Rachel Botsman
Appearances
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
Right, yeah. I don't think anyone would also come to you and say, I don't trust you. Like we're not that direct. Well, I am direct, but most people are not that direct or open. And it's a real problem because what happens is, you know, that the way that sort of comes out in the first phase, people get very defensive. Like that's the first sign that people are not trusting you.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
And then they start to disengage. Like these are the signals. Yeah. So it's, You know, in terms of creating this environment where people feel safe to take risks, to speak the truth, to speak up in a respectful way, it starts with modeling it yourself. I mean, it's such basic 101 advice that people miss. But social mimicry is what forms cultures.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
So, you know, even asking leaders to track or get feedback on how many times they say, I don't know. Or do they even say those words, right? Like in a meeting, like how do they demonstrate humility? How do they demonstrate that they are taking a risk? In what ways do they signal their own vulnerability?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
And again, this is where I think a lot of people think being vulnerable is talking about your personal life or talking about your kids or your pets or whatever it might be. But that's not really like true vulnerability in the workplace, right? It's like saying...
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
finding this like really hard or I'm actually quite frightened that I'm going to mess this up or for some reason feel really nervous about this. And I've done this many, many times before. So that's the emotional signaling that is creating that safe environment that you can say these things and there is going to be no, we're not going to see you as weak. There's not going to be any punishment.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
There's not going to be any consequence. And then the stakes go up. So when someone makes a mistake, not like a minor mistake because there is to forgive, but they make a mistake. And in some way that mistake hurts your reputation or your company's reputation, loses a customer, loses you money. Like how do you handle those situations? Like they are the deep moments for trust.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
Yeah, I mean, there's so much to talk about on this topic, but I think something that often gets missed is if you think about the pandemic and the move to remote hybrid working, we really became dependent on people like verbal signals.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
So like the nonverbal signals, the energy you feel when we, if we were in the room together or what I'm doing with my lower body and my hands or the way I walk into a room, you know, all these things, they went right. Like it became when we were speaking even through video, very two dimensional and very controlled. And then through Slack and all these other messaging platforms, all that,
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
non-verbal stuff went away. And this had huge implications for trust because these are all signals. These are all things that we're knowingly or unknowingly using to decide whether we trust that person or not. So the communication, the channels of communication and styles of communication have had huge impacts on trust.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
And I don't think many teams were trained to change their communication styles. They were given all the tools, but they weren't given the behaviors of like, how do you message? How do you check someone's intention? How do you check in with someone? How do you like ping messages without it feeling like that surveillance and that micromanagement? So that's the dynamic that has really shifted.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
And we're just starting to understand the impacts of that shift.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
You're going to be even worse, right? Let's be clear, right? It's like feeding that beast if you were a micromanager. But, you know, this is slightly controversial to say as well, but Most teams have to get together in person. Most teams cannot function purely remotely. Now, I'm a huge supporter of remote work. I have two children. It fits in with my life. But you have to get together.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
Just different things happen. It's like human chemistry. And so... I think what's missing from this whole return to work, which is crazy when you think we're still talking about that three years later, is we haven't been very intentional as to why we're getting together. That goes back to transparency, right?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
Oh, come into the office four or five days a week. It's now a mandate, right? Why? Yeah.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
I'm going to put my parlor game hat on now. Okay.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
So really well is you catch it. So imagine it's like a ball that's been thrown and you return it. So you either acknowledge what that person has said or you share something that demonstrates empathy in return. And then I know what we call like a negative minus. The other way would be, well, that's nice. And then we move on. Well, thank you for sharing that.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
That person would find it very hard to speak up again in a vulnerable way.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
I imagine it's a baseball mat. Yes, you got it. When students do it to me in the classroom, I'm like, oh, got to catch it. Got to throw it back. I love that. A company navigates a public crisis. Oh, that's a good one. That one's very easy to answer. When they have a public crisis and they come out and they point to a capability problem.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
Oh, it was the product or the system or the algorithm or something that wasn't inside their control. Like, ding, negative. When they come out and they actually say, you know what, this was a character issue. This was to do with our culture. This was to do with our incentives. This was to do with our leadership and management. It can work really well for trust.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
So I call this one a trust leap, actually, because this essentially a new initiative is you're asking people to take a risk to do something new or to do something differently. And what you have to recognize is. that leap looks really different for other people.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
So adjusting your communication, realizing what trust state people are in, realizing what you perceive to be the risk or what they perceive to be the risk. There's a massive gap between those two things or that you just haven't really explained what's in it for them. So if you get those things right, actually the launch of new initiatives and cultural change is where trust often goes really wrong.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
It does depend on what the workplace conflict is, right? So some... should be kept private and discreet and handled directly with that person. And others that have seeped out and have become team conflict need to be addressed. So just hoping or praying that it's going to go away is not going to happen. And then also it's a ding.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
