Building Trust

Exceptional Leadership in an Uncertain World

Darryl Stickel

• Publisher: Forefront Books
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781637630907
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Entrepreneurship
• Index: Business

Losing someone's trust is easy—building it back is much harder. In Building Trust: Exceptional Leadership in an Uncertain World, Darryl Stickel answers the key questions leaders face: what is trust, why is it essential to leadership, and how can I become more trusted? Trust is a basic, intuitive human reaction; it holds the fabric of our society together. Unfortunately, trust is at an all-time low in our institutions, governments, healthcare, and law enforcement. Fewer people attend a place of worship than at any time in the last eighty-plus years. Citizens fear their votes are not being counted and that politicians are lying to them—that the system itself has no legitimacy. People fail to take life-saving vaccines because they don't trust what medical professionals and policymakers tell them. In law enforcement, a lack of trust motivates non-cooperation, fear, and a breakdown in law and order. We are facing an unprecedented trust-deficit crisis.In Building Trust: Exceptional Leadership in an Uncertain World, Darryl Stickel, one of the world's foremost experts on trust, outlines his groundbreaking Trust Unlimited blueprint for building trust. Stickel moves away from the traditional approach of influencing people's willingness to trust—the con artist's tactic—to employing one or more of ten levers, which leaders can "pull" to close the gap between how much they are trusted and how much they should be. This approach also makes them more trustable and increases trust where it is deficient. Detailed case studies provide examples of his Trust Unlimited model in action.

CHAPTER 1 Origins of the TU Trust Model

HOW DOES A GUY FROM Fort St. John, Canada, end up developing a new model for understanding trust? And why is this model different from those that have come before it? To fully understand my Trust Unlimited (TU) trust model, which I’ll lay out later in this book, it may be helpful for you to understand how I got here—from my childhood and upbringing, multiple concussions, and being beaten to an inch of my life during a hockey game, through my groundbreaking doctoral thesis on trust, to teaching at the Luxembourg School of Business, losing my sight, and, yes, writing this book.

When a layperson looks at my trust model, they often comment that it’s obvious that this is how trust works; however, leading experts who study trust react very differently. They tell me that my model is years ahead of current trust research and that they learn more about trust from conversations with me than they have from years of study. This has nothing to do with intelligence or being superior in any way, but it has everything to do with the fact that my perspectives on life and resulting insights into trust have been shaped by a particular set of experiences. In this opening chapter, I’ll walk you through a small set of those experiences and share with you how they shaped my view of trust. What I’ve lived through certainly isn’t the only way to gain insight about trust and how it works; it’s simply the path I ended up following.

My Story: The Early Years

I was born and raised in Fort St. John in northeastern British Columbia, Canada. When I was a kid it was still a relatively small town. At that time it was quite isolated, almost an hour’s drive from the closest neighboring small community. Looking back, I can see how growing up there significantly affected my worldview. The climate was often harsh, and the relative isolation forced people to rely on one another more than they would elsewhere. My perception was, and still is, that this created a sense of community that doesn’t always exist in places where life is a little easier. Most of the people I was exposed to displayed a distinctive degree of honesty and humility. This is not to say that everyone was an angel—far from it. It was a rough-and-tumble place, but there was a strong sense that if you needed help, others would arrive to lend a hand. It was from living there that I came to believe it is the responsibility of the strong to protect the weak. I also came to believe that if I could help someone, I should.

I was fortunate to have a protective older brother who had a strong group of close friends. Richard and his friends allowed me the opportunity to stand up for what I believed in. I was able to speak up when I saw something I thought wasn’t fair. I was able to have the confidence to be a bit mouthy, to express my opinions, and to think independently. Today these traits sometimes get me into trouble, but far more often they free me to think about things differently.

When I was seven years old, my father was in an automobile accident. He lost his left leg, crushed vertebrae in his back, broke his hip, and cracked his pelvis. In retrospect, his process of rehabilitation from his injuries was an incredible example of resilience, perseverance, and toughness. Although I didn’t know it at the time, of course, this role modeling would serve me well later in life.

