Rebuilding Trust

Gaurav: I’ve personally come across teams, I’ve personally come across couples, where somehow they’re not able to have conversations well. Many times, people are unable to either cross the bridge or they’re not comfortable looking eye to eye and having conversations. What could be a possible way to rebuild trust?

Charles: It’s a really important question for all of us because we’ve all damaged trust with each other at times, in situations consciously or unconsciously, knowingly, or unknowingly. Mostly unconsciously, especially in the workplace, probably 90 to 95% of things happen that somebody then says, “Oh, I don’t trust that person.” That person was not being consciously untrustworthy. They don’t understand the implications until maybe later of what they were doing. 

Fortunately, I had good feedback. If I hadn’t had the good feedback, I would have kept on doing that thinking I was working for people. Yes. So, we do that, and we damage trust with each other. 

7 Steps To Rebuild Trust

“Trust is making something you value vulnerable to another person’s actions.”

Gaurav: What are the steps that we can take to rebuild trust? 

Charles: The seven steps we can take to rebuild trust are as follows:

Do I want to do that?: Before the conversation, the first step is to decide if you’re willing to talk to the other person about it. So, the first step is to identify if I am even willing to do this? Is there enough value here in this relationship? Because trust is something that’s in our relationship with each other. So, either our relationship has trust, or it has distrust. And if it has distrust in it, how can I shift that? Bring it back to a place of trust? So, the first thing you have to decide is, do I want to do that?

The specific actions: Then I find it really useful to identify which of the assessment domains is my distrust showing up? For me, what are my assessments about this other person, so that I can begin to think about what the behaviours are?

Define Standards: The third one is to define standards for trustworthiness. In terms of reliability, which is one of the four assessment domains. 

Understanding the Standard: Understanding what my standard is, identifying the specific actions or behaviours that have led to the assessment of distrust. If I’m thinking about the domain of care, what are the things that you do that are telling me you really don’t care about me? Or our team? Or what we’re doing together? What are those things, the behaviours, so that I can talk about that, rather than you as a person. Talking about you as a person as untrustworthy, versus talking about the things that you’re doing creates an assessment of distrust in me.

Acceptance: Then the fifth step is to ask yourself, “What am I doing that may be contributing to the situation?” This is a really important step because it’s so easy to point the finger, but there is some undoing that needs to be looked at. And if you are going to have an honest conversation with somebody about your distrust in them, then you should first take a look at yourself for acceptance.

Identify Need: The sixth one is to determine what I need from the other person in order to be able to rebuild trust and be able to put that in the form of a request to them.

Hitting the Conversation: Then the seventh step is really to begin by asking the other person if they’re willing to have a conversation.

Do I Trust You?

“You can only trust the other person when you’re willing to trust yourself.”

Gaurav: How would you create a distinction that one is willing or not able to trust you because of any specific action that you have done or not done? Or because of the inability to trust oneself? How do you ensure that it’s not your own projection onto the other? 

Charles: I think we don’t need to go there necessarily, in order to have effective conversations with other people. That’s really for a deeper learning in oneself. So, on one hand, you don’t leave people with the idea that they really have to do a lot of deep personal work in order to have a conversation with somebody about trust, about building it or rebuilding it. Let’s just take an example of reliability which is keeping specific commitments. So, let’s say I need to talk to somebody about the fact that I don’t trust them anymore, because they’ve so often not actually kept commitments that they’ve made to me. And this has been going on now for, let’s say, months and months. So, how might I be contributing to that, or have contributed to that? Well, right off the bat, I have to look and say, “Oh, my God, I’ve been letting this person get away with that, for months and months, I have not held that other person accountable for all this time.”

So, that’s certainly something that we have to own up to, back that, around a second, or maybe the third time that they missed, or didn’t fulfil that commitment that they had made. It would have been much more useful at that point for me to say something, but I didn’t, I’ve been letting it go on and on and on.” So what is it? I mean, then I can really take a deeper look. And what is it in me that prevented me from that, held me back from saying that way back, then? But in terms of the conversation that I need to have, I at the very least need to own up to that. I haven’t been holding that person accountable for all this time. 

About the Speaker

Charles Feltman has more than 25 years of experience coaching, facilitating, consulting, and educating people in positions of leadership. His clients’ success and wellbeing at work and in other aspects of their lives is an overarching goal in all of his work. He spent a decade in senior roles in the technology industry before launching his coaching and consulting business. Today, Charles focuses his efforts on two key areas: individual leadership coaching and leadership teams, as well as leadership development programmes.