Chapter 4
The Trust Lens
President George W. Bush and President Vladimir Putin of Russia emerged from a nearly two-hour private meeting early in Bush’s first term pledging that they would work together to keep peace and to usher in a new era of US-Russian relations. “I looked the man in the eye,” Bush said as the two stood together at the medieval Brdo Castle, the site of their meeting. “I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul; a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country.”
“Can I trust him? I can.”1
. . .
What President Bush had done in that first encounter with his fellow head of state (though I leave it to the reader to decide whether Bush had done it well) was something that all human beings do when getting to know one another—he looked at Putin through the trust lens. This is the lens that people are wearing when they are meeting you for the first time or when they feel they are still getting to know you. Its roots lie in humans’ distant past, when determining whether another creature meant you harm was priority number one, all day, every day. In the modern era, we worry less about our physical safety (though we do still worry about that, too) and more about whether new acquaintances are trustworthy.
In other words, we want to know if other people pose a threat to us—to our relationships, to our careers, to our overall happiness and well-being. Are you going to make trouble for me? we wonder. We want to know if our new colleague will be competitive and undermine us at work. We want to know if the new couple next door will be friendly and responsible, or if they’ll throw loud parties at all hours or constantly complain about the hedges that need clipping. Is it OK to let my guard down, or do I need to stay on the alert? When someone else is meeting you—whether or not they realize it consciously—that’s what they are wondering, too.
The benefits of projecting trustworthiness (and the costs of failing to do so) are enormous, particularly in the workplace. Studies show, for instance, that the willingness to share knowledge with colleagues—a sticking point in most large organizations—is strongly predicted by feelings of trust among employees.2 People are less territorial and less concerned with watching their backs when coworkers are identified as friends rather than foes. Organizations whose CEOs and top management teams inspire trust also have significantly lower employee turnover.3 And employees who trust one another experience greater job satisfaction and less job stress.4 All these observations are not surprising, really—what’s more stressful than having to constantly be on the lookout for coworker sabotage?
And remember those challenging “stretch” goals that everyone is always telling you to set for yourself and your team? Well, recent research shows that while setting higher, more difficult goals does indeed lead to better performance in organizations, it does so only when employees trust the manager doing the goal setting.5 When that doesn’t happen—when your employees aren’t confident that you have their best interests (and the organization’s) at heart—then no one feels motivated to tackle the big challenges, and stretch goals simply don’t get met.
So there is a lot riding on whether you come across as trustworthy. Studies suggest that in order to figure out whether you are trustworthy, others analyze your words and deeds to find the answers to two questions:
- Do you have good intentions toward me—are you a friend or a foe?
- Do you have what it takes to act on those intentions?
The second question is just as important as the first, because if the answer to the second one is no, then you are more or less harmless no matter what your intentions are.
Again, other people don’t necessarily realize that they are asking (and answering) these questions, because much of this is happening very quickly at an unconscious level. It’s a Phase 1 process, though as I described it earlier, it’s Phase 1 with a specific agenda. The goal is not simply to form an impression of you, but also to establish whether you are an ally or an enemy.
So where do perceivers find the answers to these questions? Decades of research show that they are highly tuned into two particular aspects of your character, right from the get-go—your warmth and your competence.6 Your warmth—friendliness, loyalty, empathy—is taken as evidence that you have good intentions toward the perceiver. Your competence—intelligence, skill, effectiveness—is taken as evidence that you can act on your intentions if you want to. Competent people are therefore valuable allies or potent enemies. Less competent people are objects of compassion or scorn—if we bother to think about them at all.
According to Harvard psychologist Amy Cuddy, a major contributor to this body of research, perceptions of warmth and competence account for roughly 90 percent of the variability in whether you are perceived positively or negatively by others.7 Thus, the importance of learning to project warmth and competence—to come across as a valuable ally—cannot be overstated.
Conveying Warmth
How can you let people know that they can trust you to be on their side—that you want nothing but the best for them? Well, I suppose you could just come right out and say it. My name is Heidi, and I mean you no harm. But there are very few circumstances in which that would not be profoundly weird. And weirdness isn’t a great facilitator of trust.
Instead, you need to signal your warmth more indirectly. When people try to appear warm, they often do things like give compliments, perform favors, and show interest in the perceiver’s thoughts and feelings.8 They try to display qualities like kindness, sincerity, empathy, and friendliness, each of which captures some aspect of valuing others at least as much as, if not more than, you value yourself.
Let’s look at several strategies to improve your warmth quotient.
