Trust

Welcome to the Fork in the Road Blog: Reflections on Life, musings based on my perception of life, spanning decades of active life. This episode – Trust – muses over firm belief in the reliability, truth, and integrity among human relationships.

You might have noticed that I normally start my blogs with definitions of the key topic I am writing about. I think this is a carryover from my training in mathematics where one must lay out the premises upon which the ensuing argument is based. I always want to ensure that I am communicating with the reader or listener.

While trust can refer to many different things, the one I am musing over is defined as “assured reliance on the character, ability, strength, or truth of someone”. This is the belief in the reliability, truth, and integrity among human relationships.

Steady, firm, and reliable relationships, whether among individuals or societies or countries, depend on mutual trust. They depend on the hope that all members of the relationships will act as expected. Contracts are signed between countries trusting that each will fulfil its obligations as laid out in the official and legal documents. Parents send their children to schools trusting that the teachers will teach them as indicated in the schools’ prospectuses. The parents also trust that the children will behave according to the schools’ requirements. You accept employment in a company trusting that the terms under which you were recruited will be kept and the company trusts that the recruit will perform the job as expected. You partner up with friends to establish and entrepreneurship company with mutual trust that you will all have the same objectives and work towards achieving the company goals. Trusting that everyone will make the expected contribution as laid out in the company prospectus. And so on.

In my book A View Round the Bend, I write that Trust plays a significant factor in a marriage. Couples marry trusting that they will remain true to their promises. Couples need to trust each other through good and bad times, when they are together and when they are apart. If two people are setting their future goals together, it is impossible for those goals to be met without mutual trust. When trust isn’t a decisive factor at the beginning, or during a relationship, it will undoubtedly lead to physical or virtual separation. When trust is missing, both members don’t feel comfortable, and they subconsciously expect the worst from each other. It’s an unhappy way to live and, over time, can be draining and exhausting. In Luganda that is what we call being on “bunkeenke” (tiptoes).

Leaders are elected by the people trusting that the people they are casting their votes for will keep to the promises given as they solicit for the votes. The naïve voters believe all promises of heaven and earth the campaigners shout out, very often coated with money and cheap trinkets. The naïve voters do not ask how the promises of functional health facilities, schools with proper educational environment, roads, increased wealth, elimination of thieving public funds etc. will be fulfilled. Sadly, they put their trust in the candidate with the loudest and most mouth-watering promises  as they cast their vote. The same voters are the first to cry foul when their elected leaders fail to deliver on the promises. That is how trust is lost among leaders, and governments in general.

When leaders, who are expected to provide leadership, turn up to be thieves of the society’s resources they forfeit any trust the people, they are supposed to lead, had in them. It does not take many instances of mismanagement of resources for the leadership to be mistrusted of its ability to lead. The Baganda have a saying: ”Mulya mamba aba omu naavumisa ekika kyonna” (It takes only one lung fish clan member to eat the lung fish to tarnish the whole clan. It is the so called “rotten apple in a basket”.) That is how quickly trust can dissipate by one member of a group to tarnish the whole group or a single incident to turn a person who might have been regarded as trustworthy all along into a person that cannot be trusted anymore. This is not only in politics and leadership, but at any point where trust is needed.

Stephen M. R. Covey’s 2006, highly recommended book, The Speed of Trust describes techniques that business leaders can use to inspire trust in both their followers and their customers. Many of the techniques he puts forward are equally applicable outside the business environment. For example, before you can trust others, you must first trust yourself. Trust in oneself is self-confidence, which, Covey says, is only created when your competence and your character integrity come together. Integrity is Honesty, Reliability Decency etc. You can hear people talk of so and so being reliable, a decent person, a person of integrity. In other words, a person that can be trusted. All it takes is a single negative incident for all these accolades to dissipate. That is the speed by which trust can disappear.

One of the quotes from The Speed of Trust is:  “In a high-trust relationship, you can say the wrong thing, and people will still get your meaning. In a low-trust relationship, you can be very measured, even precise, and they’ll still misinterpret you.”

For mutual support based on trust, we turn to people we trust for guidance as we make decisions. These are people we know would be honest with their advice, people with integrity. One can see that the more trust is established among people, the more they can assist each other with personal goals.

Thank you for being part of the Fork in the Road Blogs: Reflections on Life. Be sure to look out for the next episode when I will be writing about Faith. And if you gathered something useful, please feel free to share the blog. My books, Fork in the Road: Creating a future of value starting from where you are and A view round the bend. Setting goals for your life’s journey are available for purchase at Aristoc bookshops in Kampala, Uganda and online at Amazon.