Last month, I was, for the first time, taking part of the European Management Meeting in the company I work for. It was an interesting event, what stroke me most was an exercise we had to do in the morning where we have been asked to draw some of the company’s values. Trust was one of them. Trust! That value that is generally treated as a big bucket where you can actually throw anything you don’t know.
It is an amazing concept that I still can’t define or put any sort of action plan on. How can we be build trust? What does it even mean to trust someone? What does it mean loosing trust, having trust, sharing a relationship built on trust? To me it says it all, and it doesn’t at the same time. Anyways, we had to “draw” trust. So after a very short conversation on the confusion around this trust and some comments like “we cannot speak about trust at work”, etc., some people gave an example saying that when you throw a baby in the air, he/she still smiles at you because he/she trusts that you will catch him/her back. Can a baby really trust? I am not sure, but we had all these senior managers that have years of experience in life, what do I know if babies really trust that person specifically or are they just enjoying the moment, flying with no wings?!
We had others who gave an example of shaking hands, like a customer and a supplier (really?!), and other examples confusing trust and integrity (and as hard to believe as it might seem, bankers were on the loop)… After these few attempts of “creativity” around how to actually draw trust, we finally decided to ask the worldwide expert in everything (yes, it actually does exist), so, thanks to Steve Jobs - and our salary, we had an iPad and we went to www.google.com/images, and looked for “trust”.
It doesn’t really matter what we had actually drew, although it was a competition that apparently has decided the team with the most creative mind (based on what criteria? That has been set for things that are beyond my miserable knowledge as well).
The competition itself was actually an opportunity to take the time and speak about what we felt around that theme, trust. And what I came out with, from the whole exercise, is that trust, either in our private life or at our work, is a very difficult concept, we generally tend to put everything under its banner and we generally have no solutions for it. Yes, maybe a lame conclusion and probably too pessimistic in the sens that criticizing things without trying to bring any answers is just a loss of time… But I do understand that, like a tree, trust is there, growing in its corner, as long as it has not been broken. Once it is, and it is an eventual turn of events anyways, then it will take the necessary time to grow back, effort to understand, and energy to get things where they had started.
Maybe a last advice, while you have a genuine trusted relationship, try not to loose it, otherwise, you will end up in that big confusion bucket, just like the European Union… a big corpus, throwing one thing at a time!
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