Trust In a World Where It’s Disappearing
Growing Trust
In today’s society, trust is a word filled with promise and potential. However, no matter where we turn, there seems to be an inability to trust conventionally and personally. While institutions, collectives, groups, and all kinds of safety nets maintain trust within society, it seems trust itself has been eroding recently.
Without trust, it becomes more difficult for us to grow together and move forward in life. There is a need for leadership to take a proactive role in evaluating how it can help propel society forward in light of the erosion of trust we have witnessed in government, educational institutions, and specific business institutions.
This week, I was made aware of Edelman’s Trust Barometer, an eye-opening experience for me as part of my graduate coursework. I’ve included a link to the website to read the full report for yourself and draw your conclusions as I have. If you would like to look at the information for 2022, here is the link. Even though 2022 has just begun, comparing and contrasting the results is interesting. When you have downloaded the entire document, I encourage you to carefully consider the 21 Years of Trust timeline on page 3. I have posted it below.
EDELMAN’S TRUST BAROMETER (ETB). — BACKGROUND AND IMPORTANCE
The global trust barometer was calculated with enough international participants to represent the global environment accurately. This particular study examines two different areas, the Informed Public, which represents 17% of the worldwide population as a whole, and the Mass Population, which is the entire world population excluding the informed public for a total global population of 83%. To qualify for the Informed public category, you must meet these four criteria:
- Age 25–64
- College-educated
- In the top 25% of household income per age group in each country
- Report significant engagement in public policy and business news
The barriers can be quite steep since most people do not qualify even if they describe themselves as moderately engaged.
Rather than making people uncomfortable, these tags aim to demonstrate how their label has resulted in us being Informationally Bankrupt and needing to regain trust in our pivotal institutions. Due to the erosion of trust between the two most significant economic powers, the United States and China, a strong distrust permeates across the board. According to the report:
“With a growing Trust gap and trust declines worldwide, people are looking for leadership and solutions as they reject talking heads who they deem not credible. In fact, none of the societal leaders we track — government leaders, CEOs, journalists, and even religious leaders — are trusted to do what is right, with drops in trust scores for all.” — Edelman, 2021
CULTURAL TRUST: DIFFERENCES AND SIMILARITIES
When carefully defined, culture offers us a perspective into several categories.
- What we see
- What we infer
- What we believe
- What we fear
- What we value
- What tradeoffs do we make?
For each of us, this is our unique superpower in establishing trust. We are all alike and different, and those similarities and differences allow us to either learn to agree or disagree or to accept or reject others.
When studying cultural differences, I found that when most of us disagree, we tend to “reject” the other person’s perspective, and when we agree, we tend to accept them. What if we instead received the opposing viewpoint, even if we disagreed with it?
The paradox has given me much to contemplate and consider. Our academic training teaches us to be increasingly curious, push the boundaries of social acceptance, and chase the hidden truths. This conclusion has been the most rewarding aspect of my academic training. I believe we would all find it easier to build trust if we recognized that others have valid perspectives on the world, even if they are different from our own.
Nonetheless, we shouldn’t feel pressured to accept or reject others’ perspectives. As a leader, our responsibility is to respect that person for who they are, to love them where they are, and to continue adding value to others. When put into practice in real-world situations, I feel those who can do this have created stronger bonds and stronger teams and created more acceptable environments that stimulate personal and professional development.
HOW DO WE BUILD TRUST WITH OTHERS?
The first step is to respect our differences and similarities. We can only build trust with both transparency and honesty, and if neither of those traits is present, we cannot create trust. This phenomenon is why the government has seen the most significant losses in the ETB.
Almost every government worldwide saw positive trends between January 2020 and May 2020. According to Edelman’s survey, trust in 18 of 27 countries had flipped from positive to negative between May 2020 and January 2021. Thus, businesses became the most trusted institution in that same period, increasing their trust index to 56. As a result of this shift in trust, Edelman found that businesses are now viewed as competent and ethical.
In my view, this is primarily due to increased globalization and how businesses have become more integrated, creating a more universally accepted range of roles and jobs domestically and globally. Increasingly, CEOs and shareholders seek a hybrid model that balances profit goals with social goals. As the world demands more responsibility and ownership, business leaders have emerged as the strong voice of reason amid chaos and misinformation.
As leaders, it is our responsibility to apply these same principles to ourselves and remains objectively in the middle while building trust. Embraced by common sense and goodwill, but always striving to add value to others rather than only taking from them.
CAN WE DISAGREE AND STILL INCREASE TRUST?
There is no easy answer to this question. How information circulates in our society makes it difficult to achieve this goal. Our culture and the information we consume influence us all. In the same way as smoke and second-hand smoke, the news and social networks we consume pollute our minds. To build trust, we have to be willing to look at information outside of our perspectives and cultural confirmation biases. For most of the mass population, this amount of work and awareness is problematic. They are more likely to choose comfort and conformity over understanding the need to make changes for the sake of others. And it’s hard to blame them.
One area to observe in the United States is how our voting system slowly devolves into an autocratic oligarchy. One power is continually working to undermine and displace the other. A similar situation has occurred before when two significant influences have fought for supremacy. This weekend, I read about the War of the Roses in France, and even that gave me a sense of how Republicans and Democrats continue to give way to a battle for control between two houses.
Therefore, respectfully disagreeing with others is more challenging for building trust. This situation is especially true if we consider all other sociological and psychological factors involved. Edelman created his graph to illustrate this phenomenon on page 10.
I am intrigued by this because it shows how our choices erode trust. These differences in opinions, values, and identities only fuel the fire within politics. New couples have even created “cardinal rules” about what conversation topics to avoid or use to build trust. Interestingly enough, those topics include:
- Religion
- Politics
- Money (Income)
Even when we disagree, there are times when we must put down our swords and listen. Right now, no one in our society is in a better position than CEOs. We can also conclude from Edleman’s report that even if we disagree politically, there is value-added in other areas within society. Edelman illustrates this point in his report below.
Can we create trust even when we disagree? I believe we can. Even if we disagree with a particular perspective or thought process, that doesn’t make the individual fundamentally wrong or right. It simply means that they have a reason for believing what they believe. I expect the other side to reciprocate when I establish my way of thinking and values in the conversation, just as they would expect the same. Sometimes, however, that may not be possible. I am aware that some people are antagonistic by nature. That is why enhancing our leadership capacity should always be a priority. When someone is unruly and aggressive, we should have enough self-confidence to walk away or leave the conversation.
This technique is especially crucial for online critics. It’s easy to criticize from behind a screen, and attacking in public is more complicated. Since most people are more likely to blame without adding value, we ignore most social media posts. It will not be possible to win over everyone or win every battle. In the end, we should each contribute our points to the discussion and leave if someone is being discourteous. Just as there are armchair quarterbacks, there are also plenty of online “experts.”
OUR CALL TO ACTION
We should remind ourselves that we are the heroes and heroines of our stories. In addition, we are responsible for developing our own Trust Barometers with others. In our roles as leaders, we need to trust in ourselves as we bring awareness to others through how we act and live.
I want to offer you the encouragement I found in my meditations this week to end this post, and I hope it will be as valuable to you as it has been to me.
Finally, here’s another excellent article by Destiny S. Harris that I read this week that follows this exact topic.
Please give it a read to support a fellow writer!
