Camille Rapacz: We all know that trust is important in business, but what about the intersection of trust and risk? How does trust impact the way we perceive and handle risk and how to increase levels of trust, mitigate uncertainty and build resilience?
Today, we're exploring the role of trust and how we approach taking on and mitigating risk.
Camille: Welcome to The Belief Shift. The show that explores. What you really need to know about building a successful business.
I'm your host, Camille Rapacz: business coach and consultant who spent too much of her career working in corporate business performance.
George: And I'm George Drapeau: your co-host and her brother. I'm a leader in the tech world bringing my corporate perspective, but mostly my curiosity.
Camille: Together, we're exploring beliefs about success and how to achieve it. But mostly we're bringing practical solutions so you and your business can thrive.
Camille Rapacz: Hello, George.
George Drapeau: Hey, Camille. How are you doing?
Camille Rapacz: I am doing well. You know, this topic today came out of a conversation that maybe you'll remember you and I had not that long ago, just like in this past week, we were not talking about the podcast. We were just talking about stuff.
And this topic came up when we said, Ooh, this is a great idea for the podcast. So you are to blame for this one. Good job. Yes. Do you remember why we got so excited about this topic?
George Drapeau: For me, it was something that was happening at work that was making me think about how much trust there was in an organization.
And it felt like a low trust organization. And it also felt like, at first I was wondering, coincidentally, the people in the organization felt timid about stuff. They weren't really going out there and trying stuff or reaching out and taking risk. And then it occurred to me, Yeah, of course, there's such a relationship between trust and risk.
Like I almost feel like if you could find a way to quantify the trust, there's an equation like E equals MC squared of the relationship between trust and risk. The greater the trust, the greater the risk. They just go together. And I just, when I told you that, it just felt satisfying to both of us that it's worth exploring how that plays out. How much trust, how that turns into the ability to take risk, and how you can make that a useful tool for leaders.
For business leaders, if they're trying to figure out how much risk can I take on for a business, ask yourself, how much trust do I have? And it felt like there was something there for us to talk through.
Camille Rapacz: I agree. I thought it was great when this came up and I was like, Oh, what a brilliant thing to connect together.
Because I would think we think about, of course, in business, we're taking risks. And of course, in business, we want to build trust with our team, with our leaders, with each other. But putting them together, talking about the relationship, I thought was a great topic for our particular podcast.
Or maybe just for us. I don't know. Hopefully the audience will also enjoy it.
George Drapeau: Well, actually I was thinking of something that I thought I would tell you that proves that there is a concrete relationship or intuitive feeling between trust and risk. And you know, this by thinking about just about any action movie where the star does they have the star has to is that maybe with their companion or sidekick or love interest and they're in a jam and they got to get out of the jam and there's no clear way to get out of it but the action hero has a crazy plan super risky and wants to do something in terms of the other person that says do you trust me and the person's like do you trust me yes and then they go and do something crazy that works out right?
Camille Rapacz: Yes.
I mean, of course we should rely on movies to tell us the right way to run our businesses. I mean, it's all right there. I
George Drapeau: think they're mostly Tom Cruise movies, by the way. Do you trust me?
Camille Rapacz: Yeah. True. I mean, you know, he also seems to be doing pretty well in his own little personal business. So maybe there's something to it.
Yeah, but yes, it does come up over and over again. Like that's really yes, the most obvious example of it. But I do think it's really showing up in our every day as well. And probably in ways that we're not even consciously thinking about. So raising our own awareness about it, I think, as leaders is a great thing.
So let's just tackle trust for a minute here, because I just think trust alone you know, it starts with good relationships and just thinking about trust by itself is a worthy endeavor as a leader. But even though we think about it as, maybe just, I need to have good relationships with people.
There are some really tangible things that you can do to build trust as a leader and in an organization. And you generally, I think of this as like, I just, I just want to know I can count on people. Yeah. I mean, that's kind of the most basic essential piece of it. I want to count on you to deliver your work with a consistent level of quality and that if you're not going to be able to deliver it, you're going to miss the mark in some way that I can count on you to communicate that because none of us are perfect.