Pay Attention
When you are with another person, make eye contact and hold it—both when you are speaking and when you are listening. Nod from time to time to show that you are understanding what’s being said to you. Smile, especially when the other person does. And above all else, really focus on what is being said to you—people need to feel that they have been heard, even when you can’t give them what they are asking for or can’t be of particular help. Research shows that eye contact, nodding, and smiling are the three key physical indicators of warmth. Research also shows that people generally have no idea when they are not doing these things, so you might want to ask your friends and family if this is something you need to work on.9
When a friend of mine began his new position as the head of an editorial team, he deliberately sought to convey to his new employees the sense that he valued everyone’s point of view. So at team meetings, he made sure to put on what he calls his “active listening face” while others were speaking. After a few weeks of meetings, one team member finally summoned up the courage to ask him the question that had been on everyone’s mind.
“Tim,” the employee asked, “are you angry with us right now?”
“No, no,” he replied. “This is my active listening face.”
“Oh. Well, just so you know, your active listening face looks really angry.”
Keep this cautionary tale in mind, and get some feedback on what exactly you are doing with your own face when you are with other people. The answers may surprise you.
Show Empathy
When you are getting to know someone, take the time to mentally put yourself in your perceiver’s shoes, to really try to grasp his or her perspective. The more deliberately and vividly you do this, the better. (Don’t worry—perspective taking is a skill that gets easier and more automatic with practice.) Try to relate to the perceiver by finding commonalities—shared likes, dislikes, and past experiences. Use phrases like “I imagine you must have felt . . .” to convey that empathy directly.
One particularly effective, but often overlooked, method is what psychologists call the superfluous apology—saying “I’m sorry,” not as a way of accepting blame, but as a way of expressing regret over another person’s hardship. (In other words, apologizing for something you clearly didn’t cause.) Many people do this intuitively, saying things like “I’m sorry about the rain,” or “I’m sorry your plane was delayed,” when it’s obvious they are in no way responsible for either circumstance. Superfluous apologies are a simple and powerful way to express that you have taken that person’s perspective, understand his or her experience, and wish that things had turned out better. And it produces tangible increases in trust—so much, in fact, that people who receive superfluous apologies become much more willing to part with one of their most precious possessions: their cell phones.
Researchers at Harvard Business School and Wharton had a male undergraduate approach sixty-five strangers in a large train station on rainy days and ask to borrow their cell phone. Half the time, he included the superfluous apology “I’m so sorry about the rain!” before asking, “Can I borrow your cell phone?” A remarkable 47 percent of those who received the superfluous apology gave him the cell phone, compared with only 9 percent who did not.10
Hang on, you say. Isn’t apologizing a sign of weakness? And couldn’t a superfluous apology, under the wrong conditions, be confused with actually taking blame? Well, even if it is, that’s OK. Recent research shows that people who are willing to take responsibility for their own failures and for the failures of the teams in which they work are perceived to have greater character, more personal integrity, and more positive intentions toward others—all powerful facilitators of trust.11 So go ahead and say you’re sorry. Good things are sure to come from it.
Trust Them First
Human beings have a deeply rooted tendency toward reciprocity. We are naturally inclined to want to do favors, give gifts, and work to promote those who have done these things for us in the past. This is why sales pitches often involve throwing in something “free”—as in buy-one-get-one-free, or act-now-and-receive-a-free-bottle-opener-with-every-Snuggie. People unconsciously encode this free item as a gift that should be returned in kind, say, by buying the product they are trying to sell you.
The same principle of reciprocity holds when it comes to trust. We are more likely to feel we can trust someone who has trusted us first—someone who has been openly cooperative rather than competitive and put others’ interests above their own. Obviously this strategy is not without some risk, but again, the payoff is generally well worth the chance you are taking.
You can also try sharing personal (but appropriate!) stories of your past experiences. Allowing yourself to be a bit vulnerable is a great way to project warmth. Talk about your struggles and challenges. Let the perceiver know your fallible, human side. Far from seeing you negatively, the perceiver is likely to feel that this invitation to intimacy indicates that you are on the same team.
Conveying Competence
Being able—through your skills and abilities—to act on your intentions is a key component of trust. Allies are only valuable when they can be trusted to be effective. When your boss doesn’t trust you to act on your intentions, you don’t get key assignments, promotions, or the latitude to do things your own way and take risks. When your employees don’t trust you to make good on your promises, you don’t get their best effort or all the information you need from them to make good decisions.
Much of the advice you hear about projecting competence is fairly obvious: highlight your accomplishments and experience, be self-assured, avoid defensiveness. And again, make eye contact. Really, I can’t overstate the importance of this simple strategy. Making eye contact while speaking is, in fact, significantly correlated with IQ—and somehow, people seem to know it. Those who make eye contact are consistently judged as more intelligent.12 While we’re at it, easy-to-understand communication, faster speech rate, gesturing, nodding, and upright posture all lead to perceptions of greater competency, too.
