The 3 Kinds of Trust

In any relationship, there are three kinds of trust.

The first is integrity: we are who we say we are. We're not living a fiction. We're not pretending to be someone that we're not. The second is capability: that we need to trust that the person that we're working with or relating with is capable of doing the things that they say they can do. So, obvious example, we hire people in an organization that, because of a resume, we need to make sure that that resume actually results in them being able to do the skill set that they say they're going to be able to do. The third is that we will do what we say we're going to do, so follow through. So even if we have the greatest most developed skill set to be able to perform the things that we say we can perform, we still have to have the discipline, the commitment to follow through.

How does your organization foster systemic trust?

Any political system - and an organization is a political system - depends on systemic trust.  Without that, it's very hard to cooperate and it's not a good road to start walking down. It's also about trustworthiness, which is the responsibility of everyone who participates in the system to be trustworthy enough.

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What does it mean to be our authentic selves?

Trust is not something that is like a skill, a technical skill to be learned, it's a practice. It moves and changes. So in the practice of integrity, we are who we say we are, it's this continual kind of reshaping and moving with actually investigating and talking about: what does it mean to be our authentic self, to bring our authentic selves to work? What does that mean when I'm in a meeting? Or what does that mean when I'm hearing my performance review? What is being asked of me in that?