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The importance of trust

A lot of ministry depends on trust.

If you have the trust of people, you can do a lot. They will easily forgive your failings as innocent and loveable bumbling. they will give you a lot of freedom to try things out. they will allow you to use a lot of money.

But. If you are not trusted. Then… things become much more difficult. Every failing is scrutinised with frowns as further evidence of grave negligence. they will tell you that you have to check everything you plan to do with them first. and they won’t let you spend any money without very good reason…

And it all depends on trust. If you have trust, then rules are seen as guidelines. But if you don’t have trust, then rules are unbreakable as iron.

In conversation, the people who distrust you will tell you things that they would like you to do: hand things in on time. tell them in future. check with them before spending this kind of money. And it may seem as though the issue is that they are concerned about are all those things – that you didn’t hand it in or time, or that you didn’t tell them, or that you didn’t follow proper procedure. At the surface it may seem as though by simply doing those three simple things, they will be happy, and everything will be solved.

But don’t be fooled: at the root of it may be a trust issue. The real issue may be that they do not actually trust you.

Rebuilding trust

How do you win trust once it’s been damaged? It is possible to regain trust if you have lost a bit of it. What you can do to win back trust here depends a lot on the person you are relating to, because certain things speak louder to different people.

Some of you know about the DiSC inventory, based on the work of William Marston. Well DiSC can also be used to highlight four ways in which you can rebuild trust based on the four behavioural styles:

High D – Straight forwardness – “What I say is what I mean”

High I – Openness – “I give and ask for feedback freely”

High S – Acceptance – “Who you are is OK with me”

High C – Reliability – “I’ll do what I say”

And by showing yourself to be reliable or straight forward (say) over a long period of time, it is possible to regain the trust of people.

Negative trust

However if your trust level has dipped below zero and you are now in negative terriotory – it’s impossible to restore your trust back into positive territory through those normal means.

That’s because anything you do will be seen negatively. Even good things that you do will be seen suspiciously, and of course the occasional slip up further reinforces your negative standing.

Yes, they may have demanded that you do better by submitting claim forms in on time, or by checking beforehand – but simply doing those things is not actually enough to rebuild trust. In fact it will only have the opposite effect. Your efforts will be dismissed as non-genuine: “ahh, really he’s only doing that because we told him to. He doesn’t really care.” Or “he’s only doing what we want because he wants to stay in leadership.”

At this point, reasoning with them is not going to help, nor is appealing to someone else for help. That’s because trust is an affectional thing, and can’t be swayed by force of logic. And you can see this very easily for yourself.

Here is a thought experiment: (1) think of someone that you distrust deeply. Now (2) think of what they could do that would make you seriously, genuinely change your mind about them so that you would trust them entirely. My guess is that you will not be able to think of anything that would seriously ever change your trust about them. Yes they might do the things you want them to do – but you would still harbour feelings of deep suspicion and uneasiness about them for many years…

Resetting trust

When you are in negative trust territory, there are two strategies that may help.

When negotiators were working  with Arabs and Israelis to negotiate a peace settlement, they found that both sides deeply distrusted each other. They were well and truly into negative trust territory. Their strategy was to get people on one side to intentionally disappoint the negative expectations of the other side. The Israelis expected the Arabs to hate them and all their kind. And so negotiators encouraged the Arabs to disappoint the negative expectation of the Israeli team members. By buying a nice gift for the Israeli delegate’s family, and asking about them in a friendly fashion. The aim being to disappoint the Israeli delegate’s expectation of hateful Arabs – a crisis that forces them to rethink their whole attitude (or affection) towards the Arab delegates.

The other strategy is to wait for a huge crisis to suddenly occur. A crisis at the personal level which overwhelms the ones who distrust you – and which allows you to respond in the midst of the crisis with leadership and sensitivity. Such as perhaps a tragedy that strikes their loved ones, and your genuine care for them through that crisis. Again, this forces a reset in their attitude (or affection) towards you – so they are suddenly able to see you in a new light.

In both cases what is necessary is to move them beyond that deep-seated negative feeling they have for you (the same one you had for the person you distrusted in the thought-experiment above). And that can only happen by resetting trust through some kind of crisis event.

Bypassing trust

In this fallen world, however, it may not be possible to rebuild, or reset trust. Yet people who mistrust each other still have to find means to protect themselves and get on with life. People may do this by going their separate ways, or relating to one another strictly through formal structures.

This is not as unusual as it first seems: consider for example how opposing parties in parliament are able to conduct the business of government through the standing orders. Or how the army gets things done using the chain of command.

It’s helpful to have trust. It makes things work much easier. But in this fallen world, it’s not always possible to have…