Trust

It’s one of the things you know you have when you have it, and conversely so too. Trust is the common glue that holds together all of the world’s most successful and important relationships. It also underpins so much of what each and every one of us value in our lives. 

I’ve been fortunate to benefit from and learn a lot about the importance of trust, experientially, in numerous and diverse contexts through the course of my life. From during my time as an orchestral violinist, when teamwork and trust were essential to the musical output; to my time as a research scientist when one’s safety depended not only on one’s individual actions in a busy medicinal chemistry research lab, but on the responsible and cooperative actions of colleagues with whom one worked in close proximity; to my time working for my dad on some of his firm's construction sites during university summer breaks, where the importance of health and safety discipline being upheld was paramount; to the white collar context when working in the higher education sector as a fundraising and philanthropy executive, when I learned first-hand about the importance of that key ingredient when building fruitful and impactful donor relationships; to the parenting context where trust forms the cornerstone of the healthy parent-child relationships my wife and I foster with our two sons; and, pertinently, during the course of my entrepreneurial journey when establishing and nurturing business relationships.

Common to all situations is that when the trust is there, it’s great. But when not, there can be negative and unfortunately, though rarer, sometimes irreparable and damaging consequences.

Trust isn’t fixed. It takes time to establish but very little time to dissipate, in my experience. Ergo it’s not bell curved in its life cycle: it grows linearly ad infinitum when it’s fostered, but can be cliff-edged in its trajectory, if otherwise. 

I’ve thought deeply, at times, about the importance of trust. And in so doing I’ve settled on the straightforward understanding that it is integrity which underpins it. Which is why integrity is such a core value for me personally. 

Integrity can mean putting morals before profit; purpose before self-interest; values and ideals first; and others before yourself. It can mean upholding the essence of a written or verbal contract even if it would be easier to shift position because it later suited; it can me doing what you said you would do, every single time. It can mean doing the right thing even when that is the more challenging path, or even it’s easier to face the other way.

In short, integrity is an easy word to say but sadly often, for some, too challenging to maintain, as my experiences have thankfully, only rarely, taught me. This is true in whatever walk of life you tread. 

As humans, we all make mistakes. But what I’ve learned is that whilst integrity can be a daily challenge to maintain it should never be a responsibility that we shirk.

I’m personally fortunate to have benefitted from an overwhelming majority of relationships built on trust and integrity in my time. Including chiefly those with my family, new and longtime friends, mentors (official and unofficial), clients, donors, business associates and colleagues. But in a thankfully smaller volume of instances I’ve also seen, first-hand, the consequences of its absence, especially when you thought it had been there in the first place. This is why for me trust belongs in a category of its own.  

In a world of infinite grey, where pragmatism is often the order of the day, trust in my view maintains a binary existence. You either have it or you don’t. To use a scientific analogy it’s not a particle and a wave at the same time, as manifest in the duality of light. It is one or the other: it is or it isn’t.  Amidst the backdrop of a world of grey, there is something refreshing about the black and white view of what I consider to be one of the world’s most important commodities. 

Trust is also a guide. To use another scientific metaphor, it should be the litmus test for everyone to apply when assessing the strength of their relationships, whether in personal or professional life.