How I Needed to Improve Trustworthiness

Today, I want to talk about Trust.

I know that's a loaded word because I think trust means something different to everyone, so I want to talk about me; specifically about a role I was in.

About five years ago I was working in a leadership position and received my performance review, and of course, like any recovering perfectionist, I was looking for exceeds and expectations for every category, which, as you know, who are we kidding?

I remember getting pretty much a “meets expectations”, and i’m not even sure if I got a “needs improvement” in this category, but I remember in the free text my boss had written that trust was not there between him and myself. More specifically, he had said, “Sabrina needs to improve trust with her relationships with the team and myself.” I remember seeing that and thinking several things at the moment like:

“Oh my gosh!”

“Who are you to say  that I need to improve trust?”

“I communicate all the time!”

“I respond 24/7, including weekends!”

“I was always telling you everything that was going on.”

“If anything, it’s you that needs to improve trust!”

So, I was super critical in my mind and not open to feedback a that moment because it was such a heavy word, and as I said, trust is something that’s different to everyone. So i really didn’t get curious (which is one of my values, by the way) about what he meant by trust , that I need to improve trust, so we kind of just glazed over it, and I left that meeting (the performance review) feeling disrespected, feeling resentful, and which deteriorated trust between him and I even more.

Fast forward several years, it turns out I uncovered the very reason why there was no trust between my boss and myself, and specifically I was engaging in once behavior that really pushed me out of my integrity, but it’s something I do when I am in people-pleasing mode, and it is when i go to other people seeing to try and gain allies against other people when I feel maybe unheard or not validated, or maybe I feel like my opinion isn’t you know taken seriously.

So I have this tendency with this specific boss to discredit him, and what I mean by that is I would say things behind the scenes like:

“I can’t believe we’re going to go down that road.”

“That’s not the path that I would take.”

“I can’t believe he would not ask people for feedback.”

“Who was he to think he was better than everyone else when really he doesn’t do the work?”

So those types of comments I would make about him got back to him, which is not respectful, not clear, not kind, , and it was how trust was deteriorating, and some of the things that were lacking with me in regard to trust. So for me, I use the 7 Behaviors of Trust created by Dr. Brené Brown, which are:

• Boundaries

• Reliability

• Accountability

• The Vault

• Integrity

• Non-Judgement

• Generosity

So I was not only crossing boundaries by sharing with folks information that I probably shouldn’t be sharing, but I was also violating the vault, which meant that conversation that he and I had in my performance review needed to stay between us; and when i think about the other two, which is non-judgement and generosity, I was definitely not not judging him, I was judging him heavily and being really critical, which meant I was not extending generosity to his behaviors and actions. I was not extending a generous interpretation to his behaviors and actions. So I was violating four different behaviors of trust with regard to my boss. No wonder trust needed to improve.

So i’m grateful to have the experience and the lesson behind me to know what I needed to do different,  but it took me a few years to figure  that out, so hopefully when you think about what i’ve shared this resonates with you and you can take something  away and not make some of the mistakes  that i did with regard to trust.