As a pipeline welder with an eighth-grade education, my father saw few other options to support his family other than returning to work. Providing for his family was a key part of my father’s identity. The amount of money he brought into the household was, in part, how he measured himself as a man. Always a hard worker, he approached his rehabilitation with a relentless determination—not just to return to work as soon as possible but to return his gait to normal so that most people would not realize he’d lost a leg. I remember watching him practice walking for hours on end. I saw him return from work with his stump rubbed raw and bleeding. He was entitled to a full pension and benefits, so at any point he could’ve chosen to give up, to surrender to the pain and discomfort. Instead, he continued to work, determined to earn a living and provide for his family. Heavyweight boxing legend Jack Dempsey once said a champion is someone who gets up when he can’t. Jack likely would have called my dad a champion.

For most of my life, I remember my father being in almost constant pain. Unfortunately, he wouldn’t take prescribed pain medication; instead, he self-medicated with alcohol. I wish I could say my father and I had a wonderful relationship and that he was a happy drunk, but that would be untrue. In reality, my father and I would likely have struggled to get along regardless of the circumstances. We were so similar yet so very different. We saw the world differently and valued different things. He valued hard physical labor and manual skills, like those he understood as a pipeline welder.

Imagine his difficulty, later in life, accepting a son with a profound visual impairment who had chosen to train his brain to a point where he could think for a living. It was simply something he could not understand. Of course, I never made it easy for him; as I mentioned earlier, I was a little mouthy.

My father struggled with his temper and didn’t quite know how to handle me when I was young. Many years later, I learned from his friends and colleagues that he had seen potential in me. Unfortunately, he tried to get me to reach that potential by being extremely critical of me, almost never offering praise. This approach led to a great deal of resistance and conflict between us. However, I am happy to say that my relationship with my father ended well. Near the end of his life, my father told me that he was afraid he was going to hell for the way he had treated me. At that time, I was in my early forties and had matured enough to recognize the role I had played in our relationship and what I had gained from it. I told him that if I got a vote, that would not be the case. I told him about the successes I’d had and the role he had played in helping me get to where I was in life. I said if it were up to me, he would go to heaven and hopefully keep a spot warm for me. I forgave my father. It lifted a great weight off me; it was one of the kindest things I’ve ever done for myself.

My mother, Moyra, also came from humble beginnings. She grew up on a small farm in a small town in Saskatchewan, Canada. She graduated from high school but had little other formal training or education. She worked, at various times, as a clerk at a clothing store and as a waitress. She managed the family home and provided stability and everything we needed to survive and thrive growing up, during a time when my father was often away for work.

Growing up in Fort St. John, I played a lot of hockey. At the age of seventeen, I was playing for the Elks, a team of seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds competing in a Junior B league with players two to three years older. This meant we were usually playing against teams whose members were bigger and often stronger than us. On one particular night, we were playing in a tournament in Fort Nelson, a town north of Fort St. John. During one game, we were winning against the hometown team when things started to get rough and tensions started to mount. I found myself standing a couple of feet from an opening in the glass at the gate that led to the dressing rooms. A man standing on the other side of the boards asked me if I wanted a shot in the head. I looked at the player next to me and said, “This is crazy,” and turned to skate away. The man lunged forward, grabbed me by the collar, and pulled me back halfway over the boards into the crowd. He had a wooden club that he used to shatter my helmet and beat me repeatedly over the head. A brawl ensued. One of my teammates pulled me from the crowd and lunged at my attacker, while a player from the opposing team grabbed me and proceeded to beat me. I tried to play turtle, covering my head with my hands and pulling my knees to my chest. The opposition player grabbed me by the hair, slammed my head into the ice, then proceeded to kick me with his skates. I know all of this only because the game was televised and I got to see the tape during the court proceedings.

I regained consciousness in the team dressing room. The police, fire department, and paramedics were all in the room along with the referees and my teammates. I was rushed to the hospital by ambulance; on the way, according to a teammate who rode with me, I stopped breathing three times. Due to concerns that my attacker or his friends might come looking for me, I spent the night in intensive care under police guard. I was eventually flown back to Fort St. John, but my ordeal was far from over.

