In some of the institutional work I’ve done this semester, the issue of establishing and maintaining trust between different constituencies within a typical college or university has come up repeatedly, which has made me think a bit about the anatomy—or is it alchemy?—of trust.
I’m going to box out many of the major determinants of trust inside higher education, which are structured into entire institutions and into the way those institutions relate to the wider world. Even the most savvy, emotionally intelligent individual can’t swim upstream from the mouth of the river to its headwaters. The best anybody can do is establish local islands of trust despite larger constraints that are right now strongly pushing in the direction of mistrust.
In fact, asking for trust when you know you’re going to betray it soon enough (or even if you might) is The #1 Mistake. “Trust me, what you’re afraid of is not going to happen” is the worst thing anybody can say if they are not absolutely certain that’s true and not absolutely in possession of the power and authority that will prevent that from happening. I would never assure a student that a colleague is not going to fail them for that because I can’t stop a colleague from failing them and because there isn’t any colleague I know well enough to be sure I have a perfect model of their grading behavior under all circumstances. Don’t make promises you can’t keep if you want to be trusted. A broken promise will make achieving trust impossible until everyone who remembers the promise is gone.
The issue here is that The #2 Mistake is, “Never make promises”. If I’m working with someone who never gives any assurances, never makes promises of any kind, never makes an ironclad commitment, never signs on the dotted line, I will never be able to trust them fully. Someone who is that careful never to give their word, never to be caught out in public putting themselves on the line is someone who is always prepared to break faith with anybody and everybody as necessary. When that person says, “Trust me”, I know already that I can’t.
The #3 Mistake is never disclosing the real basis for your decisions, positions or advocacy. The moment I discern that someone has a reason for pushing one way or the other on some issue that they’re plainly not going to share or reveal, there’s a permanent cap on how much I can trust them on that matter, and over time, consistent withholding of that kind tends to bleed over into my general dealings with them. Everybody has valid reasons for showing discretion, and some issues are genuinely sensitive. But trust grows only when I know why I’m really being asked to take a particular action or provide particular information. If someone’s going to withhold information consistently, then our working relationship had better not require trust.
Someone who never concedes that they made a mistake is making The #4 Mistake. If I know and you know that you screwed up something and you refuse to say so, then I can’t trust you. If you’re blaming someone else or something else, then I have to suspect that the moment I’m out of the conversation with you, then I’m the one you’re blaming. I’m not talking here about falling on your sword in order to protect people. That’s honorable (and honorable behavior is an important ingredient of trust) but at least some of the time, that’s concealing what happened. What I need to know is that someone’s a reliable partner when it comes to unravelling a consequential error and figuring out how to make things better. Someone who owns their part of the mess is someone I can trust. Someone who goes mum or diverts blame is someone I can’t trust. Hell, someone who has apparently never made a mistake is someone to mistrust just on general principle.
Someone who continually asks for trust for no reason, as a general blank-check precondition of working together and being in community, is making The #5 Mistake. Especially in scholarly communities, where perpetual impersonal skepticism towards claims about evidence and truth are usefully baked into the fundamental ethos of scholarship. The need to emphasize and reference trust should be about a particular interaction or decision. If I trust someone more generally, then the best sign that this is the case (and that it is mutual) is that neither of us need to say it. When I’m asking for trust, I’m in the process of making a relationship. Now I grant that the oddity of academic life is that we are constantly trapped in four-year cycles of making relationships with an always-changing population of students and with new colleagues and leaders, so we are always in the process of making relationships. But someone I have been working with for a long time suddenly talking about trust abstractly generally is a reason to feel the opposite.
The #6 Mistake is making anyone feel like they’re being “handled” or managed. Condescend to me, gaslight me, fake-flatter me, tell me something that you and I both know is a load of baloney, tell me how much sympathy you have for my perspective while palpably lacking it, make me read a report that is empty, show me a slide-deck full of generic top-level abstractions rather than explanations, ask me to come to a meeting where everybody writes their brainstorming opinions on a whiteboard and then only harvest the ones that align with the already-in-motion plans. All of that creates a kind of miasma of difficult-to-dispel mistrust.
So less in terms of mistakes, and more in descriptive terms, what creates the kind of trust that makes colleges and universities run better than they might otherwise?
Explanations for actions should be plentiful, up for discussion to the maximum degree possible, and relatively unadorned by obfuscating institutional ideologies.
Each actor should be fairly clear about their motivations and interests in any interaction if they want to establish trust. If I can’t guess what you’re aiming for, trust is not happening.
Information about almost everything should be relatively easy to come by. Everything that’s secret or confidential should have a specific coherent justification for being that way.
If you’re going to deliver bad news, deliver it. Don’t evade or sidestep. If you know it’s not fair but can’t do anything about it, say so.
If you want an open discussion, respect what you hear. If you consult, show later on how it’s affected your decision making.
Take people seriously if they’re asking to be taken seriously. If you can’t take me seriously, tell me why, especially if it involves me breaking trust with you in the past. Trust is a two-way street, always. People actually need to be told if they’ve broken faith or betrayed a clear understanding—on one hand, to know that there are consequences for having done that, but on the other hand because it’s possible that you’re the one with a misunderstanding of what happened in the past.
Know who I am if you’ve dealt with me before. Remember where I’m coming from and why. Remember what we’ve worked on. Ask if you’re not sure. Ask if you don’t know what I mean or what I’m referencing. Trust is relational, and gets stronger when everybody has a stake in the relationship at hand.
Be unafraid of exploring alternatives to what you think you’ve decided has to be. If you’re not at liberty to consider alternatives because you’re obliged to follow rules and policies that you didn’t establish and can’t alter, say so right at the outset. Locate yourself within a decision.
Cultivate diverse sources of information. I can’t trust someone who trusts the wrong people, or trusts too credulously in a narrow channel of information that just delivers them what they want to hear. I can trust someone who is curious, persistent and can handle hearing contradictory kinds of information. If I’m talking to you and I’m fundamentally unsure whether you know the reality of a situation that many people experienced even if you ostensibly ought to know, we’re not getting very far with establishing trust.
Given all that, what’s the use of trust? I think that if you can establish (or re-establish) it with these kinds of principles, in time it actually eliminates the need for some of these principles—it creates an environment with less friction and less tension where decisions are easier to make and everyday work is less wrenching and more generative. Think of a lot of this as a deep cleaning process: a lot of labor at the start to make a better environment for a long time that is more easily maintained thereafter with small regular efforts.
Image credit: Photo by Marek Piwnicki on Unsplash