Trust and Networks

At work today, my team and I went through training on something called the "Speed of Trust" which essentially argues that the more trust an organization has the less costs there are associated with doing business. Not only are things cheaper, but they happen faster. I was actually pleasantly surprised, I'm typically pretty skeptical of things like this as a rule because I feel that they compress extremely complicated ideas down to a single scale to be measured on. However, with the facilitator's contribution of how the different types of powers interact with trust it became a lot more meaningful, even if there were so many platitudes provided by the author of the book during the videos that were shown.

I think that there's one area that was definitely missing from this topic that was only moderately touched on - Networks. There are plenty of network theories that discuss the obvious cost savings and accumulation of social capital in better ways than was covered in this discussion.

Social Capital is a way of measuring how much influence you have in a network. Unfortunately, the only networks that were recognized in this method are the formal networks that are created simply by being an organization. There was no discussion of how people can create informal networks that can have more influence on the organization than the actual formal network structures. For instance, if I want to change the direction of some project and I'm struggling within the project itself, I may try to use my formal structure of going up through my manager over to one of the managers of the people on the team. However, this is typically considered poor form, another option would be to discuss the topic with someone else that is influential and spend some social capital and have the problem resolved informally. These networks can influence the structure of organizations because people that are managers may not be the thought leaders in the organizations. When striving for change in an organization it is crucial to expend social capital on the most influential people - titlewise or otherwise.

Furthermore, these networks can enable anyone to generate more powerful ideas. As you discuss issues or ideas with many different people in the organization and include their suggestions or comments around the idea/issue it's possible to create significantly better ideas. Then whenever you've come to the point where you'd like to enact your idea, you've already built a coalition of support through your conversations and will have more successful ideas.

The Speed of Trust course was pretty useful to help determine how to address trust issues in an organization. It's important to identify where and how things are going wrong. However, I think it's important to keep in mind network theory to maximize the benefit of trust.