Trust Quantified, Understand the 4 Factors of Trust

In many teams, the most important component that can make or break the team is trust. This can be trust within the team itself as well as trust outside the team as well. Yet a lot of the time individuals will feel that they are unable to trust or feel as if they are not trusted. In many occasions, people don’t really know where to start if they wish to solve the problem. Today’s post can hopefully help you get some inspiration on how to tackle the trust challenge. As usual, when something doesn’t work it’s not a failure, only extra information for us to use.

There exist a thing called the “trust equation” which contains the 4 factors of trust. The equation is simple:

Trust = (Reliability + Credibility + Intimacy) / Self-Interest

Reliability

This signifies how reliable a person is. That is if a responsibility is given to the person, will he get the job done? Reliability is all about consistency. If a person is consistent that he/she is going to deliver great quality results then the person is reliable.

Credibility

If a person is credible, then we can be sure that the information coming from this person is backed with facts and will be true. Being credible means that basing our responses on what we truly know and not make things up. If we don’t know the answer then just be honest and say that we don’t know, but remembering the previous points about credible, we’ll endeavour to find the answer.

Intimacy

In this topic, intimacy means your interpersonal relationship within the team. This is how close a person is to their teammates, how he/she behaves and interact with the other team members. One of the big things that affect intimacy is EQ. People with high EQ will have higher points in this factor.

Self Interest

Notice the equation, self-interest is the divisor of all three above factors summed up. This is because no matter how much reliability, credibility and intimacy a person have, if their self-interest outweighs them then there will never be a good level of trust at all.

I think this is the main point. A lot of people who think about what’s in it for them won’t gain much trust at all. However if we think about what is best for our team and organisation, then automatically we will reduce the level of self-interest and in turn, gives us a better chance of gaining trust.

In conclusion, the trust equation is a simple way to keep ourselves in check consistently to ensure we don’t lose trust from our teams.