Building Trust - Lesson 2

Welcome back to the Foundations of Trust. We've covered a lot of the reasons of why there is trust and distrust, and we even helped you identify at this point the three specific areas where we must perform as individuals for other people to trust us, and that's between other people, the way we act ourselves, and the way we actually apply the experience and the work that we have to do in ministry. So let's take that next step and look into the state of trust in ministry workplaces today, because I think you're going to be surprised.

You see, there's a lot of space between trust and distrust. It's just not visible for you to look at from the outside and say this is trust and this is distrust. Let me give you a scary figure.

70% of employees in ministry say that they trust their leaders. Now, could it be worse? Yes, but we can do better. You see, employees leave because they dislike their bosses.

Recent studies have shown that 68% of the people polled have left a job because why? They dislike or distrust their bosses. Even though they may trust going into a circumstance because they believe in the mission, vision, and values of the ministry, doesn't mean that that lasts. Most managers monitor employees' social media when they call in sick.

Were you aware of that? They are constantly looking to make sure that they can trust you. How would that make you feel if you knew that your department head or the executive pastor was monitoring your social media to make sure that you are the person that you say you are? Now, COVID-19 made trust even more essential. And so, during the two years that that was prominent, only 8% of the managers and ministry leaders actually trusted their employees to remotely work.

But 60% of employees are now working remotely during this time. Several major national insurance companies have actually sold off their buildings and told as many as 11,000 employees that they're going to work remotely from now on. You see, what happened during that period of time was ministry people began to love that flexibility and had a greater desire for even more flexibility because of our ability to interact and communicate virtually.

So, we have an area of opportunity for ministries that we need to pay much more attention to. You see, there's two forces that literally complicate trust. In a program, in a group, and outside the group, there are interactions going on constantly.

And whether you're in or out of that group, those interactions are quite visible. Even if you don't say it yourself, other people may quote you and post it. Second, there are personal differences in the way that we view social media and inter-office communication, whether it be email or social media.

Because I can tell you, just based on my desire to be understood, going back, reading the email that I typed out, and trying to make sure by editing words that I'm not offending someone, you can still offend them. Because each person is going to look at the words that you put down and judge them from a whole different mentality. We learned this when we talked about the behaviors of the nature of an individual and the nurture of an individual by their judging of what is important and what's not important.

You see, it's triggered by that friend or foe instinct. And once a person has, "Oh my goodness, what did they mean by that?" Then any interaction and communication that goes between people is going to be questioned. It's actually going to affect relationships, especially between different teams and departments within your ministry.

Why? Because one ministry has this objective and another ministry in the same church or the same parachurch ministry. And guess what? Which one thinks theirs is most important? Both of them do. So those personal differences begin to impact departments and it's triggered by those behavioral and mindset differences and it affects the relationship between people and consequently between departments.

And when there is friction between those departments, there's less willingness to pass on critical information that will be of help and serve the ministry. Now, let's go back and remember an important point that I shared with you in the behaviors and mindsets course, and that is diversity is a strength. Diversity is a strength because we must foster ourselves to improve individuals and teams.

And if we don't have that diversity, you will not grow to your full potential. So when we think about those differences and the way that we can actually impact, especially in our new virtual society, whether our services are streaming or not, it's bound to create some questions. So what questions do you have for me at this point? 

Student: If we're relying on social media, realizing the inherent possibilities for misunderstanding, how do we overcome that? 

Dr. Coker: That's a good point because when we think about social media or email or text, we have to remember one thing. We are talking and speaking to either an individual in our email or text, but when we go to social media, we are talking to everyone. And therefore, there's four behavioral types. There are six mindset priorities.

And so when we post on social media, Instagram or whatever it might be, we are speaking to a massively different audience. Now, if I were to send an email to you, I understand your natural characteristics and I can gauge myself and I can adapt to make sure that I include all of the details because I know you're going to want those details. But to the rest of the world, they may not want all those details.

All they want is the bullet points, et cetera. So with that wider audience, you have to be much more cognizant of the fact that your message needs to be much more neutral, much more focused and much more to the point, but also not demeaning of a specific behavior or a specific mindset.