Trust by addition is a great place to start, but the competitive business advantage is trust by multiplication with the factors of trusting me, trusting you, and trusting us.

Trust by addition is elemental, sequential, and short-term. You do this and you earn trust. Children are taught this type of trust when given small tasks to complete, invited into challenges, and learning to become friends with others. This type of trust is transactional, outcome-based, and impersonal. Trust by addition grows incrementally over time, and lays the foundation for individuals to become trustworthy themselves.

Trust by multiplication is complex, patterned, and exponential. This type of trust looks like a higher level of play. Think about when children take to the more risky parts of a playground, you can see trust expand when they trust themselves on the monkey bars, and the giant-sized see-saw that begs trust at a more intense level.Trusting together invites the kind of momentum that pushes careers and organizations forward. This type of trust begins with an individual’s capacity to trust and be trustworthy, and practicing this behavior with others for an outcome that cannot yet be determined. Trust by multiplication grows predictably and rapidly beyond what one individual can do alone.

Our most trusted self is our true identity within us. The essence of our being is filled with a great capacity for trust. Most of this unique resource of trust goes untapped. We would rather choose familiar and proven ways of trusting than try new and risky ways.

When team members know themselves as trustworthy, they have a greater willingness and skillful approach to trust others. Team members find out what they are made of, and their capacity for work and contribution grows.

Executive leaders can choose to create spaces where trust and trustworthiness can be practiced. Where, when, and with whom we place our trust are critical questions to consider when creating those kinds of trusting environments. The most powerful influence an executive can build into these spaces is a regular and reliable demonstration of what it means to trust with kindness, grace, and patience. Trust is like mortar, serving as a bonding agent between stones, creating a time-denying connection and strength. You can choose to build a structure without trust, but the ability to withstand seen and unseen forces will be compromised. At times, trust will feel like risk. At other times, trust will feel like home.

Conclusion: Trust is the Career Multiplier

We have worked with hundreds of executive leaders who struggle with trust, and this wrestling is common. In the last fifteen years, we have helped leaders and teams grow in their trusting relationships and even find friendship along the way. What we have learned is that trust is not a problem to solve, but trusting is a person to become. When leaders and team members understand what trust means to them, and what it means to be personally and professionally trustworthy to others, they become a person others want to trust.

When leaders trust in their own talent and potential, they develop greater capacity to trust the talent and potential of others. When leaders trust themselves when they are vulnerable and in need, leaders learn to trust their capacity to show compassion toward others in need.

The world needs leaders to begin by trusting themselves with a grounded self-awareness. The world needs places to cultivate a practice of trust within teams. The world needs leaders who are brave enough to risk trusting themselves, trusting each other, and offering space for people to grow.

Written by Dr. Linda Schubring.