Here are a few less obvious, but no less important, strategies you should be using to get your effectiveness across.
(Appear to) Have Willpower
Willpower is almost entirely overlooked by the make-a-good-impression gurus. But if you want other people to believe that you are trustworthy, you should be aware that you may be seriously undermining that belief if you appear to lack self-control. Research shows that people just won’t trust you when you seem to have a willpower problem.13
If you think about it, this makes a lot of intuitive sense. We trust people because we know that when things get hard, or when it might be tempting for them to put their own interests first, they’ll resist temptation and do what’s right. And that, as everyone knows, takes self-control.
Studies show that when you publicly engage in behaviors that are indicative of low self-control, your trustworthiness is diminished.14 In other words, all those things you know you shouldn’t do—smoking; overeating; impulsive spending; being lazy, late, disorganized, excessively emotional, or quick-tempered—may be even worse for you than you even realized, because of the collateral damage they are doing to your perceived trustworthiness.
This, fundamentally, is why the public has such a big problem with politicians who cheat on their spouses. Logically, whether or not my president, senator, or congressional representative breaks a private vow made to his or her mate should have nothing to do with the official’s ability to successfully execute the responsibilities of office, right? And yet, it gives us pause, I think primarily because cheating—particularly when you are a public figure with everything to lose if you get caught—seems like the kind of impulsive, reckless behavior only someone lacking in self-control would engage in.
So what can you do to make sure your own trustworthiness is not undermined? Well, the best possible solution is obviously to get a handle on your problems and rid yourself of your bad habits once and for all. Maybe knowing that people trust you less because of them will give you the extra bit of motivation you need to tackle the challenge. But even the best possible solution will probably take some time. None of us rids ourselves of bad habits overnight, or with ease. So in the meantime, do what you can to keep your self-control issues private.
Beware of Overconfidence
While most Western leadership advisers extol the virtues of confidence, psychologists know it isn’t all it’s cracked up to be—and overconfidence is dangerous. It can lead you to be underprepared, to set unrealistic goals, and to generally make bad choices. On top of all that, when your apparent confidence seems to exceed your competence, you are likely to become an object of derision. Who would trust someone who routinely bites off more than he or she can chew? Who would admire or even want such a person as an ally in the first place? Research by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, professor of psychology at University College London, finds that overconfident people tend to be unpopular.15 And given how annoying it is to hear someone talk the talk without walking the walk, that’s really not surprising.
If, instead, you convey a more realistic sense of confidence, people will see you more positively. Show some modesty, and you’ll also be less likely to threaten the self-esteem of others (see chapter 6). In fact, Chamorro-Premuzic argues that if you exhibit some modesty with respect to your skills and abilities, people will add, on average, 20 to 30 percent to their estimate of your competence. Toot your own horn too much, and they’ll subtract the same amount. This may be a particularly useful piece of advice for executives. After all, in his thirty-plus years of studying what makes good organizations great, Jim Collins (Good to Great and Built to Last) has found that companies with humbler leaders at the helm consistently outperform their flashier competitors.
Adopt a Power Pose
Competence goes hand in hand with power, as it’s generally the people with the most ability and skill who rise in status in an organization. In the animal kingdom, the alphas often convey their dominant status through posture. They assume their full height, stick out their chests, and fan their tail feathers, all to take up as much space as possible and establish their powerful presence. The weaker omegas, on the other hand, bow down low, tucking in their limbs and tails and signaling their submission.
Human beings are no different. The most confident, powerful guy in the room is usually the one whose physical movements are most expansive—legs apart, leaning forward, arms spread wide while he gestures. He’s the CEO who isn’t afraid to swing his feet up onto the conference room table, hands behind his head and elbows jutting outward, confident in his power to spread himself out however he damn well pleases.
The nervous, powerless person holds himself very differently—he makes himself physically as small as possible: shoulders hunched, feet together, hands in his lap or arms wrapped protectively across his chest. He’s the guy in the corner who is hoping he won’t be called on, and often is barely noticed.
Psychologists have known for some time that powerful and powerless individuals adopt these poses unconsciously and that the poses themselves are in fact perceived (also unconsciously) by others as indictors of status. Your posture, like it or not, tells people a lot about you.
But more recent research reveals a new, far more surprising relationship between power and posing: their influence works in both directions. In other words, holding powerful poses can actually make you more powerful.
