One Powerful Way to Strengthen Your Relationships

Source: Joe Pambianco, used with permission

Trust is essential to any relationship. Research has found that our personal and business relationships fail when we can’t maintain trust (Boutros & Joseph, 2007; Turaga, 2013). Yet, in our painfully polarized world today, trust can be hard to find.

We all begin life reaching out for what psychologist Erik Erickson (1993) called basic trust, learning to trust our parents, our first caregivers, and the world around us. If they betray our trust, we can develop mistrust, fearing that we live in an unstable, uncertain world. Psychoanalysts John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth (1969, 1973, 1980) recognized that in order to thrive, infants and young children need secure attachment, a warm and predictable relationship with their caregivers, providing a solid foundation for emotional development. If our parents were neglectful, undependable, or abusive, we might develop insecure attachment, which affects our developing brains and can lead to psychological dysfunction and profound insecurity in our relationships with ourselves, other people, and our world (Siegel, 1999).

The good news is that we can learn to trust, even if we lacked secure attachment in childhood (Wallin, 2007). Seattle psychologist Meg Van Deusen (2019, 2020) has found that we can begin building trust by practicing mindfulness, which helps us develop a “nonjudgmental, compassionate relationship with ourselves.” She says that mindfulness can build “an internal working model of secure attachment, helping us engage in the world honestly and openly.”

As we develop greater trust in ourselves, we can begin cultivating greater trust in our relationships. We can gain valuable insights from corporations where effective teamwork is essential to success. Corporate consultant Patrick Lencioni has found that the lack of trust can sabotage efforts to work together effectively, leading to fear of conflict and undermining commitment, accountability, and attention to results (Lencioni, 2002).

“Have you ever been in a meeting where a decision is supposed to have been made, and when it’s over, people find someone they trust and tell them what they really think?” asks executive coach Joe Pambianco. He points out how “in many workplaces, so much gets swept under the metaphorical rug,” and the lack of trust sabotages innovation and progress. In over a decade working with leadership teams at Cisco Systems, he found that building greater trust is a process of increasing our awareness of ourselves and each other (personal communication, 2021).

Cultivating greater trust within us

“Without trust,” Pambianco says, “we can live isolated in a world made up almost entirely of our own stories projected onto the world.” Cultivating greater trust, he explains, begins with ourselves, for “If we are deeply judgmental of ourselves, we tend to believe others are doing the same, which harms trust.” He often hears people say that “they are their own worst critic.” Yet “if we secretly believe we are deficient, we can feel like imposters at work, which can lead to defensiveness and overreactions when things go wrong,” or we can become “grandiose or driven to be better than others in ways that are destructive to trust.”

Building greater trust within means mindfully listening to ourselves with an attitude psychologist Kristin Neff (2009) calls “self-compassion.” This involves first acknowledging how we feel, then accepting our common humanity, recognizing that all human beings make mistakes, and finally consoling ourselves as we would a dear friend.

Cultivating the two levels of trust around us

As we work on trusting ourselves, the next step is building greater trust in our relationships, which involves two different levels of trust: predictive and vulnerability-based trust (Lencioni, 2014).

• Predictive trust means keeping our word, following through with our promises, being accountable and reliable.
• Vulnerability-based trust goes much deeper. Pambianco explains how “it’s about people being able to be more open and honest with each other.” He emphasizes that vulnerability-based trust is “a critical differentiator of great leadership teams.”

Cultivating vulnerability-based trust requires the courage to practice “being the change we’d like to see in the world,” Joe Pambianco says. This means “to turn up the kindness and curiosity and inquire into what’s really going on.” It means asking ourselves, “Can we admit to mistakes and seek to learn from them? Be open about what we know and don’t know? Listen to others with openness, curiosity, and respect? Apologize when we act in ways that are hurtful?”

Many people see being open and vulnerable as weaknesses, but Pambianco says that “when we respectfully challenge a business initiative that we think isn’t set up for success or apologize in the middle of an argument with our spouse and admit that we now realize we were overreacting to a misunderstanding, we’re actually demonstrating courage and strength, not weakness.” It takes courage to be authentic, and this authenticity builds an atmosphere of greater trust.

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How corporate policies can undermine trust

As a leadership consultant, Pambianco has found that many corporate policies unintentionally undermine trust. Research has shown that performance management processes are largely ineffective (Goodall & Buckingham, 2019). Why? When companies develop performance expectations and expect people to fit into them, this process produces only competence. It prevents excellence by ignoring each person’s unique strengths that could lead them to excel. Because this process “pushes people to be something that they’re not,” Pambianco says, it makes them feel inadequate, undermining trust and morale.

In his work as a leadership consultant, Joe Pambianco draws upon the uniqueness of each team member. He opens his workshops by citing research on the qualities of high-performing teams, then asks participants where they are “in terms of trust, in terms of purpose, in terms of recognition.” He asks, “Are you toiling in obscurity? Or do you feel like you’ll be seen if you do good work?” He listens and then says that he’s going to stop talking as soon as possible and get them talking together because they “are the content today.” Working together, the teams recognize where they are and discover what they need to take their performance to the next level.

Joe Pambianco works to build vulnerability-based trust. He advises consultants to take care when exploring vulnerability, to make sure people are ready, that they don’t feel judged or coerced. He once met with a team of senior engineers who had “a good foundation of trust, but their interactions were largely transactional. They were not averse to connecting more deeply; they just hadn’t had the time or context for doing so.” He asked if they were willing “to answer some questions out loud to the group that would give a window into their life outside of work.”

One senior engineer shared a dramatic story of the tragic loss of a friend, “a deeply significant story that touched the whole team and inspired his colleagues to tell more powerful stories from their own lives.” At the end of the day, one team member said he had learned more about his colleagues in this short workshop than in years of knowing them. Another said he felt “a new level of trust and freedom.”

The benefits of deep trust

Research has shown how deep trust and mutual support can help teams become more effective (Boutros & Joseph, 2007; Turaga, 2013). Trust encourages innovation, creating an atmosphere where even mistakes are seen with curiosity and perspective. Years ago, Spencer Silver, a research engineer at the 3M corporation, was trying to create a powerful glue to use in aircraft construction. But his efforts failed—his glue would stick to surfaces but could easily be peeled off. In an atmosphere of trust, he began giving seminars to product developers, certain that this glue had some use.

After attending one of these seminars, Art Fry, another engineer who sang in his church choir, used the new glue to make bookmarks stick to the pages of his hymn book. This innovation became Post-Its, and both Silver and Fry were inducted into the National Innovators Hall of Fame (Sandomir, 2021). From an apparent failure, an atmosphere of trust, curiosity, and communication produced this useful innovation.

We can all benefit from a greater trust. In our personal and professional lives, an atmosphere of trust can help us solve problems, discover new possibilities, and learn more about ourselves, one another, and our world.

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This post is for informational purposes and should not substitute for psychotherapy with a qualified professional.