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Trust needs kept promises
The business book The Speed of Trust makes the point with a brother-in-law. Picture a brother-in-law who married your sister and is a great guy you really like. He borrows your lawnmower and promises to bring it back next week, and he never does. You begin to lose a little trust in him, even though the relationship is warm.
For an officer, or a leader anywhere, building trust starts with being authentic and building a personal relationship. It ends with delivery: if you tell people you are going to do something, you have to follow through. After enough missed promises, people start to wonder whether they can trust even a nice guy like McRaven, because he didn't deliver on this promise, this promise, or this promise.
Why do missed promises damage warm relationships?
Researchers Roger Mayer, James Davis, and David Schoorman proposed in 1995 that trust rests on three perceptions: ability, benevolence, and integrity. A warm relationship supplies benevolence, because the person seems to care about you. A broken promise lowers the perception of integrity, which includes keeping commitments. Their model appeared in the Academy of Management Review.
Why does trust fall faster than it builds?
Psychologist Paul Slovic described this as the asymmetry principle in a 1993 paper in Risk Analysis. Trust-destroying events are more visible and weigh more heavily than trust-building ones. A single failure stands out, while many successes blend into the background. Slovic also noted that distrust tends to reinforce itself, since distrustful people avoid the situations that could disprove it.
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