when you don't recognize that actually it should be resolved confidentially and privately and you make it public, also ding. So the way conflict is resolved, really delicate balance between score or fail.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
Oh, I haven't asked that question. The interesting thing about teaching is it's very multicultural and cross-generational. So that's seeing the different response of people from different backgrounds and different nationalities and different stages in their career. I think that's been a real learning.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
I've also realized how much teaching often is about the relationship between the manager and the employee versus managing up. So it's made me think a lot about framing that if you are quite early on in your career and most of your day spent reporting to other people, you're looking for very different things at that stage. So that's been a real shift.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
And then the other thing I have to remind myself all the time is how to take people on a journey with you. And that's, This becomes harder and harder. It's a strange thing to say. The more fluent you become in a subject, it's like being fluent in a language and having to go back to like, hello and how are you?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
And really making sure people have got the foundations of things they can move along with you. It might sound like a jukebox to you and really simple, but you have to start with those building blocks still.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
The creativity and care they put in creating trusting environments. So The teacher in particular, her name is Kim. She won teacher of the year and she works in a really hard school in Illinois. And a lot of those children, her students are coming in with serious trust issues. Some are living with grandparents, some with foster care. It's a very difficult situation and she's teaching Spanish.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
which is not the easiest subject to teach. And it was the work she put in and they weren't big things and they didn't cost her any money. So she made sure, for example, on the first day of term that she knew every single name and that she could pronounce it, that she spoke to their past teachers to understand something that was important to them. So it was really...
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
Yeah, it was the creativity and care and that these were seemingly small gestures that made such a big difference to the people that they were trying to connect with and touch.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
I think it's really giving thought to intentions. That can be, why are we having this meeting and how you set that up? Not like this is what we're going to cover in the meeting, but this is the intention. Or when you make a decision, describing where that decision has come from. I think it's one of the easiest things
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
to self-correct and implement that can have a huge difference in how people respond to you.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
Do you know what gives me hope is that I think the workplace of people lots of different environments in society is where people are turning to feel trust. It puts a lot of pressure on leaders and managers, but that employer-employee relationship is now one of the most important relationships in people's lives.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
And that's what gives me hope that it's not actually about customers and brands or citizens and politicians. It should be about those things. But those systems and institutions are very hard to influence and fix. But your workplace, that is an environment you can somewhat control and influence and shape. And I've seen in teams how quickly you can change culture, how quickly... dynamics can shift.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
And so I think if people can go to work or be at work and feel trusted and feel like they can take risks and feel safe to take mistakes, it might just be the only part of their life where they have that experience.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
Don't wait for a program. I think if it's a program, it's actually sometimes a problem because it's like imposed versus really coming from people.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
One last tip I give is around empathy. So empathy is a really important trait of being trustworthy in our character. And I think empathy can sometimes be mistaken for like putting yourself in someone else's shoes. It's not really what empathy is. Empathy is more like curiosity. So you genuinely want to understand what that person thinks and where they're coming from.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
And then the important piece is that it's followed with care. So it's really about how you take the listening and then you turn it into something active that you make that person feel supported and you demonstrate that you care.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
So that would be my other thing is that when you're trying to be empathetic, it's not just on the listening component, the information in, it's how you create the scaffold and the support structures that that person feels held.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
Yeah, the question, what would be the number one question? I guess it's actually more about what happens when trust breaks down. And I think that's interesting in itself because trust is kind of like one of those things, a bit like air or oxygen. We don't really appreciate its value until it's gone.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
And so I think that's why people tend to focus on that question is they know that feeling of not trusting someone or not being trusted versus being able to describe what trust is, which I think is really interesting in itself.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
Yeah, that's a really good point because trust is cultural in terms of signals and the way it's earned, but the feeling of trust, that is universal. I love that.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
Well, it depends on context. Context is really important when it comes to trust. So if you ask me that question, I would say, what kind of team? Is it a small team or is it a large team? Is it a team that works remotely or is it a team that comes together? Is it a new team or is it a team that's been together for a long time? What kind of work are they doing? So
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
It's not like there are general rules on how you earn trust as a leader. And one of the things that I often find when working with leaders is they don't think enough about context. They don't think enough about environment or conditions. And all those things really impact not just how you earn trust, but how much trust that you need. So There are like general principles that apply.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
So one of the most important ones, regardless of the size of the team or whatever you're working on, is expectation setting. And I find it really interesting when I say to people, have you ever been taught how to set expectations, clear expectations of people? And I don't even think of it as a skill.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
