The Project Book

CHAPTER 57 BUILD TRUST

‘The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing,’ Groucho Marx declared. ‘If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.’ Of course, it’s very hard to do that all the time — trust me, I’ve tried!

What makes you trust this statement? Was it because I asked you to trust me? Or maybe you’ve met me! Trust is a word we use a lot. For most of us it’s a core value that we uphold in both our personal and our working lives.

In a recent Atlassian survey on the impact of Artificial Intelligence on teamwork, the statistic that caught my eye concerned trust. According to the survey, 78 per cent of those interviewed said they didn’t trust their teammates, while an even larger proportion — 86 per cent — didn’t fully trust a teammate to adapt to changing situations. A 2018 PwC CEO survey found that one in five respondents had ‘extreme concern’ about the lack of trust in business.

These are pretty startling statistics when you consider that our workplaces, projects and relationships depend on shared trust. So where did all the trust go?

Too often we think of trust as a given. ‘I’ve been in this role for 15 years, so they should trust my judgement.’ ‘The plan says it will be delivered by next Friday, so they should just trust me on that.’ And so on. Yet, author Simon Sinek says, ‘A completed checklist doesn’t guarantee trust’. And he’s right. Trust must be earned.

Trust depends on having confidence in a person that they will deliver. It is a product of history, experience, honesty ...