So it's not about being perfect. This is about, I trust that we're all going to always be communicating about the work and everybody's going to do their part and do the best job that they can do. Yeah. Beyond that, I think there's also something that's a little trickier for leaders, which is trust of communication flow, the flow of information.
So we want transparency in communication. We're building trust that way too. But there's also trusting people to only share information as it's appropriate to you. So don't share something that is sensitive to someone else that they might have shared with you in confidence, or information that isn't even yours to communicate, but it's theirs to communicate.
George Drapeau: Why is oversharing bad?
Camille Rapacz: It does erode trust. So if you shared something that I told you, That I trusted was just between you and I, and then you went off and shared it.
You've broken some trust that we have.
George Drapeau: Oh, yes. I was thinking of another case. I've had managers who share stuff with their organization and I hear it. I think, Oh, you shouldn't be sharing that with all of us. Like they're sharing with us. Like, and then they're like, that's too much. Have you ever run into that?
Camille Rapacz: I usually see the opposite where they're not sharing enough. So trust goes in both directions of if I am not sharing enough information with my team, it kind of is sending the message to them that I don't really trust them with it.
I think if you're oversharing information, that's a whole other thing that's going on for lots of different reasons. Sometimes that person just really doesn't have a good awareness of managing information. They don't understand how people are going to translate that information and, timeliness of it. Like, this is not the right time to be communicating this information. I see that less often, but yes, it definitely can be a problem.
George Drapeau: Me too. I remember when I was at Sun, there's a reasonably senior leader who shared way too much. And I remember, what I think is, wow, you have no boundaries. And if you have no boundaries about that, then you're going to have no boundaries about anything I tell you. Like you're scary. I mean, it's fun hearing all this stuff, but no way I can trust you.
That's right. You Have no walls.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah. You'll share everything, you From me to you and out to everybody else you know. Then you're eroding trust in the other direction. Which is like, oh, I can't trust you with information because you're not going to treat it properly.
Let's talk about trust from like three different perspectives, because I think this is important.
And then I want to get into just talking about the relationship of trust and risk.
I Was thinking about this in three perspectives. *So the first one was trust that you have within a team.* So this is like, not the team you run, but the team you're a part of. I'm a member equally of this team. Okay.
I'm curious if you have a, do you have like a number one indicator for you that you're working within a team that has a high level of trust?
George Drapeau: The two things that come to mind right away, and I'd have to think through this are if I feel like my colleagues are predictable and transparent. Yeah. I like that.
I think I have to think through this more because you put me on the spot here, which I enjoy. But I think those two things.
Camille Rapacz: I always like to just see what like comes top of mind for you in the moment. I get to prepare more.
Those are great. I was calling out things like, obviously just communication. Managing it well, both transparent, but also I can trust you with information to manage information well. Accountability where I have high level of accountability to each other. For sure. Yeah. And consistency is another one. If I'm in a good team, everybody is consistent in how they're showing up and doing the work and all of that.
Basically, I think I can really count on that and we got each other's backs.
George Drapeau: Yeah. I agree with all those. Absolutely. I mean, for me, predictability is basically consistency.
Camille Rapacz: Yes, exactly. So that's team trust.
Then there's another layer of trust that I like to think about as the trust that you as a leader or if an individual contributor that you're the building with your boss.
Or it could be with senior leadership. So the people that are above you that you're reporting to.
How do you know, George, again, putting you on the spot. As a leader, what indicates to you that you can trust someone that reports to you?
George Drapeau: Oh, okay. My number one metric for that is, are we having regular one on one meetings. And it doesn't matter what the content of those meetings are, just are we speaking on a regular basis, ideally weekly, even if it's 30 minutes. That's my top indicator. For doing that, the chances are I have a good sense of where the relationship is, where they are in sense, if we haven't talked in a while, I start feeling a little bit less steady about where things are not as trusting, I guess.
Camille Rapacz: I think that's a good one. Consistent communication so you can always gauge where they're at. And then you have an opportunity to help redirect them in a timely fashion if you do need to. Right. Yeah.
There's other aspects of when I think about the way that some of my team might be operating, which is I want to see that they're, they're well organized and are kind of like low drama and just running things smoothly. If I'm meeting with them every week, but they're always coming in with their hair on fire, I start losing a little trust.
