Trust is not transparency

It’s easy to link the ideas of trust and transparency, and they certainly go together to a degree. However, real trust comes from other areas.

In his podcast interview with Rachel Botsman, Adam Grant shared this brief summary of their conversation:

“My biggest takeaway from Rachel is that the key to trust is not transparency. It’s integrity and reliability. There’s nothing more important than following through on your commitments and making it clear that people can count on you when it counts most.”

Transparency can be fantastic and it can certainly help to build trust, but integrity and reliability are what really count.

These words both came up while I was reading “The Challenger Sale”, with a very simple statement behind both of those words: you either are or you aren’t.

As I mentioned in that other post, there isn’t a lot of grey area with these. Think of the people you know, and you can put almost all of them into buckets of “are reliable” / “aren’t reliable” and “has integrity” / “doesn’t have integrity”. There’s very few people that fall in-between.

Both take a long time to build up, and can be lost in an instant, but if you want others to really trust you, it’s the path you need to take.