Building Trust - Lesson 5

Welcome back. Now it's time for us to begin to lay the foundation on how you as an individual can build trust because there's benefits of trust that you can take advantage of not just for yourself but for everybody that you come in contact with because humans want to trust from birth. They're conditioned to actually trust their caretakers.

That's why a child stops crying when the mom or the dad picks them up, holds them close to their chest and sings or hums or does the da-da-da-da or whatever it might be to calm that child. So that same conditioning is something that we want to hear as we go through life. We want to be told that we're good.

We want to be told that we're valuable. We want to have attention throughout our life and when we don't get it we build walls. And you know what? We can't afford to have walls when it comes to playing a role in the body of Christ.

You see ministry dynamics require collaboration, honesty and trust because the diverse environments that we are going to work in can actually harbor distrust if we don't manage it well. Trust is the key to your ministry, your organization, your relationship success. And if you don't take the time to do that, you're going to find your world very narrow and all of the people that are out there are going to get into that funnel and the funnel is going to get smaller and smaller and smaller.

And that's why today in a busy big city like New York City, the most populous city in America, loneliness is the biggest problem. While US workers may trust some of their managers, many of them don't. Employees that work for ministries or corporations kind of trust their managers.

But okay is not enough because we have seen based on national statistics that the higher the level of trust in a ministry, in an organization, is a direct impact on the performance and the productivity and in a corporation the profitability of that organization. High trust equals a great level of success and performance. Let me give you some statistics.

Organizations that have high trust are twice as energetic. They are 76% more engaged. They are 50% more productive and half of them are not as likely to leave an organization.

And how does that translate? How do high trust organizations benefit? They literally receive stronger donations, higher levels of commitment, and the secular companies actually are more profitable. So what I want us to think about at this time is how do we do this strategically? How do we actually think about and prepare ourselves, especially if you are a pastor, leader, staff member that oversees volunteers? You have to be strategic about the way that you develop trust within your organization or ministry. All three dimensions of trust are vital to building trust.

Interpersonal, between two people. Intrapersonal, the way that you conduct yourself and the application of how you communicate to those people that serve you. We're getting ready to cover those very shortly in our next lesson, but what I want you to understand is that a relationship missing even one dimension will keep you from building trust.

And if you don't have the trust of your volunteers in a church, the church will not grow. If you do not have the trust of the people in your ministry, your ministry will not be effective. And if you do not have the trust of the people that who are willing to invest in your ministry, they will not invest.

You see, people tend to be stronger in one dimension than another, and they expect that one dimension to build trust with other people, and it's not going to happen. We have to think, how can I develop? What are my strengths? What are my weaknesses? What are my behaviors? What are my motivators and mindsets? And how are they going to affect? We have to consider, we have to analyze our trust scores. If you haven't taken the Trustworthiness Index that we offer to you, I encourage you to do that, because as we begin to define each of these five constructs of trust, I want you to see how your natural personality is going to build and destroy trust.

You see, each dimension score is relative to another one. In other words, you can be very high in your interpersonal skills, but if you're not predictable in the way that you show up, you literally destroy your ability to communicate. You see, your ability to be trusted and your capacity to trust other people is going to be contingent on your weaknesses, even though you may want to emphasize your strengths.

So, as we come to this point, it's time to stop for just a minute and begin to think about your strengths and your weaknesses, because the greater you focus on how to use your strengths to eliminate or minimize the weaknesses, the greater your ability to build trust with people who probably would have never trusted you if you were just being yourself.