Credibility

As you can see, the first element listed in the numerator section of the equation is credibility. This refers to someone’s credentials and capabilities. Credibility is factual: you either have it or you don’t. It’s not up for debate and doesn’t depend on someone’s perspective. Credentials are the most obvious part of credibility and can include things like degrees, certifications, and past experience.

Capabilities, on the other hand, may include being able to perform some of the tasks your team members do every day. While you don’t need to be able to do every job in its entirety, your team members will trust you more if you can demonstrate knowledge in the relevant areas.

On the flip side, if you don’t know how to do something, it is crucial that you are honest about it. This leads to the next element of trustworthiness: reliability.

Reliability

Reliability refers to someone’s consistency and integrity. It is able to be measured objectively. For example, if you always arrive on time to meetings over a period of several months, your team can objectively note that you are consistent.

As mentioned before, it is very important to be honest about your own knowledge gaps and constraints. This gets to the integrity question. Consistency can be positive or negative; for example, someone could be consistently slow at responding to email. Integrity, then, is the second ingredient of reliability that makes it a positive trait.

Leaders demonstrate integrity when they follow through on promises, admit when they’ve made mistakes, and keep team members’ private information confidential. This last part leads to the third element of trustworthiness: intimacy.

Intimacy

This element may not be as measurable, but it is just as important as credibility and reliability when it comes to trustworthiness. Intimacy refers to a sense of connectedness and emotional security between two parties. You are intimate with someone if they make you feel safe, seen, and secure.

While we may think we make decisions with our heads, especially in the business world, Trust Equation creator Charles Green argues that we often decide things with our heart and then justify it with our head.

As a leader, therefore, all the credibility and reliability in the world won’t matter if you don’t also have intimacy with your team. They need to know that you are emotionally intelligent, willing to be vulnerable with them, and able to endure professional setbacks without completely losing your cool and making others feel unsafe or attacked.

Self-orientation

While credibility, reliability, and intimacy are numerators in the Trust Equation, the denominator is self-orientation. This is the one element of the equation that you want to be low, not high.

Self-orientation is a bit like selfishness, but it’s more insidious than you might think. Green says a better term might be self-obsession and notes that it can refer to constantly being focused on one’s own perspective to the detriment of others.

In a professional setting, this means you are primarily oriented to how business outcomes will affect you, not the team or your clients. In an important meeting, for example, you are only worried about how you will be perceived, not about the topic at hand. On the surface you may not feel selfish, as you want to perform well so that everyone benefits. But if you’re always worried about how you will perform, you are primarily self-oriented.

As a leader, it is obvious to your team when you are mostly focused on your own image and well-being. If you want your team to trust you, you have to put yourself in their shoes and truly want the best for each of them. This needs to be demonstrated with both actions and words.

Team Leader Foundations

Trustworthiness is a critical leadership trait. That’s why it’s the focus of our second session in the Teamalytics Team Leader Foundations program.

This eight-session online program will teach you how to establish trust as the foundation for

team performance, go into more depth on the Trust Equation, and help you become more transparent, vulnerable, and honest as a leader. It includes one-on-one coaching sessions and peer group sharing to broaden your individual learning.

If you know you need to work on your trustworthiness as a leader, the Team Leader Foundations program can help. It’s self-guided, so start on the path to better leadership today.