Three ways of looking at the Trust Triangle

Updated November 9, 2023

Teams with high trust perform better than teams with low trust. When people trust their leaders, stress is lower and engagement is higher. Three different articles talk about the three elements of trust from different perspectives. Two come from the Harvard Business Review over the last two years, and the third is a classic from the journal of Investigative Medicine from 2012.

The image from the HBR leadership article, Begin with Trust focuses on how other people see you. In the article, Frei and Morriss introduce the idea of the “trust wobble”, a part of the triangle that’s less strong. The good news is that these three elements can be supported by choices you make. The impact of trust-generating behaviors were quantitatively measured in the second article, Zenger and Folkman’s The 3 Elements of Trust, also from HBR. They focused on what you do to generate the perceptions Frei and Morriss describe.

Among these elements, Zenger and Folkman quantified which vertex had the most impact:

You can improve the perception of your empathy by b

uilding positive relationships.

You can demonstrate your logic with consistent good judgement and expertise and by being transparent about what underlies your decisions.

People can feel they experience the real you when you are consistent, when you walk the talk and when you do what you say you will do when you say you will do it.

In the article on Team Science, Bennett and Gadlin talk about trust in scientific relationships, and they use different words to come to the same vertices. In the case of scientists, the descriptions of the elements seem more clinical. Seeing the person as authentic and consistent is based on observation and calculation. The elements of relationship or empathy lie in understanding of each other’s values and needs, feeling understood. The third element of trust is competence, based in demonstrated capability and skill.

In the table below, we line up these elements of trust from the three articles.

A grid defining and contrasting the three dimensions of trust

The data from Zenger and Folkman would argue that the middle row has the most impact on trust in relationships. But as Bennett and Gadlin point out in the team science article, the weights differ for team science, with competency holding the most weight.

“When one loses trust in a colleague everything that person does becomes suspect. And in science, confidence in another’s intentions and commitment is just one aspect of trust. Think of the impact in a research team when people began to doubt the data produced by a team member. Even if there are no questions at all about an individual’s character, it is almost impossible to work effectively with a colleague whose work itself is not trusted.”

Anything from the world of organization development and leadership applies to humans in general, and yet there are very real reasons why the concepts don’t always map comfortably to teams of faculty. The trust triangle maps, but the specific impact of each vertex may vary with circumstances.