Trust in Whom
By Peter Block
> ...Continued
This
frames trust as if it is determined by behavior. I want to offer another
point of view. Trust is more an expression of our own inner-world, not
an outside-in reaction to people and events as they affect us.
Trust is a State of
Mine
A colleague of mine, Rosie Barbeau, just sent me a quote of Vaclav Havel
from his book, “Politics of Hope.” He writes about hope in a way that
also applies to trust. Editing him slightly, he says, “I should say
first that hope is above all a state of mind, not a state of the world.
Either we have hope in us or we don’t; it is a dimension of the soul,
and it’s not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the
world or estimate of the situation”.
--As
with hope, trust may be something that we carry within us and is, in
many ways, a projection of our own internal struggle onto those around
us. If we distrust others, it is that we are asking them to carry a
weight that we cannot bear within ourselves.
--Trust
is more an attitude about myself, an estimate of my own capacities. For
example, if I do not trust management, a more accurate statement is that
I am not happy with the way I act or I feel when I am around management.
It is my response to their power that bothers me. My caution. My
speaking in generalities. My quickness to back down in the face of an
indifferent or controlling act on their part. My short-fused cynicism
may be more the source of my distrust, than anything they do.
So What if they
don’t Walk the Talk
I recall a meeting some years ago at Ford Motor Co. in the midst of
their intensive efforts to implement an employee involvement program.
Several years into the effort, they had a senior management project
review with the team redesigning the Ford Thunderbird. The car turned
out heavier and more expensive than their projections and in the
meeting, the two men running the company, Pete Peterson and Red Polling,
openly came down hard on the Thunderbird project manager.
--Within
hours after the meeting the word spread throughout the company that
because of their aggressive act, employee involvement in Ford was a sham
and in trouble. It struck me that even after years of heavy investment
in employee involvement, all it took was one ill-advised action for
people to lose trust in the sincerity of the whole program in question.
--You
might say that management should have done a better job of handling that
meeting, and, of course, this is true. What went unsaid was that no one
in the meeting stood up and asked the bosses whether their actions in
this meeting were a sign they were changing their mind about employee
involvement. Mostly people were silent and they left the harassed
project manager to fend for himself. They did not find their own voices
until they had left the room. So, where is the problem? Why did so many
people give so much power to two men allowing them to undermine the
trust in an employee involvement effort that people held so dear?
--Distrust
is too often a projection onto powerful others of our own ambivalence.
Ford employees’ instant skepticism about Peterson and Polling was more
an expression of their own timidity, fear and internal doubts about
employee involvement, than a reflection of the actions of top
management.
Anytime, Anywhere
If trust is my goal, then I have to come to terms with my own shadow:
the power I give to others, the denial of my own ambivalence about
participation, the fact I do not walk my talk, have silenced my own
voice and have left behind my own faith and innocence. Trust is the
willingness to go public with all of who I am. If I could ever really
believe this, (rather than write about it) then my “trust problem” might
fade. Why we think it is the task of people in power to create a high
trust environment, I no longer understand.
--I
can create a high trust environment anytime I want. All I have to
realize is that I am creating the environment in which I live. We are
afraid of being naive and a fool if we continue to trust in the face of
others’ betrayal. Well, what is so great about being strategic and
clever? And what is so wrong about being a fool? Maybe the willingness
to be a fool is the exact means of creating the high trust world that we
each long for.
This
article appeared in
News for a Change published by AQP in August 1998
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