Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin
Trust Issues at Work? Here's What to Say with Rachel Botsman
Wed, 05 Feb 2025
This week, Money Rehab is hosted by Minda Harts, bestselling author and expert who helps organizations build cultures of trust and belonging through her speaking, writing, and innovative Trust Catalyst game. In each episode this week, she’s focusing on one of the seven “trust languages” she's determined to be essential to a healthy workplace. Today, Minda is joined by Rachel Botsman to talk about the trust language “psychological security,” and much more. Rachel is a world-renowned expert on trust; she didn’t just write the book on trust— she's written three. In this conversation, Rachel shares key insights from the stories she’s uncovered in her research about how to build trust at work, tips for creating a workplace environment with psychological security, and best practices for handling some common workplace scenarios where trust issues might arise. Find Rachel’s latest audiobook here. Subscribe to Rachel’s newsletter here. Pre-order Minda’s upcoming book, Talk to Me Nice: The Seven Trust Languages for a Better Workplace, here. Follow Minda on LinkedIn here. Learn more about Minda’s work here. All investing involves the risk of loss, including loss of principal. Brokerage services for US-listed, registered securities, options and bonds in a self-directed account are offered by Open to the Public Investing, member FINRA & SIPC. Public Investing offers a High-Yield Cash Account where funds from this account are automatically deposited into partner banks where they earn interest and are eligible for FDIC insurance; Public Investing is not a bank.
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Hey, Money Rehab fam. I'm Minda Hartz, guest hosting for Nicole this week while she's out on maternity leave. This week, we're exploring the seven trust languages from my upcoming book, Talk To Me Nice. And today, we're focusing on security. how we create environments where people feel safe enough to be themselves. My guest literally wrote the book on trust. Actually, she's written three.
Her latest audio book, How to Trust and Be Trusted, five lessons is out now. Rachel Botsman teaches trust at Oxford University and has been recognized as one of the world's top 30 management thinkers. Here's my conversation with Rachel. Rachel, welcome to Money Rehab. How are you? I'm really good. It's good to be here. Happy to have you.
You engage with 85,000 subscribers weekly through your newsletter. What's the most common question you get about building trust in today's workplace?
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.
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.
I agree. And I think that the wonderful thing about trust is it's a global language. So rather you're in the UK or you're in Tokyo or you're in Los Angeles, we know what it feels like when it's not there, right? That's universal.
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.
I'm going to ask you a little more obvious of a question, but a complicated one. How do leaders foster trust within their teams?
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
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.
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.
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.
Oh, my God, that was such a good point. You know, as you were talking, I was also thinking about in my relationship, like we are having like a little disagreement. And I said, well, you have to look at the context. And I think that's a really important tip for leaders. And it makes me think about when leaders make certain decisions that impact insecurity.
So how do leaders unknowingly create insecurity in their teams?
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.
So clarifying context and intent is also really, really good for trust. So you asked a question about security.
Like, how do you create? Yes, the insecurity, because sometimes we know about what it feels like to be secure on our teams. Right. But, you know, how do leaders maybe unintentionally create that insecurity on the teams that they're not necessarily thinking about?
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's a good point because I think that it's nice to have the distinction and that also for our listeners thinking about how do we handle some of the internal things that we need to kind of hone in on so that we can appreciate a psychologically safe environment, right? Because that's important.
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.
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.
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?
Oh, no, that's like perfect. That's like the money shot right there. To understand that. And I think that's really important for us to think about. I often say in some of my talks, root your conversations in facts, not feelings, because right. Some of these things get kind of mushy. Like, I feel like you're doing this. That could be true. That could not be true.
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.
Absolutely. And that kind of leads me to my next question is what's the biggest misconception about creating trust at work?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Oh, I love how you frame that. And, you know, I'm a big fan of your work. And Rachel, you talk about trust being contextual. How does that apply to different workplace cultures? Yeah.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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you know, trust is one of those things that it's almost as though, and I'm glad you defined it earlier because I think again, context, right. For people to understand, because what trust means to me might mean something different to you might mean something different to someone else.
