The Search for Trust

If it is missing, where do we go to find it?

The question that follows from my post, The Currency of Trust is where do we go to find trust? We need to begin with a brief view of the landscape of this search.

My basic view of trust, and the perspective that I am applying here, is that trust is a product, an outcome, an effect, or the impact of respect.

By respect, I mean a view towards people, institutions, and social contexts that treat each with dignity and the right to exist on their own terms.

The Ground of Respect

Respect is founded upon specific values that define the relationships that we want to have with people, institutions, and social contexts. The specific values are subject to individual choice. For me, respect is how I can honor people, express gratitude towards them for the difference they make, and how I distinguish between people of good will and ill will.

Respect pushes back against ideologies that seek to impose a specific perspective on society, essentially molding it into its own image. The mindset of these ideologies is disrespect and condescension, believing that some people are sub-human. At worse, it is a belief that those people should not be allowed to exist.

I am identifying a spectrum of beliefs about respect and trust that extends from an extreme belief in human rights for all people that would essentially be against all state mechanisms of control. The opposite extreme then views eugenics and genocide as strategies for perfecting society through either the removal of unwanted people or the genetic experimentation towards a perfectionist transhumanist future.

The moderate position that I am advocating is a belief in the value and dignity of each person, and there worthy of treatment with respect. Through this culture of respect, the establishment of a society of trust can result. The institutions of society and the state, therefore, exist to protect and provide for a society. The modern version of the ancient and medieval master/slave relation of the state to the individual should also be seen as eroding the societal conditions for respect and trust.

So, I want to frame this search for trust in three ways.

It is a problem in search of a solution.

It is a matter of our relationship to people and society.

And, it is a question about the context of our lives.

I want to explore these ways in reverse order.

The Context of Trust

In our lives, we move through different contexts. The two most obvious are our homes and the place of our work. Sociologists use the term place to distinguish them. The context of our home and family is the First Place. Work is a Second Place. They have also identified the Third Place, as environments like coffee shops, bars, churches, and athletic centers. These are places where people gather socially. Each of these “places” is in a state of flux.

The Family Context

The structure of the family has changed considerably during my lifetime. When I was a child, the traditional family consisted of a father, a mother, and two or three children. The father was the “breadwinner” and the mother was the “homemaker.” However, the last sixty years have seen the emergence of households where both parents work in careers. Children may not be a part of the family unit. And the traditional family of a man and a woman as husband and wife has now been joined by gay families of two men or two women. If they have children, they may have been adopted or conceived through a process of a surrogate birth mother or sperm donation.

The context of family is now more complex and dynamic. Adult children and their families may not live close to their parents and the grandparents of their children. Some of my friends who have retired have chosen to leave the communities where they have lived for decades and move to be close to their children and grandchildren. In effect, home follows the relationship, not the other way around.  

The plight of orphan children around the world has become a way for families to expand the number of children under their care. A college friend and her husband, after having three of their own children, adopted eight Russian children after the fall of the Soviet Union. All eleven children are now grown and doing well. Then there is the growing phenomenon of adult children living at home either through job insecurity or because the parents needing the care of their child. 

One of the challenges to establishing trust in a family is the range and importance of the outside activities that are required for family members to function in society. My Impact Day consultation with Jean from my short book, May Your No Be A Yes: A Guide To Making Better Decisions describes the conflict that she has with the demands of her children’s school to participate in fundraising activities. Whether it is school, sports, and arts activities, or the demands of work, the expectations on families seem to push them towards living more as a collection of close relatives under one roof, than as close, intimate members of a family. Families are under constant stress to lose control of their identity as a family as outside influences bear down on each member.

The Work Context

In many ways, work highlights the difficulty in creating social trust as the demands of the job grow. Add to this the trend to work from home, the tediousness that many feel about Zoom meetings, and the social context of work begins to transition to a being like a collection of independent contract employees.

A lot of careers in coaching and consulting have been beneficial to organizations by focusing on the skills of teamwork, communication, strategy creation, and leadership. The effect of these programs can be greater respect and trust within the team or company.