George Drapeau: Oh, interesting. I have to think about that. I mean, intuitively that makes sense to me, but I'm trying to think, would that mean I would trust them less?
Huh? Say more about that. Why does that erode trust for you?
Camille Rapacz: It erodes trust for me because I always feel like people who are operating with their hair on fire all the time, they're always in firefighting mode aren't getting to the true heart of the problems and challenges in their area.
They're just tackling surface stuff and it covers up what's really going on. So the other indicator I had in here was they don't show up with just a, Hey boss, everything's good here.
So on the other end of the spectrum, they can show up like, Hey boss, everything's good. Don't need anything.
Sometimes both of those are happening, like, Oh my gosh, everything is crazy. Everything's on fire, but I got this. And it's this little disjointed.
So there's something hidden in there. So if they're not being transparent about the real problems going on, and they're not talking those through with me, or they're talking about all the problems, but they're all sort of the hair on fire problems, I start to lose a little trust that they have a real grasp on what needs to happen in their area.
George Drapeau: It's like a pH balance for you. If they're either too basic or too acidic, it's good.
Camille Rapacz: Everything is about balance, like, I think sometimes we swing the pendulum too far one way or the other, and we need this nice kind of middle ground when we talk about anything in leadership.
We were just talking about it with communication. I want to be careful not to over communicate or under communicate. I got to hit this. It's like the Goldilocks communication, I want just this perfect level. And that's why leadership is difficult because we're always having to navigate that and we're making decisions all the time about this.
So yeah, you're right. it's like the pH balance of problems. I guess.
*My third category of trust is leadership building trust with a board of directors. *Oh, wow. It's like organizational trust.
I'm curious if you've seen ways where you're like, yeah, I can see how this executive leadership team has gained trust from their board of directors or lost trust.
George Drapeau: Oh, that's interesting. I can think of gain trust examples.
And I would say board of directors and also to like the market for politically traded company, kind of similar concept. When I've observed, when I've seen the leaders that have good relationships with the board is there predictable almost to the point of being boring.
And so, for example I hope this is not a stretch. So I used to work at Red Hat. Red Hat is this company based on open source software. And at the time it was started, no big enterprise companies trusted open source software because it was controlled by hippies. Why would they control that stuff? But Red Hat took this stuff and made it commercially supportable business out of hippie software and he's done great business with it.
But it took a while for the market to catch up to to red hat. And so this, the CFO at the time, Charlie Peters, every quarter would present these same old boring financial graphs that basically showed basically he'd be telling the market and the board of directors.
Don't worry about how crazy the technology is. Don't worry about whether it's run by hippies. Look at the numbers. Look at these numbers are nice and boring and going up and to the right statistically smoothly. We're building a smooth, repeatable, well run engine for this business. And he kept doing that until the market caught up to like, Oh, we get this open source stuff now.
And then everything sank in. So I think his trick was making things nice and communicated clearly and openly and predictably.
Camille Rapacz: That plays right into examples that I've seen of this where I think that the first go to is, you know, we think, well, I just need to demonstrate results.
My job is to show the board that I can get results, but I think that's only part of the equation. Yeah. Absolutely. What they're really looking for is what you were describing is we have a way to have this nice steady path of getting results, achieving the goal process. Yes. The process is there.
So I see boards be less trusting of their leaders when it's they, they don't see that they're going through a process of establishing our strategic plan. Then we have an operating plan. We have a way that management systems work. We've got the right KPIs. We're on top of it. We have transparency into the health of the business.
And we know how to respond when that health starts to go the wrong direction. When you think about what you want to see in a business, that's how you start to get the trust in a leadership team that they're doing the right work because they're on top of things and you need all of those systems and processes and structures and, and behaviors,
leadership behaviors that really back that up. So it's not enough to just be like going through and jamming and getting results. You have to show that you can do it over and over again consistently. It has to be sustainable.
George Drapeau: Yeah, absolutely. Sustainable.
Camille Rapacz: And I do find that that is a big challenge for lots of businesses. They're kind of out there making it work, but they don't have the sustainability.
