Trust Choice

As you walk into the training center you are aced with thirty people whom you are about to spend a 2 days with on a training course. Over the two days you will form a variety of opinions on these people. One of the strongest views that will be formed is to what extent do you trust each of them. As you leave the event you will have made wither an explicit or implicit choice about the extent to which you trust each of the delegates. This choice will have a direct and consequential impact upon which of these people ultimately join your network.

The actual process of trusting someone can be quite complex. Four factors that will have an impact are the level of awareness or consciousness of the process (Explicit or Tacit) and the source of the choice (Head or Heart). These can be described as:

	Explicit Trust: Sometimes trust takes a very overt form. For instance, most of us trust that the authorized driver teaching our child or partner to drive has been screened, tested and qualified to manage the car in dangerous or difficult situations. These explicit credentials can be seen in their certified qualifications. Or, we explicitly trust that our independent financial adviser will find the best place to invest our money based upon their qualifications.
	Implicit Trust: Trust also takes an implicit form. For instance, every time we open a tin of beans, we trust that it will taste as expected. Or, when we ask a friend for some advice implicitly trust that they will be honest with us. In these cases, trust is an unconscious benchmark from which the customer judges the quality of service. In other words, there is no conscious or overt process to test or assure the standards of the product until the product lets us down.
	Head Trust – This is the cognitive type of trust where we pause to think for a second “do I trust the person or product that I with”. This might be that second you take to look over the motorbike that you have just hired from the back street hire shop on holiday. Or it might be to count the change in a shop where you were short changed in the past.
	Heart Trust – This is the emotional or gut feel assessment that we take to form an opinion. There are some people we just emotionally buy into and accept that they are OK to work with whereas others it just doesn’t feel right (even if they have all the right certificates and qualifications).

If we bring these four types of trust together we have the basic trust frame shown below. This indicates the four different types of ways that we use to develop and maintain our network.

	Gut – The gut is a sudden yes/no choice that happens when you meet someone. Sometimes you don’t even know that you have made the choice to trust someone as it happens so fast. It is the real emotional buy-in to someone without knowing why. The benefit is that it just happens for you and in many cases the person will intuitively understand that you have bought into them and so the level of trust can be reciprocated. The downside is pretty obvious – that is it is the wrong decision. I know of one person who swore by their gut decisions when they recruited people. The trouble was that most of the time they ended up in abysmal failure – but he still carried on believing!
	Snap – This is very similar to the Gut choice – but this time it comes from the cognitive elements rather than emotional ones. As such the choice will come from lessons learnt in the past that have help to form the assumptions and mental maps that used to make sense of the world. These are often known as heuristic or rules of thumb choices. So in your experience you might have found that people who have worked for a certain company can be trusted. This might not always be true, but at an intuitive level and based on previous experience you then tend to use it as a rule of thumb.
	Considered - This trust choice is made both overtly and cognitively. For this one you might sit down and really think about someone and decide if you want to trust him or her. After meeting someone you might decide to reserve judgment, talk with other people about them, sit down mull it over, weigh up the pros and cons before coming to your final decision. The plus is that this should be a robust choice, but the down side is a risk of paralysis from analysis. You might take so long to signal your view that they might decide not to trust you.
	Exposed – This process is quite an interesting one because it is being consciously managed but by tapping into the emotional elements. This is a process where you might sit down and ask yourself how do I really feel about this person. What does my heart tell me about this relationship and how will it feel to be in a network partnership with them. The benefit is one of taking enough time to really test the heart and see if it feels ok. The downside might be that it could appear someone cold to the other person, especially if you explain how you are making the choice about working with him or her. The other difficulty is that the whole process of making explicit what are often tacit emotions can be challenging, especially if you are used to working in a work environment that is very formal or logical – the type of place where soft stuff is only for pussy’s.

There are two key points with the framework. First trust is the primary currency that underpins and holds a network together and helps it to function. With most professional networks there is no hierarchy, rules of office or governance systems, they just happen because people want the community to exist. The second point is that since trust is the primary currency we must be very careful if the way in which it is traded. We make choices every day or maybe every hour about who to entrust ourselves or our brand with. We must make this choice carefully and be aware of the consequences of investing in the wrong person and the gain that can be achieved by investing in the right person.

To do this it helps to be more conscious of your trust choices. Do you have a tendency to go for a Gut decision, are you more cautious and think things through or do you tend to make snap decisions that seem right. There is no right choice but the important thing is to be conscious of your preferences. Once understood then it becomes easier to step between the four quadrants and make a trust choice based upon the person and the context rather than doing what you normally do.

One final step might be to become more conscious of the processes that others use to make trust choices about you. If you meet someone who seems to go for a gut reaction with you in the first ten seconds, is that because you are such a trustworthy and wonderful person, or do they do that with everyone they meet. Ask yourself it you are confident about their trust choice process. This is important because if you go into a network with them then you will be entrusting your brand to their control and are you confident that they will not erode it because they ‘fall in-trust’ to easily with other people, people who you would sooner not have associated with your personal brand.

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(c) Mick Cope