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The faith & self confidence that “things will turn out alright” is rather low. The damaged trust is often the most important reason for this pessimism: when the trust is gone, it feels like nothing’s left. Even frameworks like Lencioni’s model on teamwork state that trust is the most fundamental ingredient for good teamwork. And exactly that is gone now: we can’t trust each other anymore. 

The difficulty with the word “trust” is that is so comprehensively huge. And quite some proverbial wisdom contributes to the paralyzing effect of damaged trust. Trusts is something one must earn, trust building goes slow, damaging trust goes fast … These convictions turn a trust crisis in a team into an unsolvable problem.

However, our view on trust is fundamentally different. We don’t consider trust to be a monolithically binary phenomenon that either is there 100% or not at all. We consider trust to a multifaceted spectrum that is more resilient than people believe. Trust is something that can be present for certain aspects and not for other aspects. Trust is something that can grow & develop, on different tracks, at different levels. And most importantly, trust is something we can give, not something we should earn.

Each of us has a backpack filled with trust. And only we can decide whom we give trust to and whom we don’t. The only way for people who have disappointed you to win back your trust, is for you to give them the opportunity to be trusted. To be trusted at micro-level, not on an existential level, but on something specific, something small. Only a small percentage of people “can not be trusted” at all. Almost always there are aspects in which somebody is trustworthy.

We help teams in trouble to look for these opportunities, to develop “trust experiments”: relevant challenges for the team in which different people with the necessary talents & passions have to work together and therefore have to trust each other, … even when the other doesn’t really deserve it yet.