When they don't, and then they lack trust with board of directors or investors or you name it, then they don't get the opportunity to take risks. And the only way that you excel in business and make more money is you got to take some risks. It's not without risk.
George Drapeau: It's the same thing with kids and their homework and it's the same thing with science.
And what I mean by that is kids with their homework. The teachers want to see the work, show your work, otherwise I don't trust that you actually did it. And with science, forays into cold fusion over the last 30 years, there's been a few times when notably science, some scientists group has said, we've done these experiments to achieve cold fusion.
But when you go and inspect the papers or the work, the experimentation, it's not reproducible. You can't trust it.
Camille Rapacz: Yes. And this plays into what we've talked about before as, one of our belief shifts around process over outcomes. Yeah. You know, outcomes are great, but really we got to focus on the process.
We need repeatable outcomes, not just one time. Not just one shot. Absolutely. Yeah. That's kind of the essence of it. So if we think about all these layers of trust, now let's talk about that relationship of building the trust. And what does that let us do in business?
Why do we care about taking risks? Cause I think maybe when I think like, aren't we supposed to be mitigating risk in business? Yes. But you also need to take risks. Like I said, if you're going to grow as a business, if you're going to get to whatever next level you want to get to, you're going to have to take some risks.
This is what makes strategic planning difficult is you're kind of placing a bet. Like, I think this is the direction we need to go. I'm choosing a path and it's risky because none of us know what's going to turn out. We don't know what's going to happen in the marketplace down the road. We can make some good guesses. But we can never predict everything that's going to happen. And so we're taking a risk.
So the more trust that we could put into the organization, the more confident we can feel about taking those risks and we'll do a better job of mitigating those risks. But if we don't have trust, we're probably just going to sit tight because we're pretty sure that that risk is going to just take us down.
George Drapeau: Yeah. I actually think this is quantifiable in a way you can ask yourself how much risk, what's our appetite for risk. And if you want to answer that question, you can ask yourself, what's the trust level within the company or the order of the unit, the unit of measurement. Because I think if you only have a little bit of trust.
You're going to be spending some of your time just, if you're trying to take risk, take a new risk into a new area, you've got to measure things. You've got to see how well an experiment is doing, or the numbers are right. And if you're too busy, not really trusting how people set goals or communicate with each other, if they're resolving or if they're surfacing problems, if you're dealing with that kind of a low trust, then it's hard to assess that risk. You don't know if you can do it.
If you have high trust, a lot of trust, then that leaves you so much room to take on a bunch of stuff. You can risk a lot because you know so many things, you know, very clearly what you're getting into. You'll know that your team has each other's backs if you get into trouble. All kinds of benefits come with it. There's directly relatable how much trust leads to how much risk you can allow yourself to take.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah, I'm waiting for you to give me the equation or the spreadsheet so I can do the math and work it out. There's something there. Yeah. I think you're right.
I mean, I was just thinking about it. Popped in my head this example for me of when just for me as a leader, I realized how, because I trusted my boss and they trusted me that I was able to take a risk proposing an idea. To executive leadership and know that even if it didn't go well, I would be okay.
It was a positive for us to like, we were in it together. It was really for my department that I was in charge of, but my boss was like, yes, I do. I agree. This is the right thing. It is a bit of a risk for us to put this in front of them now, but let's find out. It turned out the first time we tried it, it didn't get accepted.
They basically were like, nice idea, but no thanks. And so all of these things are also about timing. But because I had trust, we were able to go back and kind of rethink our approach and think about the timing and how we wanted to couch it. And then we went at it again, like six months later. And then It happened and we launched the new program.
Wow. But I couldn't have done that if I didn't have just genuine trust, both with him and he had to have, my boss had to have trust with his team because it was with his, fellow VPs. He had to have trust with them that he could bring me in and, that we could be presenting this idea. And that even if it wasn't great, that it was going to be okay.
They were just like. Thanks, but no, thanks. And it was fine. There were no repercussions of that. And that's a big deal because what you want in your organization is for people to be bringing new ideas of what about this? We think we don't might want to try this. And if people don't have trust that those new ideas will be well received, even if they're not approved, they're just not going to bring them forward.
