Establishing, Maintaining, and Reestablishing Trust

Why trust?

It’s a huge part that people talk about and around when they discuss a team, a department, and an organization’s culture. Academically, trust has been defined as “one party’s level of confidence in and willingness to open oneself to the other party” (Kim & Lee, 2021, p. 413). Without trust, deep and strong working relationships cannot be made. When trust is broken, we do not have confidence that someone can do their job, will have our backs, or will keep private information private. Trust has been found to be a fundamental element of creating strong relationships and strong organizations. It is linked to increased productivity as employees are more likely to share all their ideas (even ideas that contradict others), positive supervisor-employee relationships, commitment to and identification with their organization, and lower turnover rates.

So, this all sounds good, but what about establishing trust? How do you maintain it? And maybe most importantly, how do you re-establish trust once you’ve broken it?

First, some good skills to build, maintain and re-establish trust.

1. Active and Attentive Listening

   1. Listening is often not enough. It can feel placating instead of making the other person feel heard. Instead, focus on paying full attention to the speaker and not thinking of your next response. Additionally, summarizing what they said back to the other person helps them feel like you are trying to understand their perspective and that they are being heard.

   2. Other ways to actively listen is making sure to face the other person and put away all distractions such as a laptop, your cell phone, and other materials that could take your focus away from the speaker.

2. Clear Communication

   1. Have transparency by sharing the information you can in as much detail as you can and letting others know when you are not able to share information. It can go a long way to at least provide a general overview of a process so your team members understand what is going on when you cannot share all the specifics of a situation.

   2. Have concise and specific language. This can avoid any miscommunication and ensure people understand the information you are trying to get across to them, whether it is about processes or a run down of a situation with a student.

3. Be Empathetic

   1. Actively listening is a large part of showing empathy because it shows that you are trying to understand their perspective. Nodding along and providing other nonverbal cues also helps someone feel heard.

   2. Asking open-ended questions can help you understand what their stance is and what their understanding of a situation or process is while also making them feel heard.

   3. Demonstrating gratitude for the speaker’s time and trust in you helps them feel appreciated and emphasizes gratitude in their choice of who they trust to speak with. Expressing gratitude such as something as simple as “thank you for sharing this with me” can help decrease the speaker’s anxiety and stress in sharing this information. Brené Brown has a great short video on what empathy looks like in conversations.

4. Be Fair and Supportive

   1. Hold all your team members and colleagues accountable to their actions and job duties and responsibilities. Often sticking to the expectations you have set together and focusing on their job duties and responsibilities can ensure that you stay as objective as possible.

   2. Communicate with your team members figuring out what each member needs from you to succeed in their position. For colleagues it can be figuring out how to best communicate what materials you need to share and how to communicate deadlines and needs. For supervisors it could be figuring out the best ways to contact them to ask questions and for meetings. For employees, it could be figuring out what supervisory style they thrive under and how to best provide feedback.

5. Connect With Your Peers and Staff

   1. Often it is the small details that we remember and ask our team members about that builds trust. There is a theory called the marble jar theory. The marble jar theory is that every time you share a confidential piece of information with someone and they don’t share that information, they get a marble. So, when you want to share a very private or confidential piece of information with someone, you look for those with full marble jars. But another way to look at this theory is that you give a marble to people that do small things to earn your trust. They invite you to lunch or remember that your parent’s birthday is coming up and ask how they are doing. These small actions can build trust, that connection builds trust.

   2. A short video about the marble jar theory

   3. How to put this into practice? Ask your team members about how their weekends were, what holiday or vacation plans they have, and share small pieces about your life as well. Remember these small conversations and use them to connect. These small actions and conversations help your team members feel like you care about them and their well-being.

These skills, used consistently, can help show your colleagues and team members through actions that they can rely on you and that you care about them and their well-being. This goes a long way in building trust and maintaining trust once you have it.

A very large part of what builds trust, maintains it, and re-establishes broken trust is communication. Communicating in-person or virtually is how we build relationships with others and how we share information. To be able to set up expectations that you have with others and that others have with you, it all starts with talking with people and writing these down. Others can’t know what to expect if there is never a conversation. They won’t be able to observe how your actions match what your messaging is if you never send out a message in the first place. Additionally, a breakdown in communication is often what leads to broken trust. Building up clear communication channels and maintaining these channels, helps team members and colleagues feel heard and makes it clear to them that you want to communicate.

Often, when you break trust, you need to go back to the beginning. Re-establish expectations and communication styles. Sometimes people change or what they said worked for them in practice doesn’t work at all. Having the basic conversations can help to begin to build trust. Both sides need to be open to taking the first step together, otherwise there is no point to maintaining a working relationship. Reaching out and offering the opportunity to start a conversation, shows that you are open to figuring out how to work together again.

Creating a practice of sending out emails after conversations with a summary can also be helpful in building, maintaining, and res-establishing trust. It provides a written form of what you understood from a conversation and provides a way for someone to provide their own perspective and correct any misunderstandings. It can also provide a way for both of you to refer back to your conversations and hold each other accountable to what was agreed upon and communicated.

And make sure that you listen to your staff and peers, even with the small things. Often it is the small details we remember that builds trust. These small actions show that you are there for your team members, so when you need them to be there for you, you don’t have to ask them to trust you, you can share what the problem is and ask for help. You already built that trust, and they will be there for you like you are there for them.

While the skills above can seem easy enough to do, they can take a lot of practice to do consistently and effectively. Communicating to your team members and colleagues about helping you to hold yourself accountable and maintaining these skills can help in building them up and solidifying them as part of your practices and can help you in ensuring you build strong and productive relationships with your colleagues and staff members.