Who do YOU trust?

Who is the most trustworthy person you know? What makes him or her trustworthy? What actions can you pinpoint that demonstrate trust? I posed these questions to several employees recently. Often times the most trustworthy person identified was a family member or a life long friend. The actions included:

• When I am struggling with a problem, this is the person whom I can talk; this is the person who will listen and will not judge me.
• A trustworthy person will support me when the chips are down. He will not abandon me in the bad times.
• This is a person who will also push me to think about things differently and in a very respectful way.
• This is a person who will seek my ideas and opinions and treats me equally.

It takes a long time to develop and build a trusting relationship but only a split second to bankrupt trust. I developed a deep friendship with my college roommate. And I blew it in our senior year, when I seriously flirted with my roommate's heartthrob. We have not spoken since. Breaking trust in our personal relationships leads to tensions, separations, divorce. At work, "divorcing" ourselves from our peers or supervisors may be a bit different. We generally don't walk away. We come to work, put up walls, don't talk to each other and gradually, we drive a deep wedge which impacts our commitment to the group and to the organization. I've observed professionals who face each other with smiles and head nods only to turn around behind closed doors and deny any agreements. On simpler terms, breaking promises is breaking trust. Not delivering on time; not keeping current in your work; stealing others ideas all damage and indeed destroy trust.

If the distrust is pervasive in an organization; that is, if employees get away with any distrust no matter how small and it becomes standard and acceptable behavior, then the organization has a serious problem. If employees cannot trust their leaders at the top of the organization, the consequences can be devastating but at the very least you have a population of disengaged employees who don't speak up, don't give it their all; they just do the minimum. There is no energy and no excitement to the work.

I've seen distrust in organizations so deeply entrenched that the employees are completely unaware. They don't know any better. At present distrust is rampant in our society....can you trust your financial advisor? can you trust the government regulator? can you trust public leaders? Who can you trust? Who do you trust?