As one of these service providers, it is not hard to spot when a company or a board is dysfunctional. Somewhere in the mix of problems, there are issues of attitude and perception between co-workers, board members, and the organization’s leadership. The expectations that people bring with them to work or service that are never acknowledged or discussed can create a hostile, toxic environment.

In many cases, I found that the head of the organization did not want to address the problem. Often because they felt that it would only make matters worse. It is a product of weak leadership and short-term thinking. For the patterns of disrespectful behavior are not created in isolated moments, but are derived from a culture of disrespect, and therefore why trust is often difficult to create in the workplace.

One source of insight that I believe is helpful comes from René Girard’s work on mimetic desire. This is the human function of imitation. It is why mentoring is often a better way to teach than lecturing. But mimetic desire carries a dark side. As two people, say two who are on the same team, begin to get close to success, and only one really can be acknowledged, then mimetic rivalry results. Out goes respect, cooperation, and trust.

Luke Burgis has written an excellent book on this facet of human behavior. Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life. He writes.

“Mimetic desire, because it is social, spreads from person to person and through a culture. It results in two different movements – two cycles – of desire. The first cycle leads to tension, conflict, and volatility, breaking down relationships an causing instability and confusion as competing desires interact in volatile ways. This is the default cycle that has been most prevalent in human history. It is accelerating today .

It’s possible to transcend that default cycle, though. It’s possible to initiative a different cycle that channels energy into creative and productive pursuits that serve the common good.”

This supports what I have seen for a long time about leadership. It is not a role, but rather how we function in life. “All leadership begins with personal initiative to create impact that makes a difference that matters.” This desire to create impact is the same desire to serve the common good. In order to have this mindset, we need to address the values that we choose to define our lives. If those values do not support or endorse personal initiative to create impact that results in a working environment of respect and trust, then we have not overcome the default version of Burgis’ understanding of mimetic desire.

A work environment is a product of both organizational design and a social environment of respect and trust. If you want a trusting environment address the human dimension in the workplace.

The Third Place Context

Where home and work may be places where, in the language of networks, we find a close network of shared belief and experience, third places tend to be ones marked by “the strength of weak ties.” I spend a lot of time in these places because they are where people are. I am curious and interested in people. So, I go to coffee shops and pubs to meet people. There is a local distillery down the block from where I live. When I am in town on Friday nights, this is where I go. Just about everyone that walks through the door, I am going to end up having a conversation with them.

There is little mimetic conflict in a Third place unless a guy or gal is competing for the attention of another. This openness is the strength of a loose tie as described by Mark Grannovetter.

“Most intuitive notions of the “strength” of an interpersonal tie should be satisfied by the following definition: the strength of a tie is a … combination of the amount of time, the emotional intensity, the intimacy (mutual confiding), and the reciprocal services which characterize the tie.”

The weak tie means that there is less to “tie” the persons to each other. However, the result is that the “tie” matters significantly. Even with there is little to the relationship, respect and trust can be realized at a level that may not be where the relationship is close.

The benefit of these Third places is not just a kind of “utility” for meeting people without a lot at stake in the interaction. They also provide us a place to test out how we express our sense of identity and the meaning of our values. In the First and Second places, there is something at stake. Our status or preeminence within the family or team is a stake. The closer the relationship the more there is a “mimetic” stake.

You can see this in the political culture in the US today. The aggression expressed between political opponents rationalizes not only displays of disrespect and untrustworthiness but acts of subterfuge. I’m not suggesting at all that there is a validation to these patterns of behavior. They are corrosive and cancerous to society. The political arena should be a Third place where people gather to establish a common ground to address the problems and opportunities of society. However, this is not our reality now, nor do I expect that it will be at any time in the near future.

The Context of Relationships

It is this role of relationships in every facet of our lives that provided me a place to reflect on trust. As a pastor early in my career, then as a chaplain, leadership program director and academic instructor of a college, and later as a consultant, I saw how trust was missing. It showed in patterns of behavior where respect was missing. As a result, any plan that required the team or the board to rally to the cause of the new direction I found relationships of respect, trust, and the shared commitment to a new venture was missing.

