Have you ever seen the movie, Meet the Parents? The plot follows Jack, a former CIA agent and overly protective father, who becomes obsessed with making sure his future son-in-law Greg will make a trustworthy husband. From his point of view, a person is either in the circle of trust, or out of it. Jack makes it his mission to prove to his family that Greg should be placed outside the circle of trust. But what places one inside or outside that circle? Jack had his own criteria, but here are a few considerations.
Dimensions of Trust & Distrust
Although trends in assessing levels of mistrust are now well documented, they are not well understood. The Rand Corporation’s American Life Panel released the results of their 2018 study on institutional attributes that affect trust. Here are the 5 dimensions of institutional trust that they identify:
- Competence
- Integrity
- Performance
- Accuracy
- Relevance of Information Provided
They found that the dimensions that mattered the most to people changed depending on the institution they were referring to. But generally speaking, competence and integrity seem to top the list as the most important components of developing institutional trust.
How Can Church Leaders Begin to Rebuild Trust
The truth is that people (including leaders in the Church) have multiple circles of relationships, each with varying degrees of trust. But our circles of trust have broken down to the point where many people today feel completely alone, with no one left to trust in but themselves, like Jack in Meet The Parents. How might we begin to enlarge our circles of trust to include more people and build trusting teams?
Re-establishing presence after a prolonged absence (pandemic) is going to be vital in the post-Covid church. As we begin to re-establish an in-person presence, trust may slowly start to return, under the right conditions. But the hard truth is that many of the people who disappeared from our churches in the last two years are unlikely to return. For those of us leaders who truly care about rebuilding trust with the ones who do return, we can start doing so in small ways, with presence and symbolic actions that help to build trusting teams.
Building Trusting Teams
Simon Sinek, in The Infinite Game, offers some exceptional insights on developing trust for those of us who work on or lead teams. He says that there is a difference between a group of people who work together and a group of people who truly trust one other. In the former, relationships are transactional, and on trusting teams, relationships foster safety that allows the individuals on a team to be vulnerable and take risks. We all want to build trusting teams. How might we best accomplish this today?
Sinek points out that the healthiest and highest performing teams trust one other and that trust always comes before performance. Technical competence (performance) is about how good someone is at their job, while trust is about character (the kind of person someone is). Character trumps competence when it comes to building trust on a team and the high performer who exhibits low trust is always a toxic member on any team.
On trusting teams, relationships foster safety that allows the individuals on a team to be vulnerable and take risks
Simon Sinek
Jack, in Meet the Parents, simply wants to prove that Greg should be placed outside the circle of trust, where Sinek wants to show us that a “circle of safety” is what is most needed for trust to exist on any team. Developing that circle of safety allows for honesty and vulnerability on a team and cultivating this is the responsibility of any team leader. Not only should a team leader be actively trying to build a circle of safety, but a good leader will also actively model this for her team. When we feel safe on a team, we begin to take small risks. And when trust is cultivated over time, we feel safe enough to take bigger risks.
Strong relationships are the foundation of high performing teams and high performing teams all start with trust. Perhaps Sinek’s contribution to this conversation is something that we, who profess to be followers of Jesus Christ, already know deep in our being, that when we prioritize trust over performance, performance usually follows!
Reflection
- Who is in your circle of trust? Has that circle of trust shrunk or grown in recent years? Why do you think this is so?
- With whom in your life / work would you like to rebuild trust? How might you consider rebuilding trust in tangible ways with your presence?
- For those who lead larger groups / teams, what symbolic acts of presence might show people that you are trustworthy?
- Reflect on your experience with a team that you are on right now. By Sinek’s definition, is it a trusting team? Why or why not? How might this team develop a “circle of safety”?
- As a leader, how will you model the behavior you want to see on a team that you lead?
