I talk a lot about communication and how it can affect everything in business or our personal lives. Last week a colleague told me how they didn’t trust their manager. After a lot of ‘what does that mean’ and ‘why’ questions, I determined the problem: communication.
Today’s post is to examine whether building trust is a business communication skill or a behavior. I’m voting it’s both! The reason people trust or don’t starts with what we tell them.
If I say I am going to give you a raise, or promote you, or call you on Tuesday at 5 PM, that’s the first step in the communication process, but also the first step in building trust.
If I had never made those promises, there would be nothing to consider in terms of trust. Now, of course, if I don’t follow through with my commitments, then you question whether you can believe what I tell you; i.e., the behavior. The old adage of “actions speak louder than words” applies here. Building trust starts as a business communication skill and ends with the outcome, the behavior. What we tell people or in some cases, don’t tell them, is the beginning of trust.
We aren’t born trusting or not; as infants we don’t have an understanding of the concept of trust. As we grow, trust becomes something we learn. Experience and repetition of actions are what teach children to trust, or not, as the case may be. The same is true as we grow into adults and function in the workplace. We may come to the workplace trusting everyone, and through experience and disappointment we recognize we were perhaps unwise. How did that happen? Because we were told things by people we had no reason to believe weren’t being honest and found out that what they said and what they did were not congruent.
Trust is a business communication skill which, in combination with behavior, either works to build trust or destroy it.