Yeah, I also think this is a again, back to the, if you're going to take risk from a strategic standpoint, the stability that you have to have in the structures of the business and how it operates are so important. You can't implement the change that a strategic plan will bring in if you don't have that foundation there.
And it's, why a lot of businesses really struggle with, yeah, we kind of have a strategy, but we're not really doing it. There's no place in there for that strategy to sort of live and flourish because nobody's really built those systems out. There's not enough trust that we're going to be able to pull it off.
And so we don't really do it. You know what I mean? Yeah, I do. And we focus on the fires. We're like, oh, we got all these fires to put out by the way. So let's just do those. Because everybody knows how to do that. Everybody knows how to be a firefighter. I'm not sure why, but everybody knows how to be a good firefighter.
It's very common.
George Drapeau: Yeah. I mean, biologically, that's how we're familiar with these amygdalas that indicate this fast fighter flight syndrome. So maybe it's that. I don't know. That's true though.
Camille Rapacz: I never need to help a team learn how to do better firefighting.
It's usually the opposite. Always the opposite.
George Drapeau: There's another thing that comes to mind for me when I think about trust and risk. And I think we've sort of covered it, but the thing about when you have trust when you have high trust you have low anxiety and low fear. And so when you want to take risk, I mean, athletes, people, everybody, we operate best when we're in a low anxiety, low fear mood when we want to try something new.
It's not good for us to try something like try and skiing. It's no good to try and try a skiing if you're all nervous and locked locked up, that doesn't help. You have to be relaxed. You have to be ready to make mistakes and make some mistakes, but you got to be relaxed to try. And if you're in a low trust environment, there's this low level anxiety or maybe high level anxiety and fear. And those work against your individual ability to take on risk.
Camille Rapacz: Yeah, absolutely. I don't know why what you were saying made me think of this, but I also started to think about just our perception of risk. The way that we perceive risk as either incredibly scary or as an opportunity.
How worried we might be about that risk. I think levels of trust just impact our perception of risk, so if we don't have high levels of trust, anything risky that enters in is going to be inflated. Magnified. Yeah. It's like, Oh, that's, that's a big deal. But if we have a lot of trust, we're going to look at that same risk and be like, you know what?
We got this. Yeah. Let's problem solve. Let's work through it. Work on some mitigation plans. We have a way to address this. It's almost like a self perpetuating problem, because if you don't have trust and then you perceive high risk, then it's going to be even harder to build any more trust because everybody's very anxious about the risk and over and over again.
So you have to start somewhere. And I think you do start with foundationally building the trust and all those different layers that we talked about within your team a leader with their own team and with the leaders that are above you. And then the organization with their board of directors, like all of those levels of trust need to be worked on all the time.
And I, I was thinking about this, like maybe this is really the heart of leadership. Like everything we're trying to do as leaders at the heart of it is trust. We need trust in the organization with each other. That's why we have accountability. That's why we focus on communication, blah, blah, blah,
yeah. Yes. I realized I just blah, blah, blah about leadership, but you know what I mean.
We could probably relate trust to lots of other things in business, but I think risk it's almost like it's the thing that could both take your business down and at the same time be the biggest opportunity. Taking risks in your business can do one or the other in the biggest way.
Yeah. Yeah.
We could definitely go down some rabbit holes about some of these things, but we will not do that today.
All right. I have parting thoughts. Something that I want our listeners to ponder for themselves about this topic. Let's hear it. What if as leaders, we were all just focused on building trust at all levels of the organization? So think about this for yourself. How would this change the way you think about yourself as a leader, how you behave, and how you would show up every day if trust was at the center of your leadership approach?
So I'm just going to leave you with that. And if you want to share your thoughts about it, we would love to hear from you. You can leave us a voicemail. There'll be a link in the show notes, but you can go to the belief shift. com and hit the little voicemail widget and tell us your thoughts about this.
If you need help with this, you can book a free consultation with me. Also link in the show notes, CamilleRapacz.com/bookacall.
Thank you everybody for listening and we will be back in your ears next week.
George Drapeau: See ya everybody.
