By Ian Ash
Back in 2020 I wrote an article on the ‘Trust Equation’ which Maister, Green and Galford described in their highly successful book The Trusted Advisor, which they defined as follows: Trust = (credibility + reliability + intimacy)/self-orientation.
Typically people get to trust each other after having spent a reasonable amount of time in each other’s company and/or working with them.
You get to know their habits and idiosyncrasies and hence will often understand the motive and intent behind their actions.
However, when trust breaks down, or indeed if you are entering into a new business relationship and there is something that may be causing you to doubt your trust in the other party or you have the ‘gut feeling’ that someone is not trustworthy, it is well worth employing the ‘trust equation’ to find out what may be going on.
Let’s have a closer look at the components of this.
Credibility is probably the most fundamental element of trust in that it directly correlates with believability.
This can be established by looking at the other person’s track record of success or reputation in their relevant field, i.e. is the person known for their technical competence over an extended period of time and do they have the presence that confirms this?
Reliability is about being dependable and consistent based on previous experience(s), i.e. can you rely on the person to keep their word?
I once heard a definition of integrity as ‘being your word’ and this is pretty close to what is meant here by reliability.
There is necessarily a time-based element to this since you won’t know if someone is reliable or not unless you have experienced their performance over an extended period of time – the more consistent the person is in honouring their commitments over a reasonable interval, the more likely you are to trust them from a ‘reliability’ perspective.
Contrary to what may at first sight be inferred, ‘intimacy’ means the ability to tackle difficult, sensitive or personal matters.
Disclosing things which are very personal and perhaps even private to you necessarily involves becoming vulnerable to some degree.
No one is going to do this unless they truly believe that the person to whom the information is being disclosed will be highly discrete and careful about how this information is held, so the extent to which you are comfortable with sharing this sensitive (and often personal) information is a strong reflection of the trust that exists.
Credibility, reliability and intimacy all form part of the equation’s numerator and collectively sum to all the positive elements of the trust equation, but as should be clear from the format of the equation, all these positive elements become significantly undermined if (perceived) self-orientation is high.
Self-orientation is the extent to which someone appears to be out for themselves and can be viewed as the level of ‘selfishness’ or being out for themselves.
Unfortunately, people who operate from this perspective on a regular basis may become adept at hiding their true ambitions, so you may need to probe this with some well-chosen questions to try to determine their real intent.
We all trust in different ways; at one end of the spectrum some will readily assume that new contacts should be trusted unless proven otherwise.
These people are typically warmer, friendlier and easy to be with but at the same time can be naïve and easily conned.
At the other end of the spectrum are those that believe trust needs to be earned and so everyone is not to be trusted until they have proven that they can be.
However you trust, the equation may be useful to understand why you do or don’t.
Ian Ash ACC AIECL AInstIB
Managing Director OrgMent Business Solutions – ombs.com.au
