The Meaning

During a public board meeting, a fellow board member asked me, “How do you define trust, Sam?”

I answered:

“I define trust as—I trust, regardless of my personal opinion of the person and my emotions toward them, that they’re going to follow through on what they say in the manner that we all agree to.”

The conversation continued. But the question stayed with me.

What does trust mean?

It is something our board has been dancing around for a while now. We have talked about establishing trust, losing trust, rebuilding trust, and creating an environment of trust. The word comes up time and time again.

But I’m not sure we have ever stopped to ask whether we mean the same thing when we use it.

For me, trust is not agreement. It is not friendship. It is not the absence of conflict or difficult feelings.

I can disagree with someone and still trust them. I can find working with someone difficult and still trust them. Trust exists when I believe that, regardless of our personal feelings, they will do what they said they would do in the way we agreed it would be done.

Then I looked up the dictionary definition.

It was broader than mine.

Trust can mean confidence in someone’s character, honesty, ability, or intentions. People who study trust in organizations make similar distinctions. We decide whether someone is trustworthy by asking several questions at once:

Are they capable of doing what is being asked?

Do they act with integrity?

Do they care about what happens to others?

Can I rely on what they say?

And beneath all of those questions is risk. Trust becomes meaningful when I allow myself, something I value, or an organization I serve to become vulnerable to someone else’s actions.

That is when I began to see the gap.

When I say, “I don’t have trust,” I may be talking about commitments and follow-through. I may be asking whether we did what we said we would do or followed the process we agreed upon.

Someone else may hear something much larger.

They may hear: I don’t think you are a good person.

I don’t believe you are honest.

I don’t think you are competent.

That isn’t what I mean.

Good people can fail to follow through. Competent people can disregard an agreed process. People with good intentions can make decisions that weaken confidence. Pointing to those failures is not necessarily a judgment on the entirety of someone’s character.

But the misunderstanding can work in both directions.

I may hear “You need to trust us” as a request to overlook a failure of process. The person saying it may simply be asking me to recognize their experience, competence, or good intentions.

They may hear my concern about follow-through as an attack on their character. I may simply be asking for a commitment to mean what it says.

Neither of us may be hearing what the other intends.

One person asks, “Why didn’t this happen the way we agreed?”

The other answers, “Why don’t you believe I’m acting in good faith?”

Both questions may be legitimate. But they are not the same question.

And if we don’t recognize that, the conversation goes in circles. One person keeps pointing to actions. The other keeps defending intentions. Both leave feeling misunderstood.

I don’t know how every other person on the board defines trust. I would have to ask them.

Maybe that is the point.

We use words as if their meanings are shared. Often, we do not discover that they aren’t until something goes wrong.

Trust. Respect. Fairness. Transparency. Accountability. Community.

These words sound solid. We put them in mission statements, policies, speeches, and public meetings. Yet each of us carries an internal version shaped by our experiences, expectations, and fears.

I say “trust,” and the word leaves me carrying my meaning. You hear “trust,” and receive it through yours.

We may believe we understand each other because the word is familiar. Meanwhile, we could be talking about two entirely different things.

That is a lonely thought.

No matter how carefully we choose our words, another person can never receive all of what we mean. Something is always lost in the space between one person speaking and another person hearing.

But there is also something freeing about it.

If misunderstanding is part of being human, then it does not always represent a failure or bad intent. Sometimes it means we need to stop defending our answers and examine the words inside the question.

When you say trust, what do you mean?

Do you mean that you believe in my character?

Do you mean that you have confidence in my competence?

Do you believe that I care about what happens to you?

Or do you mean that you can rely on me to follow through?

All of those things can contribute to trust. But they are not interchangeable.

Maybe some of our hardest conflicts persist because we think we are arguing about what happened when we are actually arguing about what the words mean.

I was asked to define trust, and I did.

Now I think we may all need to answer the question.

Damn.

We have a lot to talk about.