5 steps to building a culture of trust

I made the dreadful mistake of wandering into the Nextdoor app this morning.

Last night, when I was putting the trash can out at the curb, I saw some police activity on our block. Since police activity is a rarity in our neighborhood, this morning I followed my curiosity and checked the city’s police dispatch log; it held little information.

So I thought I’d try Nextdoor. In my experience, Nextdoor has been helpful for selling household items, and for finding out who’s mad about dog poop on the sidewalk and who’s mad about people being mad about dog poop on the sidewalk.

What I got this morning was no information on the police activity, but a lot of people who seem to really want to be indignant about something. Anything.

Fighting like cats and dogs

When I first logged in, Nextdoor presented me an ongoing discussion about cats, dogs, and birds. Specifically, one neighbor was angry about a cat coming into his yard and killing a bird.

Well, that isn’t really what he was angry about.

He was angry, if I understood correctly, that, as a dog owner, he was being oppressed. If cat owners could let their cats loose to kill birds in his yard, shouldn’t he be allowed to let his dog loose to kill cats in other people’s yards?

The discussion that followed was truly off the rails, with neither rhyme nor reason. Some comments even suggested that the government should spay or neuter most humans.

I would have found this all amusing except for the fact that everyone seemed hell-bent on claiming the title of Most Offended Person.

This was not a real conversation. There was no attempt to solve the problem of cats killing birds (which is an actual, real problem). There was only an escalating vitriol spinning up rage and intolerance.

And these people are all my neighbors?

You choose: rage and intolerance, or compassion and community?

There seems to be a lot of this going around these days. People seem hell-bent on claiming the title of Most Offended Person, and everyone wants to belong to the Most Aggrieved Group.

People’s need to be offended—and to let everyone know how offended they are—has become more important to them than their need to be honest, compassionate, or fair.

You don’t have to look any farther than the recent Olympics to see examples of people choosing to be offended over something that not only did not concern them, but which was not even true.

We all make it about ourselves. Everything is about ourselves.

Humans are truly self-centered creatures. I don’t mean greedy; I mean that humans are naturally concerned primarily with their own being, their own experience, and their own story.

We are all the main character in our own story. We can’t help it. It’s how we experience life and the world.

That self-centeredness, however, when not tempered with compassion, empathy, and perspective, can lead to a feeling of being alone. It can make people feel that no one cares about their troubles. They can feel left out. Excluded.

These are powerful feelings, and they lead to a sense of “no one understands me, and no one cares about how hard my life is.”

When we feel isolated and unseen like that, we are easy marks for those who want to convince us that someone else is to blame.

This is how an Olympics with a plethora of amazing stories celebrating the power, athleticism, and courage of women athletes can be twisted and mangled and turned inside-out to become a lie about how transgender people are ruining women’s sports.

It’s how a violent moment in nature, when a cat catches a bird, can be twisted into a story about the oppression of dog owners.

Building a culture of distrust

When we give in to these impulses of self-centeredness, we not only make ourselves the main character in our own stories, we demand to be the main character in everyone’s story.

We forget to think about others as whole, unique, individuals with their own hopes, dreams, challenges, roadblocks, oppressors, supporters, loves, dislikes… in short, we forget to think about them as humans equal to ourselves.

If you’re in such a self-centered state, then it’s easy to feel justified in blaming others for whatever ails you, and it’s easy to devalue other people. Especially people you think have it easier than you in some way.

But what happens when everyone does that?

When this happens in organizations, it quickly turns the culture to one of distrust, gossip, and anti-teamwork. Everyone looks out for themselves and points the blame finger at everyone else. They refuse to acknowledge their own role in the dysfunction, even if they are fully aware of it.

This is why we talk about empathetic leadership. Not because leaders need to coddle and white-glove hypersensitive employees, but because leaders need to understand the difference between an environment where people feel safe to be open and collaborative, and an environment where people feel self-protective, combative, and distrusting.

It’s the leader that sets the tone for the culture. Individuals can nudge it in little ways, but ultimately the boss shapes the culture of an organization

Building a culture of trust

Both bosses and employees have a role to play in changing an organization’s or community’s culture from a me-first attitude to a we-all attitude.

Bosses need to reward and model prosocial behavior, and discourage anti-social behavior.

While employees have little control over official rewards and punishments, they can still behave in ways that exhibit and reward prosocial behavior and discourage anti-social behavior.

Here are five examples:

1. Discourage gossip

When someone comes to you complaining about a coworker, decline to participate in their gossip and criticism. While it may feel like letting them vent to you is creating a bond of trust with them, over time that will decrease overall trust within the organization. If they’re talking to you that way about someone else, how might they be talking about you to others?

2. Praise good actions out loud

Recognize people for little actions that would normally go under the radar. This is, sadly, a habit that is very hard to keep up in a fully virtual workplace. We used to be able to say things like, “Thanks for taking the time to make a fresh pot of coffee every time it runs out” where others could hear. Try to find ways to recognize the small contributions of others. Make it a habit.

3. Keep your commitments

When you commit something to a coworker (or an employee you manage), you need to follow through. This might be more difficult than it sounds because it means you need to understand what healthy boundaries look like, and you need to be able to discern between what you should say “yes” to and what you should say “no” to. When you say yes, follow through.

4. Listen actively

Active listening is listening to understand rather than listening to respond. In untrusting cultures, people listen in order to figure out what they have to defend against, and where they may find an advantage. This gets in the way of communication and understanding. It creates miscommunication and misunderstanding, and that in turn gets people to shut up rather than speak up. Active listening is a learnable skill.

5. Ask “what else could be true?”

Whenever you feel like blaming or criticizing someone else, ask yourself what else could be true about the situation. How might this not be their fault? How might they also be hurt by whatever is going on? What else could be happening that caused this situation? When you get comfortable with asking yourself that question regularly, begin asking it of others when they throw blame or criticism around. Blame and criticism get in the way of learning and growth; they are backwards-looking and punitive, which tightens an organization rather than opening it.

You get to choose, every day

We all get to choose how we will behave. Will you participate in the dysfunction and bad behaviors around you, or will you stick to your own personal values and model the prosocial behaviors you wish everyone else would embrace?

You get to choose. Every day, in every interaction, you make choices. Each choice contributes to the function or the dysfunction of the system you’re in.

Imagine a set of scales. Every choice you make adds a pebble to one side of the scale or the other. Meanwhile, all your coworkers are adding their pebbles to the scales as well.

Some choices are bigger pebbles; some are smaller. But they all tip the scales.

If you’re the boss, you can’t really balance out a bad culture with a few big rocks like a team-building retreat, and you can’t put your thumb on the scales to balance it out. You need to get people to start making the choices that put the pebbles on the positive side of the scale.

Eventually, you can bring things back into balance and even tip the scales toward the positive. Depending on how far into dysfunction it’s already leaning, however, it may take some time and patience to get there.

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