Building Trust

I was working this past weekend with Durham Central Park, a newly built intentional community in downtown Durham NC. We ended the first day with a focus on trust. While there was quite a bit of trust that had been built by folks that had gone through the fire of development together (it took about six years of faith and dedication to turn their dream into a beautiful three-dimensional reality), people also noted that there have been some bumps in the road during the first year of living together, and thus there arose the desire to give attention to building (or rebuilding) trust.

We wound up devoting about 30 minutes to going around the room inviting everyone to share what trust meant to them and how they build it with others. (The default is that people assume that others see trust as they do and offer what they'd like to receive—but as a community veteran I knew that it wasn't that simple.)

From 28 people we got this range of responses:

o  Developing knowledge of the other person through a wide variety of ways, many of them informal (not just in the context of meetings or working together).

o  Assuming good intent.

o  Being emotionally authentic.

o  Following through on commitments (that you'll do what you say you'll do). [This was the most common response, mentioned by a quarter of the group.]

o  If favorable stories about a person match with independent observation.

o  If the person accurately shares relevant information (rather than withholds).

o  Establishing connection through empathy; feeling heard by the other person.

o  Being vague and avoiding engagement undermines trust.

o  Going through the fire together (considerable trust was built in the process of developing the community over a period of years).

o  Being consistently kind.

o  Trust and familiarity are not necessarily related.

o  Emphasizing showing up more than performance.

o  Willing to honestly share reactions.

o  Trust is built through repetition and time.

o  Acting with courage.

o  Acting for the good of the whole (in contrast with self interest).

o  Moving slowly enough to make sure everyone has been heard. Emotional expression needs to be authentic; not calculated or manipulative.

o  Trust is built on a wealth of common experience.

o  Predictability; deep knowledge of the other person's background.

o  Honesty.

o  Sense of being in it together (fellow travelers).

o  Exchanges that are caring.

o  Feeling safe; honest and direct communication.

o  Being thoughtful and forward looking.

While this list unquestionably contains many similar comments (and probably few surprises), it's noteworthy how rich it is and how varied are people's points of entrée to trust—a concept that everyone immediately identifies as desirable, even though it turns out to come in more flavors than Heintz has pickles. All without anyone being off the wall or inappropriate.

If you reflect on this list you'll be able to see the potential pitfalls. For example, if you highly prize direct, honest communication, you might experience kindness as pussyfooting around. Going the other way, direct feedback might land as an attack—which is not all consistent with caring. In such an exchange, each party may come away with the mistaken notion that the other doesn't want to build trust, when the actual message is that the two parties go about it differently.

That's the gold in this kind of exercise: uncovering that good people can reasonably have a wide range of preferred ways to create and nurture something as universally desirable as trust. Just because we all have belly buttons doesn't mean we all build and sustain close relations the same way. Trust me.

Building Trust

I recently got this email from a friend who went through my two-year facilitation training and is testing her wings working for other groups in her region:

I'm still on board to facilitate a community meeting at Nirvana [name modified whimsically to obscure the identity but not the intent] on the topic of trust. I had originally been slated to go in August and had developed what I thought was a good start with a couple of well-placed community members who are familiar with what I can do and what the community needs. The plenary was postponed however, due to not having had enough publicity to be sure that it would be well attended, and to give the folks in charge of setting up meetings time to fire up some interest in the topic as well as to do more spade work ahead of time. I got an email today suggesting that rather than looking baldly at trust, that the meeting focus instead on issues of governance and questions about how they could work more effectively together. I'm going to be meeting with a different set of folks to discuss the agenda based on this new idea, but I'm curious... why not focus baldly on trust? Is this more effective focusing, to get at trust via how we work together? Or, is this a diversion from looking at the underlying issues?

It could be both! In my experience, people view trust in a variety of ways. While almost everyone will report that they want more of it, the path there is not the same for everyone. I imagine you'll get mixed responses about whether it's better to work it directly or to work it through example. In general, trust is built when people are able to fully disclose authentically and this leads to an enhanced sense of connection and greater insight about what to do together. Trust is also built by people doing what they agreed to do. Trust is eroded when people have the experience that vital information is withheld or distorted, when agreements have been blown off, or when the vulnerability associated with deep sharing has been used as ammunition rather than as an olive branch.

From where I sit, nothing builds trust (or a sense of group cohesion) as surely as successfully working through non-trivial tensions and disagreements with one another. You see a version of this when people pull together in a crisis, shedding their outer veneer of aloofness and the stripping away the everyday trivia that clogs our psychic arteries—getting real under pressure. It stands out because it's not the normal way people operate and is precious because of its rarity.

Given that Nirvana is a good sized group (50+), there are certain to be folks there who will see a direct discussion about trust as navel gazing, I suspect your best bet is to work with the topic of governance (or whatever hot topic will get good engagement), and look diligently for how to make your points about trust out of the specific. This has the power to please everyone (those who need problem solving as the output of meetings, and those who see relationship building as the prize in the meeting crackerjack), though it requires you to multiple track, so that you can see the openings for aha! generalizing. That is, you need to look for the moments when you can pull the group out of the specific conversation about governance, to make a general observation about trust. It's an advanced facilitative skill, being able to track the different levels of the conversation and knowing which is the most potent to focus on in the moment—never mind the skill needed to make it clear to the group which floor the elevator has stopped at before people start responding (people on different floors don't tend to hear each other very well)!

As a process consultant it's common for a group to hire me both to better understand a skill set (consensus, facilitation, conflict management, delegation, power dynamics, etc.) and to help solve a particular sticky problem that showcases their ambiguity about the skill set (participation, pet policy, safety, children in common spaces, etc.). I've found over the years that it typically works better if I start with the specific and work toward the general. If we begin with theory, at least half the group zones out and has Glazed Eyeball Syndrome within 90 minutes. By launching immediately into a hot topic however, everyone is better engaged. Then, when I lay out afterward the principles that I was employing in working the issue, it's much more tangible—they have a live application right in front of them to root their understanding. What looks like magic turns out to be a replicable approach, and everyone goes away feeling like they got what they came for.

Circling back to the question of trust, different people key off of different things. Words (authentic statements of commitment, and heartfelt reporting of feelings) can be pivotal for some; for others statements count for little until and unless backed by actions. Sometimes there's a great shift in trust (either up or down) based on how a person responds under pressure. Some go through life starting with the premise that everyone is trustworthy until they prove otherwise; some do the reverse, trusting no one until they've earned it.

The point of laying out this complexity is to stress the importance of asking the individuals involved what trust looks like to them, so that you don't fall into the trap of inadvertently assuming others see trust the way you do (which will only occasionally be right, mostly by accident).