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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Appearances
And that's what gives me hope that it's not actually about customers and brands or citizens and politicians. It should be about those things. But those systems and institutions are very hard to influence and fix. But your workplace, that is an environment you can somewhat control and influence and shape. And I've seen in teams how quickly you can change culture, how quickly... dynamics can shift.
And so I think if people can go to work or be at work and feel trusted and feel like they can take risks and feel safe to take mistakes, it might just be the only part of their life where they have that experience.
Don't wait for a program. I think if it's a program, it's actually sometimes a problem because it's like imposed versus really coming from people.
One last tip I give is around empathy. So empathy is a really important trait of being trustworthy in our character. And I think empathy can sometimes be mistaken for like putting yourself in someone else's shoes. It's not really what empathy is. Empathy is more like curiosity. So you genuinely want to understand what that person thinks and where they're coming from.
And then the important piece is that it's followed with care. So it's really about how you take the listening and then you turn it into something active that you make that person feel supported and you demonstrate that you care.
So that would be my other thing is that when you're trying to be empathetic, it's not just on the listening component, the information in, it's how you create the scaffold and the support structures that that person feels held.
It's a funny subject to study because it's really intangible, trust. But it came from a fascination in human connection. So I've always been interested in why we're attracted to some people and we repel from others. I've always been interested in what holds groups and teams and society together. And the force, the social glue is trust.
And what I realized is that in the field of trust, you sort of have people who study like cells and negotiation. So essentially, how do you manipulate trust to get something from someone? Or you have the other end, which is like the Esther Perel end, which is like the therapist. Let's repair trust when it breaks down. There wasn't a lot in between, which I found fascinating.
It's a good question. Most of us trust naturally. It's a very intuitive thing. Most of us do it badly because we rely on intuition and not information. And especially in high stakes situations or high risk situations, we're not really taught how to trust well, how to give our trust to the right people and products and information, which is a big one.
And everything about our society and technology now is speeding up those decisions. So our trustmaking is getting worse, not better.
Well, speed is the enemy of trust. So making it too quickly or under pressure is a really big one. So most big decisions we have to make because we've got to hire someone or whatever that might be. So that's number one. The second is intuition over information. So I still believe in trusting your gut, but what is information? Yeah.
There's a lot of evidence around charisma and confidence, overweighting capability. And I think we're seeing that play out in sort of leaders that are getting elected. So those that seem like bold and disruptive versus steady and capable or maybe even bland, that really influences trust. They'd be my top three.
And sometimes it's not even like, does this person feel familiar? Like they can't even get beyond that. And it's the person that feels strange or unfamiliar that sometimes we just can't or choose not to trust. And that's a real problem.
Or what do we lose as well? I think it's one of the biggest myths around trust that needs blowing up. So, well, transparency, I always think of disclosing information, right? So disclosing lots of information so you understand why something is happening or good transparency is understanding the context behind a decision. So why did you choose to do that thing?
But transparency in practice can feel like surveillance. So if you think about transparency, you're trying to get visibility into something. You're trying to understand where someone is by tracking them maybe on their phones. You're trying to understand what they're up to and what they're doing. And that is the very opposite of trust.
So the way I define trust is a confident relationship with the unknown. So if you think, Malcolm, of people in your life, your professional, your personal life that you deeply trust, you don't need to know where they are. You don't need to know what they're up to. It's that visibility is a form of control and that control can be a sign of lack of trust.
So I think it's, I'm not saying transparency is completely a bad thing, but this idea that you fix trust issues, systemic trust issues, trust issues in an organization, even in a relationship by making things transparent, it has a backfire effect where it might work initially because you think, oh, that person's being more open or I have more visibility into that situation and therefore more control.
But over time, it actually leads to less trust.
I'd really love to know why you chose to put me on your podcast, Malcolm. And you said, sure, I'll share that information. That's that's being open. But if equal, if you said, you know what, you don't really need to know or I can't really explain why. If I really trusted you, I wouldn't need to know.
So the problem is with transparency is when leaders promise it and then an employee goes to them and says, well, I really want to understand what that person is being paid or how the bonus structure works or why you've changed the pricing mechanism or whatever it may be. And then the leader goes, I can't tell you that. Well, you promised to be transparent.
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