Trust is a very tricky topic because on one hand we have a sense of trust with the world around us especially with the people that we interact with we have to trust them because we're dependent on them and many many different aspects of life and what this dependence really just comes down to is I have needs and I'm hoping you can fulfill those needs and you have need and you're hoping that I can fulfill those needs and we rely on one another to fulfill each other's needs now.
I'm very lucky because I get to work with a lot of very. Trustworthy people they're not always experienced and that is often kind of put together packed up with trust somebody's experience and you can trust that they know what they're talking about or they know what they're doing or they have something they can build off of but often I've worked with you very young professionals who may have not had the kinds of experience that a mid-level or a senior level professional might have and so I trust that in the process of our collaboration that they're gonna gain the necessary skills, they're gonna gain the necessary ability.
These to actually contribute in a significant way to the needs of our mission to the needs of our work now. I also do a lot of teaching and there's a huge amount of trust that's built into the teaching process and I think we it goes unrecognized so I trust that my students are putting forth their best effort that if they come to me and they're asking me questions or if they need support or they need help then they've given it their best shot and that when they come to me, it's because I trust that they're actually have a need that that they're expressed.
That I can fulfill. And of course my students trust me a great deal, they trust me to evaluate their assignments fairly they trust me to give them information that is credible that has been validated that is based on research and so this kind of bilateral this two-way flow of trust between people between an individual and groups or between groups of people is really really important to the way our society is run and now the last issue of trust that I think is really critical for us to kind of think about is how.
Trust operates and teams now in one sense if you have a team that's relatively homogenous that's made up of people from very similar backgrounds, very similar life experiences, it can be really easy to establish trust it can be really easy to establish rapport with each other because you're all working off of a very similar playbook now the challenge with this is that oftentimes homogenous teams teams that have people from more or less similar backgrounds can't really produce innovative ideas because they're not drawn.
From the broadest possible menu of options when it comes to life experience. So then you have your left with this issue of diversity in teams So now we have a team highly diverse the people within the team are from very very different backgrounds, and they come from very very different life experiences.
And being able to establish trust and rapport in these teams as absolutely critical because this is what communication is really founded upon. And so, I have to be able to trust the other members of my team even though I don't know their life experience even though I may not be familiar with their background and that way in that way.
I need. To make sure that I'm not looking at their contributions as somehow being invalid or not as legitimate as my contributions. We have to look at each other's contributions as being equally valuable. And so establishing trust in these teams can be challenging but it's a challenge that's well worth tackling because once you've established that feeling of interdependence that collective identity within a team that makes you unstoppable when it comes to achieving your goals.
So as you're working within a different groups of people as you're putting together teams remember the importance of trust.
