Rachel Botsman
speaker
139 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Rachel Botsman’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Yeah, the question, what would be the number one question? I guess it's actually more about what happens when trust breaks down. And I think that's interesting in itself because trust is kind of like one of those things, a bit like air or oxygen. We don't really appreciate its value until it's gone.
And so I think that's why people tend to focus on that question is they know that feeling of not trusting someone or not being trusted versus being able to describe what trust is, which I think is really interesting in itself.
Yeah, that's a really good point because trust is cultural in terms of signals and the way it's earned, but the feeling of trust, that is universal. I love that.
Well, it depends on context. Context is really important when it comes to trust. So if you ask me that question, I would say, what kind of team? Is it a small team or is it a large team? Is it a team that works remotely or is it a team that comes together? Is it a new team or is it a team that's been together for a long time? What kind of work are they doing? So
It's not like there are general rules on how you earn trust as a leader. And one of the things that I often find when working with leaders is they don't think enough about context. They don't think enough about environment or conditions. And all those things really impact not just how you earn trust, but how much trust that you need. So There are like general principles that apply.
So one of the most important ones, regardless of the size of the team or whatever you're working on, is expectation setting. And I find it really interesting when I say to people, have you ever been taught how to set expectations, clear expectations of people? And I don't even think of it as a skill.
So they'll think of like communications as a skill or negotiations as a skill, but how you are clear with people about what you expect from them, the quality of work, when they should deliver it, not just sort of the what's, but how they approach work. Like this is absolutely key to trust.
Well, that's a big one. And just going back to the context thing, the other really important point is often trust is broken when we take things out of context. Yes. And so, you know, when you work in those teams and that narrative starts to brew, it's because something that's been said or something that's been intended has been taken out of context.
So clarifying context and intent is also really, really good for trust. So you asked a question about security.
Yeah, this is a really important distinction between safety and security. So you've probably heard of Amy Emerson. She's a brilliant professor at Harvard, and she talks a lot about psychological safety. There is a really important difference between safety and security. Safety is creating the environment where people... I feel like they can take risks. They can make mistakes.
They can admit that they don't know something. All these things that some people might perceive as a sign of weakness in some cultures. And they can do all those things without fear of negative consequence. That's what every leader needs to create. That's fundamental. Psychological security or insecurity is actually very hard to control. That is about your inner thoughts.
And sometimes as a leader, you could create the safest environment. You could wrap someone in cotton wool and they are still going to feel insecure. And that's because of their upbringing. That's because of their conditioning. Often it's because they have trust issues, right? So it could be something that happened very early on in childhood that they just find it very hard to trust people.
So as a leader or a manager of a team, or even just being on a team, I It's actually more helpful to think about psychological safety, like how do you create the conditions and the environment that people feel safe versus people's inner emotions and feelings. That's very difficult for you to influence and control.
Yeah. And it's also something that I think needs to be reeled in, in that these boundaries between the personal and professional have got very blurry and mushy. And this really started to happen with the whole bring a whole self to work. And then the pandemic where those lines were really blurred.
And the reason why I say this is that it's not actually a leader's responsibility to manage how you feel. And so what I see in a lot of teams is there's quite a lot of flooding. There's quite a lot of sharing of feelings and emotions that maybe should be kept out of the workplace and aren't necessarily your boss's responsibility to manage.
So that is why I think this distinction between environment and conditions that people feel safe versus your own emotional security is really important to understand. Does that make sense?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it's also how we make bad trust decisions. It's like when we rely on feelings and intuition and we don't have enough information to make a good decision. That's not a great place for decision making, particularly when it's a high risk or, you know, high investment.
There are actually many. I keep thinking I'm done with trust, right? And then I discovered that it's like another thing. It really is this transparency thing. So... It is this idea that the more transparent you are with your team, the more transparent your culture, that trust will increase. And that is the opposite. It often has a backfire effect. The reason for that is actually to define trust.
So the way I define trust is trust is a confident relationship with the unknown. So if you think about people that you deeply trust, personal and professional, you don't need to know what they're up to, right? Like you just let them get on with things. It's that visibility, that needing to know, like checking messages, needing to track someone, wondering what someone is up to.
Like these are signs that you don't trust someone. Transparency is essentially trying to make everything visible in your culture. And often, I'm not saying transparency is a bad thing, but often what people want to understand, again, they want to understand the context in which you've made a decision. They're trying to understand the reason that you've made a decision.
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