Was this absence simply a lack of clarity about why they should move in a new direction? It was not a lack of clarity about the ideas. People understood the ideas. The problem was that they did not understand how values ideas had a concrete reality to them. Trust could be a valued concept, but one that lacked an embodied reality to the group.

As a result, the relationships took on a transactional character. Which opened them to mimetic conflict.

When respect and trust are present in a relationship, each person is saying to the other “I believe you are a person of genuine worth.” For me, it is how I treat people with honor. I treat them with gratitude and interest. This is my pattern of behavior that drives my interaction with people.

Treating someone with respect is more than a form of validation. It is a valuing of them as someone who has a valuable contribution to make in the world. However, in a hyper-mimetic culture of socio-political competition, people are not looking to value people but rather to be treated as superior in their judgment and character. The stakes for people who live this way are high, because there is a fragility to their lives that they cannot acknowledge publically. This is why mimetic conflict is so aggressively confrontational in the political realm.

As the Circle of Impact model formed in my mind, with relationships being one of the three dimensions of leadership, I sought a connection between the Ideas and Structure dimensions. The concreteness of relating to people brought me to see respect, then trust as keys to our relationships. When our relationships become the embodiment of respect and trust, then we can see how honest communication and mutual accountability can develop.

The Search Problem

If trust is missing in our world, then what kind of problem do we have?

I’m going to use my Circle of Impact model as a problem-solving device. We begin with a question.

What kind of problem is the lack of trust in the world?

Is it an Ideas problem, a Relationship problem, or a Structure problem?

Once we identify the problematic dimension, we look to the other two dimensions for the resources to solve the problem.

For example, our written communication with a client receives no response. We decide that this is a relationship problem. Instead of confronting them for their lack of respect for our efforts to serve them, we go to them and say “We are revising our communication strategy with clients. We’d like to know what content (Ideas) would you like from us, and in what manner (Structure) would you to receive it?” This is how the Circle of Impact problem-solving method works.

Let us quickly look at each to see how we might address the loss of trust.

It is an Ideas Problem

The way we know that this is the problem is that we or our team are not clear about what is respect and trust. If we are asked to describe it, and our description seem vague and uninformation, then we have embarassed ourselves.

For the Ideas dimension, clarity is the quality measure.

The solution is to bring people together to talk about how to better structure communication and collaboration processes. In so doing, we seek to understand how to elevate respect and trust in those patterns of behavior within our team.

It is a Relationships Problem

The way we know this is because respect and trust are missing. We are caught up in a mimetic conflict that must be addressed.

The quality measure of our relationships is respect and trust.  

We solve the problem by developing a structure for evaluating teamwork. In doing so, we discuss the values that are important to team members in their work together. Once clarity and a structure for teams begins to work, then discussion about the quality of relationships takes on importance.

It is a Structure Problem

Many organizations suffer from a lack of respect and trust because it is not considered essential to the functioning of the organization. The way we know that the Structure does not support respectful, trusting relationships is the presence of mimetic conflict, significant turnover in staff, and client complaints about the lack of attention to them and the poor coordination from the company’s staff.

The quality measure for the Structure of an organization is impact. Impact is a change that makes a difference that matters. If the company is clueless about its impact, then it should show up in a range of metrics that point to problems.

We solve this problem by clarifying what impact means for the company. To do this requires an honest look at the core values of the company, and the quality of the relationships regarding respect, trust, and mutual accountability.

The Real Context of Trust

While I’d like to see you all begin to have conversations with people about respect and trust. I believe the place to begin is with yourself. Ask yourself these questions.

Do I treat people with respect? How can I find out?

Am I a person that other people trusts? How can know this?

By asking these questions, you open yourself up to seeing how you behave with people.

If you are still unsure after asking these questions, go to someone you trust and ask them what they think.

Engaging people in conversations about the practicality of trust in your relationships will open both of you to the prospects of how to develop deeper relationships that avoid mimetic conflict and build upon positive mimetic mentoring.

When respect and trust become an aspect of your relationships, and you have found mutuality to be growing, you’ll find that many of the inner conflicts and fears that were once prominent in your life will go away.

These are steps we can take to restore our humanity in society and its institutions.