Games and Guardians 141trust
Once outside your familiar boundaries, you have to make
new rules and find what underlies all rules and values – trust.
That is both trust in yourself and trust in others. Trust is the
basis of all relationships. When (and if) you can trust your-
self and others, you have an immense space for ideas and
action.
What is trust? Another nominalization, an abstract noun.
How do you think about trust? What does it mean to trust
yourself or to trust another person?
Trust underlies so many leadership skills that we cannot
avoid it. Also, I think it is the most important leadership
quality. It takes trust in yourself to strike out on a new path,
especially when others tell you to stay at home. It takes trust
to follow a leader as well. ‘Trust’ and ‘true’ come from the
same root. You trust what is true for you. The word comes
originally from an Old Norse word traustr, meaning
‘strong’. We trust in a person’s strength, that it will not let
us down, literally or metaphorically. Trust is how we deal
with uncertainty.
Trust comes in two varieties. The first is trusting some-
thing that has been tried and tested. Here you are on
familiar ground, which you know has had the strength to
support you in the past and you trust it still has that strength.
For example, you have asked a colleague to support you in a
meeting and you trust he will again, because he has done so
before. Or you have successfully coached many colleagues,
so you trust your coaching skills. A friend tells you what
happened to him and you believe him. All this comes down
to trust, trust in others, trust in yourself, based on prior
experience. Trust means you do not have to think, to
scheme, to make contingency plans. If your friend says he
will support you, you trust he will and you do not have to
make plans about what you will say or do if he does not.
Second, we build trust over time – we test the strength of
the support, giving it our weight and taking the risk of being
let down. This is how we build relationships, gradually show-