So they'll think of like communications as a skill or negotiations as a skill, but how you are clear with people about what you expect from them, the quality of work, when they should deliver it, not just sort of the what's, but how they approach work. Like this is absolutely key to trust.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
Well, that's a big one. And just going back to the context thing, the other really important point is often trust is broken when we take things out of context. Yes. And so, you know, when you work in those teams and that narrative starts to brew, it's because something that's been said or something that's been intended has been taken out of context.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
So clarifying context and intent is also really, really good for trust. So you asked a question about security.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
Yeah, this is a really important distinction between safety and security. So you've probably heard of Amy Emerson. She's a brilliant professor at Harvard, and she talks a lot about psychological safety. There is a really important difference between safety and security. Safety is creating the environment where people... I feel like they can take risks. They can make mistakes.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
They can admit that they don't know something. All these things that some people might perceive as a sign of weakness in some cultures. And they can do all those things without fear of negative consequence. That's what every leader needs to create. That's fundamental. Psychological security or insecurity is actually very hard to control. That is about your inner thoughts.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
And sometimes as a leader, you could create the safest environment. You could wrap someone in cotton wool and they are still going to feel insecure. And that's because of their upbringing. That's because of their conditioning. Often it's because they have trust issues, right? So it could be something that happened very early on in childhood that they just find it very hard to trust people.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
So as a leader or a manager of a team, or even just being on a team, I It's actually more helpful to think about psychological safety, like how do you create the conditions and the environment that people feel safe versus people's inner emotions and feelings. That's very difficult for you to influence and control.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
Yeah. And it's also something that I think needs to be reeled in, in that these boundaries between the personal and professional have got very blurry and mushy. And this really started to happen with the whole bring a whole self to work. And then the pandemic where those lines were really blurred.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
And the reason why I say this is that it's not actually a leader's responsibility to manage how you feel. And so what I see in a lot of teams is there's quite a lot of flooding. There's quite a lot of sharing of feelings and emotions that maybe should be kept out of the workplace and aren't necessarily your boss's responsibility to manage.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
So that is why I think this distinction between environment and conditions that people feel safe versus your own emotional security is really important to understand. Does that make sense?
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it's also how we make bad trust decisions. It's like when we rely on feelings and intuition and we don't have enough information to make a good decision. That's not a great place for decision making, particularly when it's a high risk or, you know, high investment.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
There are actually many. I keep thinking I'm done with trust, right? And then I discovered that it's like another thing. It really is this transparency thing. So... It is this idea that the more transparent you are with your team, the more transparent your culture, that trust will increase. And that is the opposite. It often has a backfire effect. The reason for that is actually to define trust.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
So the way I define trust is trust is a confident relationship with the unknown. So if you think about people that you deeply trust, personal and professional, you don't need to know what they're up to, right? Like you just let them get on with things. It's that visibility, that needing to know, like checking messages, needing to track someone, wondering what someone is up to.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
Like these are signs that you don't trust someone. Transparency is essentially trying to make everything visible in your culture. And often, I'm not saying transparency is a bad thing, but often what people want to understand, again, they want to understand the context in which you've made a decision. They're trying to understand the reason that you've made a decision.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
And that's really important for trust, but you don't need to make everything transparent. In fact... really, really trusting cultures, if I went to someone and said, oh, I really like to know what that person earns, or I really like to know the thinking behind your bonus structure, the ultimate sign of trust is they turn around and say, you know what, you actually can't know. And I go, I get that.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
I trust you. I trust how you've made that decision. So This call for transparency is often people are desperate almost or hungry to understand how and why you're making decisions. And that's the piece that's often missing from communications in the culture.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
Yeah. So this idea of blanket trust, right? Like, so we're going to create a high trust culture or you should trust me. It's how the media talks about trust. It's like the element trust barometer is about to come out and it will be in these like very generalized terms.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
But really in your culture and even in yourself, you want to be thinking about what it is that you're asking people to trust you for or to do. And so for me and my work, I'm being trusted to share factual information and research. I'm being trusted to teach people. I'm being trusted to storytell, being trusted slightly to entertain people and give them an experience.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
I'm not trusted to touch their bodies. I'm not a surgeon or a doctor. Let's qualify what I meant by that. I'm not a therapist. I'm not going to deal with their relationship issues. So even things that are closer to the context.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
And this is really important to understand because what you see in businesses and teams that are really, really trusting and trustworthy is they are very clear about what they do and they are very clear about what they don't do. And they reject things that don't fit within that context that they should be trusted within. And this, I think, is something that you shouldn't be afraid to do.
Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
You shouldn't be afraid to say no. Trust is often in those things we decide not to do or those things that we turn down. That's often where trust is earned, not the things that we continually do.
Revisionist History
How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
And I'll teach you how you can fix this problem. So let's start by unpacking what trust actually is. It's a word we use a lot in our lives. But if I asked you to write down one word to describe trust, what would it be? Maybe you're jotting down confidence, faith, or perhaps risk. Some people think of trust as a state or as an outcome or a feeling. But trust is a belief.
Revisionist History
How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
It's your belief about how someone will behave or how something will turn out. To go back to my definition of trust, it's a confident relationship with the unknown. So what does that mean in the workplace? Let me give you an example. Trust is a belief that when someone is working from home and you can't see what they're up to, they will behave in a way that you expect.
Revisionist History
How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
They can be trusted to be productive and not let you down. If you need to know exactly what someone is doing and are constantly checking in and monitoring them and asking them for updates, that's not trust. It's control. Once you see trust as your belief lens, it can have a profound impact on the way you make decisions and how you behave at work. Trusting another person is complicated.
Revisionist History
How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
There's a whole host of factors that determine when and how trust forms. For instance, how long you've known them, what is the thing you're trusting them with or for, and how bad would it really be if they let you down.
Revisionist History
How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
Stanford Business School professor Roderick Kramer found that eight out of 10 executives report being burned at least once because they trusted the wrong person at some point in their career. People tend to make poor trust decisions because they don't understand how trust dynamics really work. So let me give you a simple framework to help visualize how trust happens between two people.
Revisionist History
How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
In any relationship, there are two players, the trust giver and the trust receiver. Let's start by focusing on what it means to be the trust giver. A trust giver is the person that is deciding whether to trust someone, a boss, a colleague, a friend, or in my dad's case, the nanny. As the trust giver, we have an important choice. Do we trust them or not?
Revisionist History
How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
What influences our choices and decisions is called a trust signal. Trust signals are small clues we knowingly or unknowingly use to decide whether another person should be trusted. how someone speaks, the questions they ask, who they're with, what they're wearing, and even how they say, hi, how are you? These are all trust signals.
Revisionist History
How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
In other words, the way we make a trust decision is based on pieces of information we pick up from another person. The tricky thing is we don't always look for or interpret trust signals in the right way. Some trust signals are way louder than others because often we unknowingly tune into the signals that we want to see, that are familiar to us.
Revisionist History
How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
Becoming aware of the trust signals you're tuning into is the first important step in making smarter trust decisions. Here's a simple exercise to try. The next time you meet someone for the first time, try to stay aware of what you're tuning into. Is it their voice, their clothes, their demeanor, or their posture? Similarly, what questions do you ask them in the first few minutes?
Revisionist History
How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
It's a funny subject to study because it's really intangible, trust. But it came from a fascination in human connection. So I've always been interested in why we're attracted to some people and we repel from others. I've always been interested in what holds groups and teams and society together. And the force, the social glue is trust.
Revisionist History
How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
Just becoming aware of how you're looking for things that are familiar can be powerful. Making trust decisions based on familiarity is a tricky behavior to change because our assumptions about whom to trust are deeply wired. They're often biases that have been with us since we were very young.
Revisionist History
How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
Maria Konnikova is a psychologist and author who's written a lot about distrust. She's an expert in the ways trust is exploited by everyone from con artists to poker players. And she happens to be a champion poker player herself.
Revisionist History
How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
There's a fascinating study on the link between trust and familiarity. The study, done by a professor named Lisa D. Bryan from the University of Glasgow, showed how facial resemblance enhances trust. Participants in an experiment were shown faces of strangers to be potential playing partners for a game.
