Trust Is Not A Useful Value

One of my greatest pet peeves about company values used to be (maybe still is?) is how they’re painted on office walls. You come to an office’s welcome desk, and there they are. Trust, integrity, leadership, innovation, all painted on the walls around you, serving as a reminder to employees on what’s expected of them. I said to my coach once how much I despise values because of this. That one conversation did help me overcome that pet peeve, but it didn’t happen by embracing the empty words I loathed so much. It was to think about values differently. And that does require going back to trust.

Trust is something many organizations strive for. So much so that they embed it in their values as a key behavior they’re asking of their employees. I can picture it, written in well calligraphed handiwork, on a wall at the company office. It sounds so good, like something worth aspiring to in a group of people that needs to collaborate, coordinate, and keep an open flow of information. Right?

But aiming for trust is a misguides venture. Trust isn’t something you can mandate. You can’t tell two or more people to just trust each other, not even by default (as some companies like to postulate). It might work for some who are just willing to extend that trust to anyone from the get-go. But in a large group of people, personalities, preferences, and goals will be so vastly different across the board, trust may not be on everyone’s mind at all times. Trust between two people can change in an instant. It needs just one person to something the hurts the other person and damages the relationship for that trust to be gone or at least be much reduced. People are complicated.

Trust is an outcome. It describes an ideal state where people talk to each other whenever there’s something important to talk about. They share information without hesitation. They can give each other feedback without fear of reprimand or punishment. This last part is where it starts to get really tricky. How somebody gives and how somebody else accepts feedback is highly personal. Our responses can vary from grace, to not caring, to wishing the worst on the other person. A company value can’t make this go away.

Trust can also imply that one person should trust the other blindly. “Just trust me on this” is one of the great copouts. It does work when you know that this has always worked out in the past, when you can indeed fully trust each other. You know the other person long and well enough to accept this. You know they would do the same.

But in an organization, where groups of random people are thrown together, with or without a shared history, that’s not enough. Trust here comes from being transparent about your reasoning, hearing out other people, and incorporating their feedback.

Trust is no different here than happiness, integrity, leadership, or the modern buzzphrase AI-first. They look great on the office wall, but they lack any practical meaning or implication. They are simply too broad to be practical in everyday work.

Values are meant to describe behaviors. Some of these are behaviors already present in the organization. Others are aspirational. Values are not an absolute state, either. You may never find the place where an organization fulfills a hundred percent of its values all the time.

Trust isn’t a behavior. Neither is happiness. They’re both outcomes that you may or may not get. They depend highly on the group of people and its interactions, as well as each person’s individual needs and characteristics. And, of course, on the organizational circumstances. You can’t prescribe a culture of trust when that trust isn’t extended from top management.

Instead of focusing on broad words like trust or integrity, think about the behaviors that create them. What does a group that trusts each other look like when they interact? You may arrive at phrases like candor, or open flow of feedback, or transparency. These are still broad, but they don’t describe an end state. They describe behaviors that are easier to apply in everyday work.

All that said, any value that is just one or two words will leave a lot of room for ambiguity. Candor could be used in a supporting way, or it can be used to belittle the other person.

Meaningful values need clarification. In addition to candor, you need to describe what that looks like in real life. Assuming you want people on your team to share feedback gracefully and with kindness, you write that into an extra couple of sentences. Here’s what our definition of candor looks like:

We are open, honest, timely, and direct (but kind) in our communication. We don’t let things simmer for longer than 24 hours before either checking in with each other or chatting face-to-face should either of us feel that something is off.

It’s highly specific to us and our partnership, but it does offer practical implications and also steps to take when things feel off.

The work of creating values isn’t just about finding a couple of words that look good on an office wall, that sound great when inserted into a job ad. The work is in thinking about the behaviors you truly want and, by extension, the ones you don’t want.

Values are your best tool to describe to your team what’s expected of them and where the behavioral boundaries are. That’s the true crux. You can’t tell people how to behave down to the minute. But you can give them guidelines on what’s acceptable and what isn’t.

Trust isn’t a useful value, it’s just skipping all this work. But that’s the work you owe to your team, as a founder, executive, as a leader.