The Trust Dynamic
One of the fundamental elements of collaboration is establishing trust among the collaborators, and so I’ve been thinking about trust recently and doing a bit of research on the topic. As it turns out, the idea of trust is pretty complicated.
Paul Thagard, PhD, is a Canadian philosopher and cognitive scientist who describes trust as an emotion with a neural pattern that combines aspects of the situation, the relevance of that situation to our goals, how we perceive changes in our physiology, and even how we see ourselves. Trust is a mixture of things happening in the moment, things that have happened in the past, and our estimation of what is likely to happen in the future, without any assurance that what we predict will happen, of course. I found it fascinating to think that trust results from a number of different neural pathways or circuits in the brain firing all at the same time, meaning that it isn’t any one thing that creates a feeling of trust. There are multiple things happening at the same time that together generate the feeling of trust.d
At any given moment in collaboration, each of us is looking at what is happening, assessing it against what we know from past behaviour, potential future behaviours, and what we are trying to achieve. I would imagine that this constant assessment translates to other individuals in the collaborative and to the group as a whole.
Linda Allen-Hardisty, an Industrial Relations Facilitator with Queens University describes three levels of trust in workplace relations. The first level is rules-based, meaning that the relationship is defined (e.g., contracts, laws). Level two is based on experience and confidence, which bases trust on our previous experiences and our prediction that those previous experiences will shape future experiences. The third and last level is established and vulnerability-based trust, which comes from a deeper connection and understanding of personal goals or aspirations. While seemingly similar to level two, this level of trust comes from a longer, deeper history with our counterpart or team. So our assessment of trust not only responds in the moment, it builds and evolves over time.
I’ve come to start thinking about trust as a trust dynamic, which may be synonymous with the people dynamic of my three collaboration dynamics. While there are obviously many ingredients that make up our own internal trust decisions in any moment, there are some that we can point to and plan around in any collaborative work. Here’s a few I think are pretty important:
Safety
Psychological safety is critical. We are all continually assessing how safe we feel in a situation; it’s a biological obsession. Our feeling of safety comes from how connected we feel to the group. A higher level of connection means a greater feeling of safety. So, we are constantly looking for belonging cues that signal our level of connectedness with the group; things like asking questions and active listening, as well as eye contact (in western culture) and physical contact are all belonging cues. Belonging cues always come from others, we can’t create them for ourselves. I find it really interesting that our brain, specifically the amygdala, regulates the amount of energy we use and will allow more mental resources to be available in situations of high connectedness (high psychological safety). The more connected we are, the more of our brain power we will offer to the group.
Appreciation
Appreciation is one of the core concerns described by Dr. Daniel Shapiro. In essence, it is a belonging cue, because it hinges on understanding another person’s perspective and being appreciative of it. It’s important to recognize that appreciation does not mean agreement, you do not need to agree with someone to be appreciative of their perspective. The idea it to listen closely to what is being said, ask questions to explore and understand the other person’s perspective, and then reflect back things that you appreciate in their perspective. It may be you like the person’s reasoning, or perhaps their feelings or concern, or perhaps it's the action they’ve taken or the effort they’ve put in the work. Regardless, positive appreciation makes us feel good and it makes us feel like we belong.
Autonomy
Another element in the trust-building mix is autonomy, which refers to the freedom to make our own decisions and take our own actions. We’ve all been in that situation where someone is trying to ‘tell us what to do’, and we resist and get offended. This is another of Dr. Shapiro’s core concerns, where respecting a person’s autonomy generates good feelings (trust) and violating it shifts us to negative feelings (distrust). Often, we think about our autonomy in terms of the decision (e.g., the decision to go to a certain restaurant for dinner), but it is sometimes more about how the decision was made than the decision itself. If we ask about what restaurant and then decide, we’ll feel our autonomy has been respected because we had the opportunity to exert our autonomy if we chose.
Fairness
Like so many other aspects of trust, we all have a pretty keen sense of what is fair and unfair. If there is unequal treatment among those who are collaborating, we pick up on it right away and our trust assessment begins to slide downward. One perspective or one interest dominates over another or is perceived as receiving special treatment, and we will often see that special treatment as unfair. Like everything else though, it is not a one-size-fits-all response, because sometime special treatment is warranted, such as when someone has previously been treated unfairly. In fact, we only need to observe unfairness to be affected; we will have a negative reaction to someone else being treated unfairly, perhaps because we see the potential for that behaviour to extend to us, which in turn will affect our assessment of their trustworthiness.
These are just a few thoughts on trust and some of the ingredients we might use in figuring out how much trust is deserved. Safety, appreciation, autonomy, and fairness are some of the basic pieces that interact with one another to give us a sense of trust and there are so many others (e.g., consistency, authenticity, vulnerability, and more). I intend to keep digging to understand more about the things we can do as good collaborators to build and keep trust.
I’m curious what behaviors or situations will lead you to see a person or a group as worthy of trust? Let me know in the comments or at scott.millar@collaboration-dynamics.com.
Happy Collaborating.
Scott Millar, through Collaboration Dynamics, often works as a "peacemaker" by gathering people with different experiences and values and helping them navigate beyond their differences to tackle complex problems together. As the host of the Cool Collaborations podcast where he explores fun stories and insights of successful collaboration with guests from around the world, and then dives into what made them work. Cool Collaborations is currently available on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and Spotify.