Revisionist History
How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
When the face of the stranger was similar to the face of the participant, they were more likely to trust the unknown person. Take a moment to think about that. Have you ever trusted someone just because they felt familiar? Maybe they went to the same school as you, like the same sports team, or maybe, as in the study, they even looked a bit like you.
Revisionist History
How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
Familiar trust signals are often the loudest because of what's known as confirmation and desirability bias. We use them to confirm our own ideas about how someone or something should be or how we want them to be. That's what happened with my parents and Doris the nanny. She showed up wearing a navy-coloured uniform, complete with a bonnet hat.
Revisionist History
How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
She had a mop of curly hair and large steel rimmed glasses. She even played the tambourine. I'm not joking. What a trustworthy person she must be. And even when some major red flags started popping up, my parents let the familiar trust signals override their better judgement. There was the time Doris wanted to get away for a weekend.
Revisionist History
How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
So she said her Uncle Charlie had died and she needed to go to the funeral. My dad found out this wasn't true when he called Doris's mum to express his condolences. And Doris's mum said, but Uncle Charlie is just fine. Doris must be confused.
Revisionist History
How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
But you know, even after Uncle Charlie, she came with us on a holiday to Marbella.
Revisionist History
How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
Even though we were only five and eight, my brother and I could see how Doris was, well, different when my parents were around. It was all an act. And eventually, even my dad couldn't ignore what he was seeing. At the height of suspicion, he did something he'd never done before. He searched Doris's room. found a bag of money under her bed. Quite a lot of foreign currency.
Revisionist History
How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
And it happened to be from countries Dad had been travelling to for work.
Revisionist History
How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
And what I realized is that in the field of trust, you sort of have people who study like cells and negotiation. So essentially, how do you manipulate trust to get something from someone? Or you have the other end, which is like the Esther Perel end, which is like the therapist. Let's repair trust when it breaks down. There wasn't a lot in between, which I found fascinating.
Revisionist History
How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
The same tree. I want to know where this tree is, Dad. And still, Doris stayed with us. That was until my dad's car went missing and he finally kicked her out, called the police and sat guard outside our front door with a baseball bat.
Revisionist History
How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
I imagine the Doris saga was in part how I first took a deep interest in understanding trust. Thinking back on it, my dad told me the decision to trust Doris came down to convenience. My parents were busy people with busy jobs. It was more convenient to keep Doris than to find a different solution. It's easy to dismiss or laugh at my dad's reasoning. But haven't we all done that?
Revisionist History
How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
Not hire a dodgy nanny, of course, but make a trust decision or continue to trust someone based on convenience. Like when you tell yourself, I know that company isn't entirely ethical. They don't treat their employees well, but their service, it makes my life a little easier. So I'll just carry on using them.
Revisionist History
How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
Or perhaps you're under pressure to get something done, so you conveniently delegate a piece of work to a person when you know they shouldn't really be doing it. Convenience so often trumps trust. Understanding the power convenience has over trust has been one of the most important things I've learned about being a trust giver. Let's try another exercise.
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How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
Think of the last time you made a poor or very bad trust decision at work. Did you blame it on the character of the other person? They turned out to be unreliable, incompetent, dishonest, or you fill in the blank. Someone's character plays a critical role, but what we often overlook is the importance of having the right information.
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How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
As the social scientist Diego Gambetta puts it, trust has two enemies, not one. Bad character and poor information. So the next time you find yourself making an important trust decision, I'd recommend asking yourself these three questions. One, what trust signals am I tuning into? Two, am I trusting this person out of convenience? And three, am I making this trust decision too quickly?
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How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
Now, let's look at something else that influences what trust signals we pay attention to. Our gut. My dad's gut told him that a nanny who seemed bland was a safe one. His gut told him that blandness was a good trust signal. But our gut feeling or intuition is rarely the source of trustworthy decisions.
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How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
For Maria Konnikova, the expert in distrust, there's a common saying about this that's a real pet peeve.
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How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
It's a good question. Most of us trust naturally. It's a very intuitive thing. Most of us do it badly because we rely on intuition and not information. And especially in high stakes situations or high risk situations, we're not really taught how to trust well, how to give our trust to the right people and products and information, which is a big one.
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How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
So let me share with you something from my research that has made me think differently about the role of gut feeling in giving trust. Gut feeling is not the decision maker, but a decision driver. So use your intuition, but challenge it with other information to make sure it's accurate. Here's how this might come up in your job.
