Intuitively I knew it from my conversations with leaders. Trust always ranks highly in stated values. Leaders talk about empowering team members, stepping back from day to day tasks and letting go of the need to do things ‘their way’. And a lot of the time the behaviours stick, on the good days the leaders embody the value they name. But the test of values is not in the easy days. It’s easy to listen when you are not busy, easy to be empathetic when people are being reasonable and easy to be collaborative when your colleagues are supportive. When the conditions align for trust, it’s easy to live it.

The true test of values comes on the hard days. Can you trust in others’ reliability when the stakes are high? Can you trust in their judgement when they let you down before? When does trust become naivety? Do you trust people who demonstrate untrustworthy behaviours themselves? How far does the value of trust go?

We tend to think of values as the absolute non negotiable in your life. With many values this remains fully within your own control. Values like Optimism, Well-being, Excellence, Courage, and Humility are usually easier to keep stable in the midst of anything that challenges that value. In fact, challenges to that value are usually reasons to strengthen the value, in those moments it becomes more important. When work pressures rise, you need to lean into your value of well-being to keep you balanced. When things get tough, your value of optimism gets you through. When people are engaging in ethically questionable behaviour, your courage will help you do the right thing and when you have big successes your humility will keep you grounded.

So why is trust different?

Trust, in the way that people usually view it is relational. My trust of you depends on your behaviours. I trust you, until you show me you can’t be trusted. This raises a challenge with trust as a value. Values are part of you, they are your North Star, the principles you seek to return to across circumstances. But people don’t treat trust in that way. It flexes and changes depending on who you are dealing with and the specific circumstance.

Trust may be particularly challenging because there are two forces operating simultaneously: our own commitment to trust and our ongoing assessment of whether another person is trustworthy.

There is no surprise then that trust showed in the Leadership Values Map data as one of the most unstable values. Under pressure, trust collapses.

43% of leaders identify trust as a core value and only 12% live it under pressure.

Source: The Values Lab

Perhaps then we need time to rethink how we think about trust.

Trust can be both a value and a relationship metric. On a metric level, we assess the degree of trust between ourselves and another person. That’s how we usually think about trust, which is helpful for relationships, and less helpful as a value. As a value, we should think about trust differently.

As a leader who values trust, I embody it because that is who I want to be as a leader. I trust in the capability of people, I trust in the integrity of people and I trust in people’s intentions. As a leader who prioritises trust, I know that when I give trust, good things happen. People live up to the expectations I have of them, people level up and trust their own judgement.

Living trust as a value doesn’t mean ignoring evidence. It means your default orientation is towards trust rather than control, suspicion or self-protection. Embodying trust as a leader doesn’t mean you don’t set boundaries or pull back responsibilities when someone fails to live up to expectations. But you do it in a way that keeps trust at the core: “You are not ready for this level of responsibility, but I trust in your capability and we’ll build up to it.”

If trust is genuinely your value, another person’s behaviour may change how much you trust them - but it shouldn’t change the kind of leader you become.

We can therefore see trust in these two ways:

Relational trust

How much do I currently trust this person, given what I know about their competence, reliability, integrity and intentions?

Trust as a value

What orientation towards people do I choose to bring as a leader?

I think people select the value of trust over others because it’s an appealing one. We all want trust in our relationships, professional and personal. But to really embody trust as a value is a different proposition.

When another person gives you reason to trust them less, does your value of trust disappear with it?