It was 1984, and little was known about concussions or head injuries. I was to learn a great deal about the topic over the following months and years. I went from being on the honor roll at school to not being able to remember a thing; I had the attention span of a fruit fly. My plan had been to attend university, but my grades were so poor during my last semester of high school that it was hard to believe any university would accept me. Instead, I attended community college in Grande Prairie, Alberta. I continued to play hockey and experienced a series of concussions. One of the side effects I experienced was profound fatigue, which seemed to mystify my doctors and led to a series of tests looking for serious diseases that had fatigue as a component. It seemed that every week I was tested for something new and terrible. Leukemia, chronic Epstein-Barr virus, multiple sclerosis, and AIDS were all thought to be possibilities.

College and University

Not surprisingly, it was a challenging time in my life. I was failing at school—one of the things at which I’d always excelled. My sense of self was profoundly challenged. My ambition had always been to live based on my ability to think, but I was no longer able to do that effectively. My two years at college proved a brutal failure academically. I applied to transfer to the University of Victoria (UVic) and was initially denied because my track record in college was so poor. I subsequently appealed on compassionate grounds because of my injuries and was accepted in the summer of 1986. During my first year at UVic I failed every class I took.

I experienced a couple of additional concussions in my early years playing hockey at UVic. I’ve lost count of how many concussions I have sustained in my life, but I’m fairly confident it’s at least ten. People ask me why I kept playing. There is no one simple answer, but back in those days doctors didn’t understand the seriousness of concussions, especially the damage that multiple hits to the head did to the brain. I recall only one doctor ever suggesting I quit hockey, and that was only after I had landed in the hospital for the umpteenth time. I also loved the game and was a good player. It stoked my self-esteem—playing felt good. I never once seriously considered quitting the game. As I say to my sons, the last guy you should ask how he’s doing is the guy with the head injury.

Each injury has been a test of my resilience—and a reminder of human fragility. Growing up in Fort St. John taught me a measure of humility. Recovering from multiple concussions, experiencing vulnerability, being weak, and knowing that a simple bump or fall could shatter me only served to deepen that humility. It also increased the amount of empathy I feel for others.

In retrospect, it’s unclear how long it took me to recover from the original concussion I received at the Fort Nelson hockey rink. The several concussions in the years immediately following that incident likely compounded and delayed my recovery. Slowly, however, the world came back into focus. In part, this was a matter of my body naturally recovering, and in part it was taking a break from hockey for a few years so my brain could return to something close to normal. As a result, I started taking an increased load at UVic and started doing better in my classes. I would eventually earn my undergraduate degree in psychology with honors.

I’m sharing these early experiences because they helped me understand human behavior and gave me a strong empathy for others. I found people sensed this and tended to open up around me; oftentimes complete strangers would tell me about their struggles—people just seemed to feel safe with me. On more than one occasion a person would say something like, “I don’t know why I’m telling you this, but you somehow seem both strong and gentle.” It was these experiences that led me to consider becoming a clinical psychologist.

I switched my undergraduate major to psychology and started working with children who were in the care of the state at group homes. I learned a lot from working with teenagers and from my colleagues at the homes in which I worked, especially about connecting with people who had developed an early cynicism about the world, people with whom it was not easy to connect. Through this work I began to build experience and strengthen my skills; I wanted to make myself a strong candidate for graduate programs.

I also volunteered for a crisis line and eventually began working with troubled teens and families in crisis. While working with these groups, I came to realize what challenging work it is being a mental health professional. Usually I could quickly see both the issues my clients were facing and a relatively easy path for them toward a better life. Unfortunately, most of them were already doing the best they could and failed to make the necessary changes to their lives that would improve their situations; what seemed so easy and obvious to me was difficult or even impossible for them.

I came to realize that working in this field would drive me crazy if I stayed in it for too long. Watching people struggle and be in pain, knowing there was a potential path forward but witnessing their inability to move in the right direction, was heartbreaking. When I thought about this being the sole focus of my career, I realized I needed to take a different path.

Studying Trust with Leading Experts

Upon completing my undergraduate degree in psychology, I switched direction and entered a master’s in public administration program at UVic. As part of my training, I had work terms that provided practical experience in government. During one of those work terms, I was employed by the Federal Treaty Negotiations Office of the Canadian government. This resulted in me being retained as a contractor and subsequently a research analyst.