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How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
When you're thinking about how to have a difficult conversation with a colleague, or when you're taking a brief from a potential client and you're not entirely sure what they do. And of course, when you're hiring someone new, don't let your gut make the trust decision.
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How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
Instead of making important trust decisions in seconds, Maria recommends going by the old mantra that former President Ronald Reagan was so fond of, trust but verify.
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How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman's definition of a gut feeling is spot on. He says a gut feeling is thinking that you know without knowing why you do. Even though I've studied the ins and outs of trust for over a decade, I have still gone with my gut countless times. Sometimes things have gone right and other times things have gone horribly wrong.
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How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
So let me share with you a useful tool that will help you better read trust signals. It's called a trust pause. A trust pause is a healthy hesitation where we question if a person, a product, or a piece of information is worthy of our trust. If you find yourself wanting to make a trust decision quickly from your gut, take a trust pause and ask yourself the following questions.
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How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
Where is this confidence coming from? Am I seeing or hearing something I want or need to believe to be true? Is it because this person feels familiar or similar to me? And a really important question. What information do I still need to make a reliable decision? When you put these questions into practice, they will intentionally slow you down.
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How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
Now, I know that in a world that's so driven by efficiency, this might sound counterintuitive, but speed can be the enemy of trust. I'm not suggesting you overthink every single trust decision. I mean, you'd never leave the house. But if it's something important, take a trust pause.
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How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
For example, if you have some sensitive or confidential information to share with your boss, take a trust pause before speaking to them. If you're going for a new role in an organization, take a trust pause to speak to someone in a similar position. If you're starting an important contract with a new supplier, take a trust pause to speak to some other customers. Are you sure? Are you sure?
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How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
And everything about our society and technology now is speeding up those decisions. So our trustmaking is getting worse, not better.
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How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
That's at the heart of a trust pause. It might feel like you're wasting valuable time, but otherwise you may be left wondering why you didn't pause for a bit longer before giving your trust. Because once trust has been given, it's in the other person's hands to take care of or break. My dad could have taken a trust pause with Doris and it would have saved a lot of anguish and his Volvo.
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How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
Of course, there are regrets, but after everything, it hasn't really changed my dad. He just tends to trust people.
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How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
Some people trust too much and too readily, like my dad. They have what psychologists call a high propensity to trust. They assume they won't be taken advantage of.
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How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
Here's something else Maria helped me rethink. The existence of con artists like Doris actually says something very good about humanity. That may sound strange, but the only reason they succeed is because as people, for the most part, we are trusting.
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How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
As the late master magician Ricky Jay once said, you wouldn't want to live in a world where you couldn't be conned because it would mean you're living in a world where you never trusted anyone or anything.
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How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
There's no one size fits all approach to trust giving. Ultimately, trust is a choice. It's yours to give or not give. So let's just recap the four main ideas about giving trust that you can now put into practice. One, be aware of the trust signals you're tuning into by remembering that we tend to trust what's familiar. Two, recognize when you're allowing convenience to trump trust.
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How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
Well, speed is the enemy of trust. So making it too quickly or under pressure is a really big one. So most big decisions we have to make because we've got to hire someone or whatever that might be. So that's number one. The second is intuition over information. So I still believe in trusting your gut, but what is information? Yeah.
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How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
Three, reframe your gut feeling as a decision driver, not the decision maker. And finally, four, speed can be the enemy of trust. So take a trust pause to get the right information. I'm going to leave you with a question to think about as we head into chapter two. How do you get someone else to trust you?
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How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
There's a lot of evidence around charisma and confidence, overweighting capability. And I think we're seeing that play out in sort of leaders that are getting elected. So those that seem like bold and disruptive versus steady and capable or maybe even bland, that really influences trust. They'd be my top three.
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How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
And sometimes it's not even like, does this person feel familiar? Like they can't even get beyond that. And it's the person that feels strange or unfamiliar that sometimes we just can't or choose not to trust. And that's a real problem.
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How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
Or what do we lose as well? I think it's one of the biggest myths around trust that needs blowing up. So, well, transparency, I always think of disclosing information, right? So disclosing lots of information so you understand why something is happening or good transparency is understanding the context behind a decision. So why did you choose to do that thing?
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How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
But transparency in practice can feel like surveillance. So if you think about transparency, you're trying to get visibility into something. You're trying to understand where someone is by tracking them maybe on their phones. You're trying to understand what they're up to and what they're doing. And that is the very opposite of trust.
