How - Dov Seidman [92]
“Later that day, the team called me back. They had spoken to their counterpart, and in the course of the conversation told him that I thought his position was unreasonable. He immediately changed his mind. ‘We’ll do this for Mike,’ they reported him saying. I ran into him at an industry event a few months later and thanked him.”10
I told Mike what a terrific example of the currency value of trust this was, and he was extremely modest about it. “Having those good, trusting relationships dramatically facilitates your ability to get things done,” he said. “My wife, with our children, always refers to a ‘ladder of trust.’ You go up one rung at a time, but when you slip you come all the way back down to the bottom. I think there is a lot of truth in that for making deals as well. Once you catch someone not telling you the truth or not dealing fairly, then the trust element really disappears and it’s hard to build back. Things get a lot more difficult from that point on.”
Extensions of trust can occur both as conscious and as unconscious actions. Some people you meet just feel trustworthy to you, and at some level you choose to extend them trust without too much conscious thought. This is the trust that happens at what the neurobiologists call the amygdalic level, that complex interface of oxytocin, error detection, and decision making in your brain. You can become one of these sorts of people. On a one-to-one basis, you can conduct yourself in a way that activates what Paul Zak and others call social attachment mechanisms, behaviors that create physiological responses, release oxytocin, and increase trust. Meeting with people in person when the occasion is important, greeting them with a warm handshake, making frequent eye contact, sharing a meal together, and demonstrating concern for their family members and other passions all stimulate trust responses. As much as it may sound like a homily, science has shown us that caring and honest behaviors increase trustworthiness (note the and honest in that sentence; the unconscious brain senses false caring as quickly as it does true caring).
On a companywide level, unconscious trust responses can be activated by what business knows as morale-building programs. Lifestyle programs like on-site child care, flextime, team-building outings, exercise facilities, and family leave are more than just good public relations; they actually raise oxytocin levels in the bloodstream, increasing employees’ trust and productiveness. Even something as unconventional as on-site massage therapy (which, by the way, has been used by such touchy-feely employers as the U.S. government)11 is amazingly effective. Not only does massage send a message that the company cares, but it translates that caring into human touch, a powerful stimulator of oxytocin response.
Strengthening social attachments is just another way of building strong interpersonal synapses with others in your stadium. These sorts of behaviors work especially well with those with whom you make direct contact. But I believe these principles scale also to teams, business units, and companies as a whole. These larger gestures can help to carry your Wave throughout the stadium, even reaching those in the outfield whom you have never met and do not know.
(A point of clarification here: Despite the fact that we talk about “interorganizational trust,” organizations can’t actually manifest trust for each other. Trust flows from individuals. As part of their research, Dyer and Chu point out that a person can place trust in another person or in a group of individuals, such as a partner organization. But a group of people can also collectively hold a trusting orientation toward people in another organization; thus “interorganizational trust describes the extent to which there is a collectively held trust orientation” from one company to another.