In one study, Amy Cuddy and her colleagues asked male and female participants to hold two poses, each for one minute. The poses were either high power (the CEO feet-up-on-the-table pose with hands behind head; or standing feet apart while leaning over a table, supported by one hand resting on the table) or low power (sitting with shoulders slumped forward and hands in lap; or standing with feet together and arms folded tightly across chest).16
After holding the high-power poses, the participants not only reported that they felt significantly more “powerful” and “in charge,” but were also more willing to take a risk when offered the chance to gamble their study earnings for double the money. The high-power posers also experienced significant increases in testosterone and decreases in cortisol (measured in their saliva), a neuroendocrine profile that has been linked in past research to dominance, competitiveness, adaptive responding to challenges, disease resistance, and leadership ability. So not only did high-power posing create psychological and behavioral changes typically associated with powerful people, but it also created physiological changes characteristic of the powerful as well.
Low-power posers, on the other hand, experienced significant drops in testosterone and increases in cortisol—giving them the typical physiological profile of the nervous and risk-averse omega. The pose left them feeling less powerful and less willing to take a chance on a big win.
How you are sitting, right now? Reflect on what you are typically doing with your body when you are at your desk, in a meeting, or simply socializing. What message is your body language—your posture, your stance, your gesturing—sending to everyone in the room? And just as important, what message is it sending to your own brain? If you sit all curled up in a ball or stand with your arms wrapped around your chest like battle armor, you are going to end up looking and feeling less powerful and less competent because your brain will assume that that’s what you are. Adopting a high-power pose is a great way to subtly signal your competence—especially if you aren’t the type to sing your own praises—while simultaneously providing a power boost to help you tackle your next challenge.
Emphasize Your Potential
It would be reasonable to assume that the best way to project competence would be to focus others on your history of accomplishments. After all, a person’s track record of success is the single most important factor in determining whether he or she gets hired for a job. Or is it?
As it happens, it isn’t. When we are deciding whom to hire, promote, or do business with, it turns out that we aren’t as impressed by the “big thing” nearly as much as we are by the “next big thing.” We have a yet another unconscious bias, leading us to prefer the potential for greatness over someone who has already achieved it.
A set of ingenious studies conducted by Stanford’s Zakary Tormala and Jayson Jia and Harvard Business School’s Michael Norton paints a very clear picture of our unconscious preference for potential over actual success.17 In one study, Tormala, Jia, and Norton asked participants to play the role of an NBA team manager who had the option of offering a contract to a particular player. To evaluate the player, the participants were given five years of excellent statistics (points scored, rebounds, assists, etc.). These statistics were described either as ones that the player had actually earned in five years of professional play or as projections of how he was capable of playing (i.e., his potential) in his first five years.
Then the “managers” were asked, “What would you pay him in his sixth year?” Those who had evaluated the player with potential for greatness said they would pay him nearly a million dollars more in annual salary ($5.25 versus $4.26 million) than those who evaluated the player with a record of actual greatness. Potential evaluators also believed their player would score more and would be more likely to make the All-Star team.
The researchers found the same pattern in evaluations of job candidates. In this case, they compared perceptions of someone with two years of relevant experience who had scored highly on a test of leadership achievement and someone with no relevant experience who scored highly on a test of leadership potential. (Both candidates had equally impressive backgrounds in every other way.) Evaluators believed the candidate with leadership potential would be more successful at the new company than the candidate with a proven record of leadership ability.
In other studies, the researchers showed how we prefer artwork and artists with potential to win awards over those that actually have, and prefer restaurants and chefs with the potential to be the next big thing in dining over those that have already made their name. In a particularly clever study, they compared two versions of Facebook ads for a real stand-up comedian. In the first version, critics said “he is the next big thing” and “everybody’s talking about him.” In the second version, critics said he “could be the next big thing” and that “in a year, everybody could be talking about him.” The ad that focused on his potential got significantly more clicks and likes.
And this is not, incidentally, a pro-youth bias in disguise. It’s true that the person with potential, rather than a proven record, is sometimes also the younger candidate, but the researchers were careful to control for age in their studies and found that it wasn’t a factor.
So, since preferring potential over a proven record is both risky and inherently irrational, why do we do it? According to these findings, the potential for success, as opposed to actual success, is more interesting because it is less certain. When human brains come across uncertainty, they tend to pay attention to information more because they want to figure it out, which leads to longer and more in-depth processing. High-potential candidates make us think harder than proven ones do. As long as the information available about the high-potential candidate is favorable, all this extra processing can lead (unconsciously) to an overall more positive view of the candidate’s competence. (That part about the information available being favorable is important. In another study, when the candidate was described as having great potential, but there was little evidence to back that up, people liked him far less than the proven achiever.)
