Gaining trust

Let us be honest, working with others entails some level of risk because collaborating means relying on them. Your willingness to take that risk requires trust in the relationship, and that calls for having a psychologically safe space and trusting team members’ competence and reliability to deliver on the work. It is almost impossible to imagine a successful collaboration without trust and some level of psychological safety. Trust must be built from the start of a collaboration and sustained once the work has started. Building trust is essential for a new team. Assessing the level of trust for existing teams can help them learn where improvements can be made, and regardless of how long a team has been working together, how they work together will either build, sustain, or diminish trust over time. Without trust, the collaboration will collapse.

To experience trust, team members must have confidence that their colleagues will do rigorous work and produce dependable results (competence), that they will do it on schedule (reliability), that they will openly share and discuss interpretations of the data collected (identity), and that they view the collective to be more important than oneself (for the good of the team) (Cloud, 2023). In addition, within teams there must be a feeling of confidence that all team members are committed to the collaboration and that they will be truthful in their communications, honest in the conduct of their research, and respectful in how they behave. If that confidence is betrayed, tensions will infiltrate the team. Once trust is eroded, it is difficult to rebuild organically and will require commitment and intentionality.

Trust in another person or group is based on our assessment of where they stand on four components: competence, reliability, identity, and motive.