I had a great time on Wednesday speaking to the Virginia Association of Realtors Leadership conference on the topic of building trust between members and the board. One of the first papers I ever had published was on trust (back in 1995), and being from the conflict resolution field, it's always been a part of my professional interest.
So I was happy to do a session about trust that was focused on associations. I think trust is particularly relevant to association management, because associations operate in incredibly complex environments. Multiple stakeholders with conflicting interests, all under the umbrella of a decentralized and often unclear governance structure. That's complexity!
Trust is somewhat of a secret weapon for dealing with complexity. Systems with high trust can eliminate the effort and conversations and time and energy that go into verifying and investigating and checking and explaining. When there is high trust, boards are left to focus on the strategic, and staff and committees can be energized by their independence and leeway. Experimentation and innovation is more likely.
My presentation talked about three different levels of trust, and four different areas you can focus on to build trust. The slides are embedded below (or you can find them here).
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“Trust is somewhat of a secret weapon for dealing with complexity.”
It’s important to recognize that high levels of trust also can be an obstacle to dealing productively and generatively with complexity. Association governing groups typically enjoy considerable bonding social capital built up over years of close collaboration among their members. Bonding social capital creates strong ties within the group, but also tends to make the group more insular and more susceptible to groupthink.
To deal effectively with complexity, governing groups need an integrative mindset, the ability to include information and insight from external sources that runs counter to the group’s shared conventional wisdom and design new solutions. Many association boards struggle with this challenge in dealing with complex problems, and instead default to the simple decision-making rules of thumb the group has perfected over many years of working together. Because they trust each other more than they trust outside information they often don’t like, they are unable to deal with the complex issues productively and generatively.
Governing groups need to build “bridging social capital” with the rest of the association’s social leadership system to ensure the free and constant flow of ideas and information, and to develop a distributed capacity for integrative thinking and intelligent decision-making in handling complex issues.
Jeff, awesome comment! I agree with what you’re saying about Boards being so close that groupthink results. Although I am not sure that is really all about trust. I think what you’re talking about in terms of social capital includes trust, but goes far beyond it. Same with disliking outside information. It’s not really that they don’t trust the outside information–they just don’t like it.
I think you can build the social capital that leads to insular thinking WITHOUT real trust. Trust means being vulnerable with each other, and the kind of closeness you are talking about often excludes that. They like their close bonds almost BECAUSE they don’t require each other to be really open or take risks.
Interesting comments. If you read Fukuyama’s book on Trust and Society, you’ll see that in high trust-high kinship societies, innovation is actually stifled because of the resistance to external perspectives. So if associations close in on themselves, then yes, they must have high trust- but innovation suffers. And group-think is indeed a risk.
On the other hand, their relationship capital will be high. It’s a key tension which emerges in all high-trust groups. And there is a tendency to work inwardly so much that you forget your greater purpose.
I see this in my work in employee engagement. Organizations are now so focused on employee engagement that they forget that ultimately, it is the customer who is the most important person in the equation. Maybe it’s time to focus on customer engagement. And that is a complex trust-building exercise in itself!