In last week's column, The Speed of High(er) Trust Leaders: Part1, I explored the considerable benefits that accrue from FranklinCovey's Leading at the Speed of Trust training program. However, enthralment to any framework thinking it has the answers to 'life, the universe, and everything' is always fraught with problems, therefore it is essential to maintain a healthy level of doubt—yes, even in high(er)-trust environments. The reason for this is twofold.
First, in the absence of doubt a false sense of sufficiency is created, whereby individuals or organisations assume that adopting a framework's principles at face value is inherently transformative. This reductive approach ignores the complexity of trust, which is deeply contextual, relational, and requires ongoing effort tailored to specific intrapersonal, interpersonal, and team dynamics.
Second, it risks indoctrination over critical application, particularly in environments with limited critical literacy or organisational maturity. By uncritically adopting a prescriptive system, individuals may neglect the nuances of positional authority, cultural factors, ethical challenges, and environmental dynamics, ultimately enabling superficial compliance rather than authentic, sustainable trust-building. When combined, like some kind of malfunctioning Power Ranger, these risks can degrade trust rather than enhance it, as genuine trust cannot be imposed, manufactured, or messaged into existence by mandating employees follow a formula.
Over-Simplification of Trust-Building
The Speed of Trust workshop simplifies trust as a construct that can be systematically developed through behavioural steps. However, trust in organisations is not merely an outcome of behaviours. It is a complex, and at times irrational construct—think when people continue to trust a colleague despite consistent displays of incompetence—influenced by history, context, culture, and reciprocity. There is also a deeply reciprocal element to trust:
… individuals trust another individual or entity, based on what they put into and what they receive from a relationship. When individuals perceive an imbalance in the exchange and experience dissatisfaction, trust decreases.
Fulmer & Gelfand (2012)
Meaning that no matter how much the leaders of an organisation may think they do for their staff, if employees feel they give far more than they get, trust is unlikely to be high. This imbalance can happen at a behavioural level, but also in very tangible ways (e.g., pay, promotion, and working conditions). These deeper relational and historical dependencies, that vary across individuals and organisations, raise a number of problems in operationalising the relatively mechanistic approach promoted by the Speed of Trust program—which does not adequately capture these subtleties. Raising concerns about the program's applicability in contexts where trust dynamics are complex and context specific.
One way to understand how reciprocal factors that can strengthen, or undermine, trust is through Frederick Herzberg's two-factor theory. According to Herzberg, motivation is not a continuum on which satisfaction is at one end and dissatisfaction at the other. Instead, there are two-factors in play, motivators and hygiene.