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How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
So the way I define trust is a confident relationship with the unknown. So if you think, Malcolm, of people in your life, your professional, your personal life that you deeply trust, you don't need to know where they are. You don't need to know what they're up to. It's that visibility is a form of control and that control can be a sign of lack of trust.
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How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
So I think it's, I'm not saying transparency is completely a bad thing, but this idea that you fix trust issues, systemic trust issues, trust issues in an organization, even in a relationship by making things transparent, it has a backfire effect where it might work initially because you think, oh, that person's being more open or I have more visibility into that situation and therefore more control.
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How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
But over time, it actually leads to less trust.
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How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
I'd really love to know why you chose to put me on your podcast, Malcolm. And you said, sure, I'll share that information. That's that's being open. But if equal, if you said, you know what, you don't really need to know or I can't really explain why. If I really trusted you, I wouldn't need to know.
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How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
So the problem is with transparency is when leaders promise it and then an employee goes to them and says, well, I really want to understand what that person is being paid or how the bonus structure works or why you've changed the pricing mechanism or whatever it may be. And then the leader goes, I can't tell you that. Well, you promised to be transparent.
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How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
So there's this difference between being open and being visible and promising for transparency.
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How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
Well, the first thing, often people are trying to create high trust teams because they're trying to be innovative. They're trying to get those teams to be able to tolerate uncertainty. So high trust teams and creative teams, there's a real correlation there. So one of the things that you say is don't mistake reducing risk for increasing trust.
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How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
So what a lot of teams do is they figure out all the bad things that could go wrong right at the beginning. And it's a mindset. It's like, we'll just figure out how to mitigate risk before they've even happened. And if you create those kind of cultures in your teams, your trust mindset, your tolerance for uncertainty in the unknown actually reduces.
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How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
So one of the really powerful things to do is actually go, okay, how does this team expand their capacity to be in the unknown and to be in that creative space versus how much of our culture is actually wired to measuring and managing risks? That's a really big one.
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How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
Yeah. That I mean, that was harder to do because I don't think many organizations think they think they're thinking about trust, but they're actually thinking about risk. So that shift is quite tricky. An easy one that you can put into practice tomorrow is to become a better expectation setter.
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How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
So, so many trust issues, and I think many managers and leaders are really bad at doing this, is how you set clear expectations that allow people to be empowered and to sort of live and work in the unknown. So it's like, this is what I expect of you within this timeframe, within these boundaries, now go play and go and do it. But we're often really bad at setting expectations.
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How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
You're about to hear the introduction or chapter one, which really lays the foundations on what trust is and how it works in our lives. And I find it fascinating and also a beautiful thing that trust has more definitions than love. So it is the most debated sociological concept in our lives.
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How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
And so in chapter one, we really dig into this understanding of what trust is and how it works and how it influences your decisions and choices in ways that you may be aware of or may never have thought about before.
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How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
Yeah. I really hope it changes the way people think about trust. That's the reason for doing this.
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How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
It's called How to Trust and Be Trusted. Intentionally a two-way title because trust is something that you give and something that you earn. And we have to think about both those things in our lives.
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How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
Have you ever trusted the wrong person? In this chapter, I'm going to teach you a really important workplace skill. How to give your trust to the right people. Because we can all learn how to make better trust decisions. I know firsthand about bad trust decisions. Because when I was five years old, my parents put their trust in the wrong person. A nanny. Hello? Dad? Hi Rach, just a sec.
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How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
I called my dad to ask him more about it. So, I'm calling about the nanny. Mm-hmm. You know which nanny? I think I know which nanny. A nanny are called Doris. It's hard to ever forget Doris. What was your first impression of her? What do you remember when she came into the house?
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How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
Unimpressive? What do you mean by that?
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How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
Oh yes, bland old Doris got up to all sorts of things. The nanny my parents trusted to take care of me and my brother turned out to be very untrustworthy indeed. She forged my dad's signature to get a loan for a car. She stole from us in the most brazen ways. And she was even running a drugs ring. Really. Deciding whom to trust can be pretty complicated.
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How to Trust and Be Trusted with Rachel Botsman
Okay, so not everyone has put their trust in a drug-dealing nanny. However, we all know how bad it feels to make a poor trust decision. But I want you to be able to make good trust decisions because being able to trust people is a positive thing and it will make you better at your job. So I'm going to tell you why we sometimes trust the wrong people, like dodgy Doris.