Trust - the most uncommon currency
Posted on August 20, 2024 by Mark Pritchard, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.
A dive into the concept of trust, why it should be cherished, and how hard it is to recover, if squandered. The most important social capital.
I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of…
This small statement currently resides on pieces of folding paper in the purses of almost all those reading this article in the UK. Our currency holds an underwritten promise that we normally take completely for granted, so great is our trust that it will be fulfilled.
In many useful ways trust can be seen as a literal currency. You can certainly accumulate trust. You notice it when you are surrounded by trust. Amongst those you trust you feel it is perfectly safe to be yourself. You feel that you can share, and perhaps even expose more fully, information and concerns. We prize those people we trust deeply, will do more to protect them, innovate to support them and give over more of our capacity to back them.
However, trust differs from common currency in quite a fundamental respect. Unlike cash, it is vastly harder to replace if you squander it. This is most obvious where the currency was not strong in the first place. If say an estate agent surreptitiously assists a party to gazump you on a property exchange, the chances of the agent ever doing business with you again are slim to vanishing. It is also true that an agent who works to protect your interests becomes trusted – and that currency can be passed on.
I have worked in businesses where the response to squandering trust is an emphatic “so what”. Clients are easy enough to replace and if we didn’t behave this way, well our competitors would, and then we would be the ones to lose out. The toxicity of these environments barely merits unpicking. Suffice to say that creating a space which rewards breaching trust, with both clients and colleagues, with the aim to build bottom line, is a strategically brittle approach; made more so now with social media at full tilt.
I am much more curious about those situations where the trust is so strong, that it will withstand unpredictable behaviour, that snap reactive judgements are reserved, where you first look to other factors driving the person you trust, rather than the short-term blip you are currently experiencing. Those relationships, often found with family and loved ones, are the ones worth unpicking, understanding and valuing.
When you consider the lengths you will go to for those whom you truly trust, it makes for an interesting, and perhaps not immediately apparent observation – you cannot pay people to trust you. It bears repeating. You cannot buy trust. Not ever. You can, to an extent, coerce people. You can contract people. You can in some extreme sense, buy people, or buy their behaviour – but you cannot buy their trust. Trust, in its truest sense, is not for sale.
This leaves leaders with an interesting conundrum, because if you cannot buy trust, then you also cannot remunerate someone for it – and this matters. More than ever leaders need to unlock the latent potential in their existing workforce. With scant resource, in an effort to drive more from less, one area to look at is the collective intelligence you already harbour, and trust is a significant part of the means of unlocking that social capital. The potential rewards for organisations who take this on and succeed are sheer and incredible.
The question remains for many leaders – if trust, the true stuff, is so powerful, but I cannot buy it, how is it possible to tap into it?
