High performance teams are built on trust. Trust in ourselves, much less trusting another, is a gigantic step for most of mankind. Only the narcissist and the arrogant seemingly are free from the first, and all of us struggle with the second. We just do.
Study history and you will see that the root reason behind groups of people on Easter Island, the Maya Indians and countless other groups of folks that are NO longer here, is that they put their trust in someone or something that eventually caused their demise. This truth isn’t limited to societies and communities. This truth applies to companies and couples, and to you and me. We’ve been hardwired for survival and this hardwiring tells us not to trust. It just does.
High performance teams, remember, are built on trust.
Do you see why we are so jacked up?
Do you understand what this means to your marriage, to your relationships, to your teams, to your leaders, to your followers, and to you?
Do you see why so few “adults” have any true friends?
Do you see why we so easily buy the alternative and slowly but surely become more and more…
ALONE?
Maybe the problem is that we have misplaced our trust. Maybe the problem is that we were never designed to give our complete trust to another, human that is. Maybe the problem is that there never has been a community that is worthy of our whole heart. Maybe the problem is that we are aiming too low. Maybe we were designed to give our whole hearts, our whole minds, our whole bodies, our whole selves only to the creator, the designer, and the God that alone can mend our broken lives.
Maybe as we slowly realize this truth, we’ll be free to really LOVE. Maybe this would allow us to really trust ourselves and open ourselves to giving this newly aligned trust to another. Maybe, just maybe, this could create some magic. Maybe this could transform our performance and the performance of our team. Maybe this perspective could change why we perform in the first place, how we measure our performance, and whose approval ratings we seek. Maybe, just maybe, this could change everything.
My performance mantra is quickly becoming three words that I’m trying to convert into ONE. It means a ton to me. It just does. It may mean something to you, it may NOT. Regardless, here it is…
Truth in LOVE.
Do you see it?
BUILT TO LEAD 
Hey Chet,
You and I may share worldviews that trace back to God but if others must also come to this belief as the key to trust, then the world is in for a long, distrusting slide into chaos and BUILT TO LEAD won’t have been as much help as it could’ve been. I think non-believers or deep doubters still see the need for trust, still want excellence, and need some other keys, short of conversion, to make their personal and work lives richer, more peaceful, and more productive.
Truth in LOVE can exist as a philosophy OR a religious belief. Trust can be high without being complete. High trust is a common root of high performance, without the former there can be no latter.
My secular AND to your thought is this: ALL of us self-justify, and generally think that “I’m okay, you kinda suck.” It’s the attitude of arrogance that WE are real people, and that others are, well, objects. This is the root problem of all interpersonal conflict. It’s the worst kind of problem because most of us don’t realize we have it. Hard to fix that kind of problem, ya’ know? It is insidious, because self-justification becomes a pattern of habit, and we accumulate over time the idea of “how great WE art” and how bad others are as we build the habit, making it harder and harder to fix over time. And if EVERYONE’s first nature is this way, no amount of “fixing the other” will help. It’s a psychological logjam.
So, the first thing we should focus on is helping others see that we, and they, have this problem. The only way to unjam the logs is to GO FIRST. If leaders could do one thing to help their communities, it would be to model and then promote the change in thinking and behavior of self-justification.
When we learn to see others as “THOU”–people just like us, rather than “IT” we can approach them with an attitude of service, helping them in the community situations we share with them. If the community has a purpose and vision, we then can replace our self-serving attitudes with accountability to be a positive force for helping the community achieve its purpose. All the better if we helped the leadership of that community create this standard of behavior as a basis for BELONGING and REMAINING in that community…!
All this is The Way to a more peaceful, productive community. The conversion, though, is a logical response to an interpersonal psychological logjam, requiring only a change of thought patterns and, maybe, a softening of the heart. It doesn’t require a spiritual or religious conversion.
Pax Vobiscum,
Sully
Maybe
The biggest blocker to trust, as I see it around the world, is that we know we need it, we all want it and we all want to be trusted, but NO-ONE has been able to tell us exactly what TRUST actually is and how it works.
One of the things I say in my presentations is that if you decided you wanted to build a house, you first need to know what a house is, then you need something to build it on, you need a design and some plans drawn, and you need people to build it. You need the finer details, what do you want it to look like, what material, how big, small, how many rooms, what colours inside, and so on.
Building trust is exactly the same. You first need to understand what trust is. Then you need the common ground on which you are building it. You need the design, the plan, and you need people committed to building it.
You cannot leave building trust to chance, which is what we’ve done in leadership for years and years. And you cannot put it aside and hope it just happens. When you dedicate yourself to learning what trust is, when you go about your day actively and consciously building trust, then you are true, trustworthy leader. And sadly, there are too few of them around.
Vanessa,
I believe you. The answer to building trust in community lies in building trustworthiness in the individual heart. This should be “a guided tour” with a trusted partner and advisor to examine our individual hypocrisy (holding others to standards we are unwilling to hold ourselves to), determining our core purpose, linked to the service of others, and living true to that purpose, and through the “habit of the heart” of looking at and closing gaps in personal integrity and knowledge that stand in the way of our purpose.