And, you know, that leads me to, we talked a little bit about the difference between safety and security, but I'm wondering for those leaders or even those employees listening, you know, how, how, how can leaders create more psychological security, like having those kind of conversations?
We talked about how it's more of an internal piece, but when you do have somebody that's coming saying, hey, I don't trust you, but that's not really the leaders necessarily their fault that you don't trust them.
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.
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.
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?
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...
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.
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.
Yeah, that's very important. And I love that distinction. You know, I'm also thinking about how psychological security has changed in these hybrid work models in the digital age. Can you talk a little bit about that and how leaders can and even how as individuals we can think about that in the context of trust?
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.
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,
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.
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.
And we're just starting to understand the impacts of that shift.
Yeah, that's a good point. And I think that's important to know. I'm sure we both could trade war stories about different companies and clients that we went into and they have all the materials, but the behaviors haven't been changed or modified in terms of, you know, if you were a micromanager in the office, then you're probably going to be one virtually.
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.
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?
You know, what's the real reason why we're doing this?
Oh, come into the office four or five days a week. It's now a mandate, right? Why? Yeah.
Yeah, that part. Well, listen, I could talk to you all day about this and hopefully we can have tea and talk about more of it. But I want to shift gears just a little and talk about trust in a different way. But I want to play a little game that I call trust tipping points. I'll describe a workplace scenario, very short, where trust hangs in the balance.
And you tell us the moment that trust tips either towards security or insecurity. Does that make sense? I think so. Okay.
I'm going to put my parlor game hat on now. Okay.
A team member shares a vulnerable mistake. Where's the moment where that could either go really well or it could be really bad, you know?
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.
That person would find it very hard to speak up again in a vulnerable way.
And many of us have probably experienced that too many times to count. So you just got a tip on how you tip it toward the right direction. Let's try another. That was really good.
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.
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.
That was really good. I hope everybody's taking notes because these things happen, folks. You've probably seen them each and every day. A new initiative faces resistance.
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.
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.
Yes, definitely. I think we're seeing some of these things emerge, even as we speak, as you said, with return to work, you know, a lot of that there too. One last question. You're really good at this, Rachel. A workplace conflict emerges.
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.
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.
We'll bounce back into a few more last questions, but I'm really curious about your experience at Oxford. How has teaching trust at Oxford shaped your understanding of trust and leadership?
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.
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.
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?
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.
Absolutely. That's really, really great. I also want to congratulate you on your new audiobook, How to Trust and Be Trusted. You spoke to a range of leaders, a teacher, an admiral in the Navy, the head of Dorchester Hotels, about how they earn trust. What surprised you the most?
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.
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...
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.
I love that. And one of the things that I want us to think about as leaders, what's one thing we can do tomorrow to create more trust on our team?
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
to self-correct and implement that can have a huge difference in how people respond to you.
I love that. I think about trust, you know, a lot in my professional life and my personal life. And, you know, you've been a go-to trust expert for a very long time. And I'm wondering what gives you hope about the ability to build secure and trusting workplaces?
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.
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.
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.
I agree with that. And I think even at a current time in history where, you know, things are changing, programs are evolving or being removed, I think it's important for us to think about those micro kind of moments within our team, how we can implement change, because we don't have to have permission to have humanity in the workplace, respect and dignity, right?
You don't have to have a program to uphold those values.
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.
Absolutely. We end Money Rehab episodes by asking one last tip listeners can take straight to the bank. Rachel, can you give one last practical tip about building trust? You've given us so many, but I know you still got some more in there to share.
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.
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.
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 is a production of Money News Network. I'm your host, Nicole Lappin. Money Rehab's executive producer is Morgan Levoy. Our researcher is Emily Holmes. Do you need some money rehab? And let's be honest, we all do. So email us your money questions, moneyrehab at moneynewsnetwork.com to potentially have your questions answered on the show or even have a one-on-one intervention with me.
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