In this episode of the Trustbuilder Podcast, hosts Scott and Brad dive into a couple of difficult questions surrounding the foundation of trust. They tackle the core question: Is trust earned, given, or assumed?

The discussion explores the critical role personality plays in how individuals build or withhold trust. The hosts share their insights on how different personality types (Action, Insight, and Connection) can influence trust-building dynamics, offering a specific story of how one person's attempt to build trust was met with the opposite reaction due to a misunderstanding of the other person's personality.

The second difficult question posed is: Should leaders give trust freely, or should they make people earn it? Drawing from their own leadership experience and concepts from Game Theory (like the Prisoner's Dilemma and the idea of initial optimism), Scott and Brad explore the idea that trust operates on a gradient, not a binary scale. They conclude that starting with a degree of optimism and cooperation is the most effective way to foster a high-trust environment.

Join Scott and Brad as they look for answers to these difficult questions and help listeners explore their own relationship with trust.