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Trust has knowledge and intention
The two parts of trust
A person can trust someone's intentions and still think the person is a putz, in which case there is no trust. A person can trust someone's skill and doubt their intentions, in which case the right move is to run the other way. Doug Leone taught his partners at Sequoia early on to see trust as having both components.
The zeroth tenet
When he wrote the firm's tenets, performance came first and teamwork second, and he told the firm that without those two the other eight don't matter. After publishing them, he realized he had forgotten the zeroth tenet, which is trust. He calls trust an accelerant.
Trust and speed
In an organization with trust, decisions come extremely fast. In companies with a broken culture where no one trusts anyone, nothing gets done, and by the time a decision made by someone who knows the answer travels up to the VP or the CEO, it has become a whole different thing.
How do researchers break trust into parts?
In 1995, Roger Mayer, James Davis, and F. David Schoorman published a model in the Academy of Management Review in which trustworthiness rests on three traits: ability, benevolence, and integrity. Ability corresponds to skill, while benevolence and integrity cover intent. The model has become one of the most cited in organizational research.
Why does trust speed up decisions?
Economist Ronald Coase argued in 1937 that every transaction carries costs for searching, negotiating, and monitoring. Where parties trust one another, much of that checking disappears, and decisions can proceed on a handshake. In low-trust settings, those costs return as extra approvals, written confirmations, and legal review.
Why do decisions change as they move up?
In a 1974 study, Charles O'Reilly and Karlene Roberts found that information is filtered as it passes up an organization's hierarchy. Each manager summarizes and softens what they pass on, usually in ways that protect their own position. After several layers, the message that reaches the top can differ a great deal from the original.
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