British Columbia was, and still is, one of the last places on the planet to resolve land claims with its indigenous populations. As a research analyst, I was asked deep, philosophical questions: What is self-government? What will the province look like fifty years after a settlement is reached? How do we convince a group of people we’ve mistreated for the last one hundred years to trust us? The last question intrigued me. It provoked thoughts about long-standing disputes and why we never seem to fully resolve them. With these in mind, I decided to pursue a PhD at the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University, where I wrote my thesis on building trust in hostile environments.

I began by studying a variety of topics related to conflict resolution, negotiation, procedural and distributive justice, ethics, power and dependence, and, of course, trust. Exposure to academic writings on these topics, along with a heavy dose of decision-making theory, began to hone my thinking and tailor my perspective; it informed my previous experiences. I was fortunate that several truly remarkable academics were present during my doctoral program.

Sim Sitkin arrived at Duke the same year I did and eventually became cochair of my doctoral committee. Sim is considered one of the world’s leading academic experts on trust and leadership. He helped challenge my thinking and remains a good friend.

Karen Cook arrived at Duke the year after me and was the other cochair of my doctoral committee. She now teaches in the sociology department at Stanford, having left Duke the year before I completed my PhD. She is also considered one of the world’s leading experts on trust and is one of the most impressive people I’ve ever met. Karen is remarkably well regarded within her field, has tremendous influence, and is incredibly smart and capable. I can’t say enough positive things about Karen’s brilliance, yet she remains personable, friendly, and approachable. Karen played a significant role in my academic development, and I can’t believe how fortunate I was that she was at Duke for three years during my doctoral program.

Fritz Mayer was at the School of Public Policy at Duke while I was working on my PhD. He is one of the smartest and kindest people I’ve ever met. He has since left Duke to become dean of the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver. Fritz carries out compelling research on narrative that still influences my thinking about trust. He was a student of Howard Raiffa, the author of The Art and Science of Negotiation, one of the earliest and most influential books on negotiation. Fritz acted as my mentor and thought partner, and he was a close friend. It would be understandable if he and Karen Cook thought they were better than the rest of us. (They would both be right, but neither ever acted that way, which make them exceptional people and role models.)

A Mental Model for Interactions

Through my studies and research I was acquiring an overwhelming amount of information. To help me make sense of it all and see where possible gaps existed in my knowledge, I created my own mental model. It was a simple way to help me understand the perspectives being taken by different authors in different academic disciplines. The model consisted of a large square with two circles inside it and an arrow pointing in opposite directions between the two circles.

The two circles in the diagram represent the people engaged in an interaction (psychology). The double-headed arrow represents the interactions between them (social psychology, sociology). The space inside the square represents the context they are working in (economics, political science). This simple model helped me identify different levels of analysis and better understand the research I was compiling to explain how people were making decisions to trust.

Business schools aim to help future business leaders excel through the application of research findings in the social sciences. Unfortunately, faculty members often become focused on perspectives that are consistent with only a single discipline or level of analysis. However, the problems being examined are often too complex to be explained completely by any one discipline. Often a more elaborate, multidisciplinary approach is required. This is certainly true when considering the topic of trust.

Once I had built my framework for classifying research findings from different disciplines, I was able to use it to look for gaps. I noticed that most of the trust research focused on either the person doing the trusting or the person trying to be trusted. This made sense, given that trust is a psychological state. It seemed reasonable that...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Origins of the TU Trust Model
• Chapter 2: Trust Is Everywhere (Except When It Isn’t)
• Chapter 3: The Trust Challenge for Leaders
• Chapter 4: The Benefits of Trust
• Chapter 5: Introducing the TU Trust Model
• Chapter 6: Fifty Ways to Love Your Lever: Using the Trust Model
• Chapter 7: Repairing a Trust Deficit: A Future Needs Case Study
• Chapter 8: Building Trust with the Locals in Afghanistan: A Diagnostic Case Study
• Chapter 9: Organizations of the Future
• Chapter 10: There Are Many Miles to Go Before We Sleep
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Notes
• Copyright