Leaders, like everyone else, have been burned by trusting people they shouldn’t have.
They then sometimes use past experiences where they were betrayed or let down as a guide for cautiously trusting others. When taken too far, they can become reluctant, without even an iota of proof or evidence, to trust others. This means they carry mistrust until others earn the right to be trusted. By only gradually allowing others to gain their trust, they undermine the most valuable currency in leadership.
By trusting slowly, leaders unintentionally teach other people to be less trusting of them.
Trust is a reciprocal quality that leaders depend on to get things done. The mutual exchange of confidence that trust requires is never one-sided. Leaders who withhold their trust by extending it ever so slowly to others fail to benefit from the shared presumption that both parties have the competence, integrity, and good intentions to work seamlessly together.
Team members who are not afforded trust without earning it are more likely to be suspicious of the leader’s intentions and to allow simple misunderstandings to play out in tremendously negative ways. Because they haven’t been extended trust, they don’t grant it back to the leader. This keeps relationships from developing in a balanced and healthy way.
Over time, the everyday conflicts that most relationships work through come to undermine the ability to achieve even simple tasks together. Ironically, the breakdown of trust between both parties actually fosters more mistrust.
Leaders must rise above their hurt and painful experience of trusting too quickly in the past and recognize that those who have betrayed them are the exception and not the rule. More importantly, leadership and success depend on the positive presumption that everyone is afforded trust until they prove they are unworthy of it, and not the other way around.
Leaders who trust more quickly are trusted more quickly as well. They treat trust as a verb and not as a quality to be earned. In the end, the best way to learn if you can trust someone is always to trust them first. Without mutual trust with each and every team member, leaders can never create the team excellence they expect.
