If you are working towards trust, it is vital to understand what is on the other side. Naturally, you might ask, “what is the opposite of trust? The opposite of trust is fear. This means that fear and trust cannot coexist. As you look to improve the level of trust within your business, you must look at where the fear is. Many people don’t know the answer to this, as it is difficult to find the fear. While they may not be able to pinpoint the fear, many people can instead pinpoint who they are mad at. Usually, this madness comes from poor communication, and fear shows up as poor communication.
Throughout my many years of working with leaders and teams, I have done some anecdotal research with 134 different project teams. I ask each team this question, given their experience and their entire career:
“What was the best project you have ever been on and what made it so great?”
I also asked the converse question:
“Of all the projects you have been on in your career, which was the absolute worst nightmare to be on?”
What was interesting was that over 95% of the team said that the reason why their projects were successful was because of great communication. Upon reflecting on nightmare projects, over 98% said that the reason why their projects failed was because of poor communication.
Throughout my time working with these teams on their projects over many years, I saw a pattern on all these projects, and that was this;
Fear shows up as poor communication and Trust shows up as good communication. This thought can be used in your business to ask where there are pockets of fear.
Fear can show up in many different spaces within organizations. Maybe it is with you. Maybe your team is not telling you their truth or what they see. Either way, there is fear within your organization and the more fear there is the less trust. Fear may prevent your business from evolving and growing.
There is no better time to start weeding out the fear in your organization to make room for more trust. What are you waiting for?
