Our Insights Blog

This is the third section of our Fundamentals series on TRUST. See all our Fundamentals here. Organisations need trust to perform at their best; as do leaders, individual team members, and collective groups and teams. Having captured some of the key learnings from...

Trust is a word used in everyday language. We can assume we know what we or others mean by it. We can also fall into the trap of assuming we know how it is built, broken and repaired. As with all psychological features of human interactions there is a bit more to it than meets the eye. Recent advances in neuroscience, as well as macro level organisational studies focussing on behaviour, have helped us see into some of the outer and inner workings of this concept.

We intuitively know Trust is important for organisational life and outcomes. We hear statements like “The thing that it comes down to is trust or a lack of trust”, “they just can’t trust them” or “That’s different I can trust him or her” and “You can’t trust management to…“You can’t trust employees to…”.

But do we know what we mean when we speak of trust or the lack of it?