There is a common misconception that trustworthiness is a personal quality that one either has or doesn’t.

Trust -- in leaders, colleagues, suppliers, even customers -- is essential for organizations and teams within organizations to be effective and successful. Joel Peterson, who retired in 2020 as chairman of the board at JetBlue, describes the power of trust succinctly: “[Trust] supports innovation and flexibility, and it makes life more enjoyable and more productive. People who live in high-trust environments thrive.”[1] Unfortunately, many organizations are deemed untrustworthy by their employees. Gallup research shows that just one in three employees in its global database strongly agree that they trust the leadership of their organization.[2]
All too often as well, there is a common misconception that trustworthiness is a personal quality that one either has or doesn’t, that it is innate and permanent.

If employees feel they cannot trust one another – to tell the truth, to honor commitments, to behave ethically - organizations as a whole can lose focus and performance can diminish. Great Place To Work, which, among other services, partners with Fortune to publish an annual list of the top 100 places to work, concludes that trust fuels performance and provides sustainable benefits for organizations high in trust [3]:

• Comparative cumulative stock market returns among the publicly held Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For® are nearly three times greater than the market average. 
• The most innovative companies achieve five and one-half times the median year-over-year growth compared to the least innovative companies.
  

When people think about trust, we often hear the following: trust involves people “being allowed to be themselves,” or that “people here say what they mean and mean what they say” or that “people here are allowed to be vulnerable.” We don’t see anything intrinsically wrong with these descriptions of trust, but we do think all are a bit too vague if we’re looking to develop skills to assess trust, build trust when it is lacking, or re-build trust when it has been lost. 

We believe that trust can be designed into an organization and that trustworthiness can be developed. We view trust in four dimensions: Competence, Responsibility, Involvement, and Sincerity. It is possible to develop these dimensions and to create the trust that can make organizations perform successfully.

• Competence: the ability to perform effectively and transparently in a domain, according to the accepted standards of that domain. If we ask someone for help in any particular area, we do so because we trust that he can help, either by working directly with us themselves or connecting us with someone he knows can help us.   
• Responsibility: the ability to effectively manage our commitments to others. A commitment is a promise and following up on a commitment is responsibility. People can be taught about the importance of making promises, and can learn how to make them, deliver on them, even if that means asking for help, and, if necessary, renegotiate them on occasion.  
  

• Involvement: the commitment someone makes to take care of our concerns, and to open future possibilities for us. Does this person care about what we care about? Does she understand why this issue matters to us, and is she willing to help us build our identity along that path? Does he go beyond helping complete a task to spending time understanding our broader concerns? Does she see not just our responsibility and role but how we help fulfill the organization’s commitment to customers? How engaged is he in the mission of the organization?
• Sincerity: the consistency between what a person says to us and what he is thinking as he says it (that is, his public conversation matches his private conversation). Assessing sincerity is difficult: an insincere conversation is not detectable until after – sometimes long after – it takes place. An insincere person doesn’t acknowledge her insincerity and we tend not to judge people as insincere in the moment. If someone fails to deliver on a promise to us by a certain date, was she insincere at the time or did circumstances intervene to make delivery impossible? If we distrust someone’s sincerity, it is harder to repair this distrust.   
  

We believe that trust can be designed into an organization and that trustworthiness can be developed.