All this suggests that you need a very different approach to projecting competence than the one you intuitively take, because your intuition is probably wrong. People are much more impressed, whether they realize it or not, by your potential than by your track record. It would be wise to start focusing your pitch on your future, rather than on your past—even if that past is very impressive indeed. It’s what you could be that makes people sit up and take notice.
Conveying Warmth and Competence: The Paradox
Here comes the tricky part. You may have begun to notice that the patterns of behaviors we associate with warmth and competence often directly contradict one another. In other words, if you appear too warm, people may question your competence—and if you appear too competent, people may assume you’re cold.
Think about it. When people are trying to appear warm, they are agreeable, engage in flattery, make kind gestures, and encourage others to talk (i.e., they are good listeners). But when they want to appear competent, they do the opposite—speaking rather than listening, focusing the conversation on their own accomplishments and abilities, and challenging the opinions of others as a demonstration of their own expertise.18 In fact, both consciously and unconsciously, people tend to use this knowledge and play down their competence (i.e., play dumb) to appear warm, and vice versa.
Psychologists refer to the apparent contradiction that people see in these traits as the compensation effect. You see evidence of this effect in some stereotypes—that women are warmer but less competent than men, that rich people are intelligent but relatively cold. Career women feminists, female intellectuals, and lesbians—so-called nontraditional women—are seen as more competent, but also (perhaps consequently) less warm. Sexism toward these women can take a particularly hostile form, in part because of their perceived failure to adhere to the women-are-warm-but-less-competent norm.
Research by Cuddy, Fiske, and Peter Glick reveals yet another troubling result of these beliefs in the modern workplace: working mothers seem warmer but less competent than other employees, while the perception of working dads gains warmth without losing competence.19 Talk about unfair! In fact, so powerful are these beliefs that when given only one kind of information (e.g., person A is very friendly, or group A is very warm), perceivers will fill in the blanks, assuming that the person or group is probably also less competent than a low-warmth individual or group.20
It seems, on the surface, to be a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t kind of scenario. If you’re seen as warm but not competent, you elicit compassion but a lack of respect. If you appear competent but cold, you elicit respect but also envy and wariness. And don’t be surprised if your colleagues are only too happy to see you stumble.
Fortunately, there is a way to resolve this paradox: focus on projecting those qualities of warmth that do not appear to evoke low competence—the moral aspects of warmth. Research by Paul Rozin (the psychologist who convinced me to abandon my chemistry major for a career in psychology, God bless him) and his colleagues has argued that moral character, rather than overall warmth, is really the best predictor of whether someone will act on his or her good intentions toward you, and therefore is the better indicator of whom to trust.
They found that traits like courageous, fair, principled, responsible, honest, and loyal—traits that lack the touchy-feeliness we generally associate with warmth—convey good intentions and trustworthiness even better than traits like sociable, funny, and agreeable, and without the connotations of low competence. (Of course, sociable, funny, and agreeable have the advantage of being much easier to convey, particularly in a short time. In a brief conversation, someone is unlikely to come away thinking you are principled, for instance.)
Importantly, warmth does not have to mean “huggable,” “nurturing,” or “kind of guy I’d like to have a beer with.” So if you just aren’t the warm-and-fuzzy type, and maybe talking about feelings makes you uncomfortable, fear not. You can project your good intentions and navigate the perils of the trust lens by being someone the perceiver can always count on to do the right thing. After all, this is ultimately what trust is actually about.
Trust and Leadership
Trust is obviously essential to good leadership. When your team members trust you as a leader, they increase their commitment to team goals. Communication improves—ideas flow more freely, increasing creativity and productivity. Perhaps most important, in the hands of a trusted leader, employees are more comfortable with change and more willing to embrace a new vision. When your team doesn’t trust you, you don’t get the group’s best effort or all the information you need from your team members to make good decisions. And you find yourself unable to inspire, unable to influence, and unable to create real change.
So we can all agree that trust is good. The problem, however, is that most people see leadership as being first and foremost about competence—as about strength and confidence and accomplishments. We are so eager to prove that we know what we’re doing as leaders that we neglect the arguably more important part of the trust formula: proving that we will act with others’ interests in mind. In other words, warmth is an afterthought.
Cuddy’s research shows that when you project competence before warmth, you run the risk of appearing cold . . . and eliciting fear from your employees. They might respect you, but fearful employees are rarely able to work at their best. And you certainly can’t blame them for wanting to jump ship once an offer to work for someone who doesn’t make them constantly anxious comes along.
So, are you a leader who projects warmth first—a leader whose top priority is making sure your team members feel they can trust you? If you suspect the answer might be no, you need to start working on your warmth pronto, because you will never be trusted without it.