TrustTalk - It's all about Trust

Paul Zak is a professor at Claremont Graduate University in Southern California and the Founder of Immersion Neuroscience. He talks about the neuroscience of trust. His experiments researching the neurochemical oxytocin (the "Trust Molecule") show that most humans are biologically wired to cooperate, but that business and economics ignore the biological foundations of human reciprocity, risking loss. Building a culture of trust is what makes a meaningful difference. Employees in high-trust organizations are more productive, have more energy at work, collaborate better with their colleagues, and stay with their employers longer than people working at low-trust companies. They also suffer less chronic stress and are happier with their lives, and these factors fuel stronger performance.

Maikel Batelaan, consultant and co-author of the book “Why Should I Trust You” talks about the ideal of every organization: smooth collaboration. In practice, it is more unruly. After all, there are always complex problems that need to be solved. Many leaders then react impulsively: they flee or they fight. Increasingly, we see leaders who choose the solution that lies exactly in between: they create trust. Organizations are much more equitable, much flatter than they used to be. If there is a need to create change or to overcome existing rivalries, the first thing that comes to mind is to restore trust among the key players, trust between leaders and co-workers. And that's why he thinks that in most cases where organizations want to change, trust is something that should be seriously looked at. Distrust blocks basic team performance, and it also makes people very unhappy in their private life. If a situation like that exists, it's important in the first place to identify the elephant in the room. He talks about the taboo to talk about this lack of trust and the remedies to restore trust.

Admiral Bauer is NATO’s most senior military officer. In his first podcast interview he talks about the crucial role of trust in the military training and operations, about his years at the Naval Academy and the international retreat from Afghanistan, about “mission command” and his personal mantra “Expect the Unexpected”. He speaks of military personnel as highly educated and trained professionals, who do not conform to popular stereotyping, about ethical choices in combat and the difference between trust and performance.

Paul Timmers talks about trust and cybersecurity. Cyber threats undermine trust in the daily practice of working with digital systems and in geopolitical relations. But even if we should increase our control of digital technologies, some myths about digital sovereignty must be debunked. Nevertheless, there are also sensible ways forward to strengthen strategic autonomy in the digital world. Importantly, the debate about trust and technology is going really to the foundations of the kind of society that we want to have.

Afghanistan has been all over the news in the past weeks. The reason was far from positive. The Taliban unexpectedly returned to power, just at the time that the last international troops were being withdrawn from the country. The final chapter of twenty years of international engagement became the most tragic one, as countries tried to evacuate their citizens and the Afghans that had worked for them. In TrustTalk we talk to Jorrit Kamminga, an associate fellow of the Dutch Clingendael Institute who spent 16 years in Afghanistan and has recently published a Dutch book about twenty years of the Netherlands in Afghanistan. With him, we explore the various layers of trust that existed in the past twenty years. From the national parliaments of donor countries and the international military coalitions to the Afghans on the receiving end and the new interim government of the Taliban.

In this interview with trust researcher Bart de Jong he focuses on the impact of trust on teams in organizational settings, about the difference in hierarchy or rank among team members. Trust building in a team should not be a one-off exercise but an inherent element of every interaction, every day. He talks about three ways managers can have control over that they can use to build and maintain trust, about differences in online and face-to-face team meetings. He researched three waves of trust research, spanning a period of more than 25 years.

Deep trust and high expectations are set to be two pillars of high-performing cultures and Emotional Intelligence (EQ) is essential to both. It is said that when leaders set high expectations without the EQ necessary to create trust, they breed anxiety. They breed stress and burnout. Bert Iedema, board room coach has extensive experience with EQ and how to improve it by training, helping to create trust.

According to Marcos Aguiar, senior partner and managing director at BCG Sao Paulo, Brazil, 7 out of the 10 most valuable companies in the world, are ecosystems. When there is no trust or if the level of trust falls in an ecosystem, participants are less likely to cooperate and frictions occur, harming their performance. Competence is by far the most prevalent trust driver in the ecosystems he studied, among others companies like Sony, Amazon, Handy, HopSkipDrive, Spotify, BaseCamp, Blix, Tile, Match, Ant Group’s Trusple, Doordash, TaskRabbit and Apple. There are tools you can use to reinforce trust, or to substitute for trust, which is what the BCG Henderson Institute identified in the successful ecosystems they studied, the “7 tools for building a business people trust”.

Trust becomes an issue in copyright in the digital age because it is based on an implicit understanding of the way content is copied and distributed versus how copyright could be infringed. In the pre-digital age, it is based on a foundation of trust between businesses and the amount of trust that was implied in relationships between creators and consumers. In the digital age, every user has the ability to make virtually an infinite number of copies of creative works for almost no cost and distribute them to anyone they want in the world. And so the copyright owner no longer has this ability to obtain recourse against people who he doesn’t know and who to trust. In this interview Bill Rosenblatt discusses the various technical means to establish that trust in digitally distributed works, from digital rights management, watermarking, financial means like levies, and other means. He reminds us of the US CASE law and the problem with legislation to solve the trust issue in dispersing digital copyrighted material.

David Horsager is a global expert on trust and CEO of Trust Edge Leadership Institute where the mission is to develop trusted leaders and organizations. Trust is a fundamental, bottom-line issue. Without it, leaders lose teams, salespeople lose sales, and organizations lose reputation, retention, and revenue. But high-trust teams and organizations bring out the best in their people and get the greatest results. Through David’s industry-leading research The Trust Outlook and firsthand experience working with the world’s highest-performing organizations, David reveals the 8 Pillar Framework for driving business results and becoming the most trusted in your industry.