I have come to conclude that there is scarcely a more important and relevant discussion topic for city/county management, especially now, than this thing we call “trust.” In fact, I think it was an important thing to talk about in 1996 when I first darkened the doors of city hall. However, particularly since the turn of the last century, I have witnessed an accelerated erosion of public trust in all governmental institutions, including local government.

This growing trust deficit has come with some pretty nasty side effects. Not that these haven’t always been among us, but they now appear more pronounced than ever before. I don’t think many in our profession would disagree that, generally across the United States, civic engagement is low and agitation is high. It is easier today to fill the council chambers with the angry and the outraged than it has ever been. 

Growing hostility and polarization have meanwhile created a difficult environment for our employees, the vast majority of whom simply want to make life better for our residents. This situation isn’t getting any better, nor is it going to get better, primarily because we are not actively and sufficiently engaged in building or repairing trust.

Successfully nurturing trust with our residents requires continuous attention and effort. Trust is not static. We are either elevating trust or it is declining. However, before we embark upon an examination of why trust is so very important and what can be done to rekindle it, we need to share or at least accept, for the purposes of our discussion, a common understanding of what trust is. It is common to confuse trust with confidence, for instance. One may say, “I trust the city to pick up my garbage on Tuesday,” “I trust my coworkers to do their job,” “I trust my bank to safeguard my money,” etc. But what they’re really saying is that they have confidence in certain outcomes materializing.

For example, every time I board an airplane, I don’t give a second thought as to whether the pilot is qualified and able to safely fly me to my destination. Because I’ve seen the outcome of my arriving unharmed many times, I am confident that it will be so again. I don’t “trust” the pilot. I don’t even know who the pilot is or anything about him or her. I have confidence, nevertheless, based on my experience; and I book my ticket with the confidence that the airline will only place a qualified person into the captain’s chair. When they stop doing that, I will reevaluate my confidence…if I’m still around.

In contrast to simple confidence, when I trust someone, I am “entrusting” him or her with something very valuable or precious. I am making them a trustee, and I am giving them stewardship for something that’s important to me. To be “trusted” literally means to be made a custodian for something of high importance.

Over the years, I have served officially as a “trustee” for a regional dispatch center and two hospitals. In all three cases, there was someone who was depending on me to take care of that center and those hospitals. As a trustee, I felt the weight of those responsibilities and was acutely aware of the lives I would unintentionally harm if I failed to ensure those entities operated in the best interests of those being served. Likewise, when we trust someone, we are giving them custodianship of something very important to us, and those whom we truly trust should feel the weight of that responsibility.

This is why when trust is betrayed it is usually much more devasting than when someone simply lets us down, and this sense of betrayal can emerge from our experiences with any person or even institution that we had once decided to trust. When we have entrusted someone with something that is very important to us and they betray that responsibility or stewardship, we feel the pain on a very spiritual level. Because we have been injured, we may find it very difficult to be vulnerable enough to trust that person or institution in the future…or any other similar person or institution. 

Indeed, many of us are heirs to the betrayals perpetrated by those who came before us. I still recall a phone call from a woman who screamed at me for a half hour about how our city had betrayed her in 1963! She vowed that she would never trust the city again and then hung up. On a city level, betrayals happen when a resident determines that we in city hall neither care about nor care for them and their community. And trust once lost is indeed difficult to recapture.

When I was young, my coaches used to tell me to “play through the pain.” It was a different era, I get it. Unfortunately, many in our profession fail to grasp the importance of elevating or recapturing trust. They have concluded that residents will never be happy and that they are inherently suspicious, cynical, and critical. I can just hear some of them saying, “It’s better to just put your big boy or girl pants on and play through the pain. It’s just the way the profession is. People aren’t going to trust us, and so what! I don’t need them to trust me. I just need them to pay their taxes and live somewhat functional lives.” This is certainly one approach, but consider what Dr. Henry Cloud, a New York Times bestselling author, psychologist, researcher, and leadership expert, has discovered regarding the impacts of trust upon our institutions, communities, and nation. Among many positive effects of high trust, Dr. Cloud’s research shows that:

• Rises in trust affect gross domestic product growth in economies through increases of business investment, human capital accumulation, and organizational improvements.
• Work teams with high trust outperform teams with low trust in results across multiple measures.
• High trust leaders are more effective across multiple measures.
• Performance, turnover, and customer experience are affected by trust, and the absence of trust leads to multiple business problems.
• What is referred to as “social trust” (positive attitudes toward other members of society) increases individual success; maintains health; reduces anxiety; increases welfare, health, and education; and improves physical and mental health in a society, while low trust does the opposite. 

Trust is more than an emotion. It is the basis for all human relationships. That’s why the absence of trust in your community can have such a dramatic effect on just about everything. Like Dr. Cloud, allow me to accentuate the positive and provide a few of the positive effects of high trust inside and outside of city hall.

• There exists a higher level and frequency of resident engagement in civic life. High community trust environments tend to encourage more direct engagement with local government through service and volunteerism, voting, and event attendance. Conversely, when people feel betrayed, the first instinct is to withdraw.
• Civility is generally the rule, not the exception. Dialogue between residents and those who serve them is respectful and focused on developing win-win solutions to problems.
• There is greater political calm and continuity in local government leadership.
• Outside investment (economic development) in the community is facilitated. Development dollars are usually attracted to politically placid, stable environments.
• It becomes easier to recruit and retain high-quality employees, and they are much more productive than their counterparts in low-trust environments.

So you may ask, “What did I ever do to lose their trust?” Perhaps nothing. That’s the point! When it comes to trust, what you aren’t doing is just as important, perhaps more so, than what you are doing. Remember my exchange with the irate woman? I was born in 1963! I didn’t do a thing to inspire her lack of trust in our city. There are simply things well outside of our control that created our low-trust environment and factors that keep it low. However, we don’t need to address the past. We need to talk about the future. What are we going to do about recapturing and elevating the trust of our residents?

Dr. Cloud, in his book, Trust, presents what he refers to as the five essentials of trust: understanding, motive, ability, character, and track record. Each of these needs to be or should be present if we are to rationally expect someone to trust us. As it relates to our topic at hand, local government, I propose to you a slightly different set of essentials. I call these the five pillars of community trust:

• Listening.
• Authenticity.
• Delivering.
• Integrity.
• Sustained Effort.

Listening

My experience is that we “municipal types” spend far too much time and energy in the exercise of convincing residents that we are worthy of their trust instead of more appropriately demonstrating our trustworthiness by first and foremost listening to them, and I mean deep listening. As human beings, we do not and will not trust someone we do not believe hears us and understands us. Deep listening entails listening to understand, not simply giving the other person a chance to talk. Public hearings and surveys do little by themselves to communicate that we are truly listening to understand. As we engage in deep listening, demonstrating our earnestness to understand, we send the first trust signal to our residents that says, “This might be someone I can trust.”

Authenticity

Authenticity is that characteristic or element that brings a genuineness to our listening. This entails demonstrating that we not only heard and understood, but that what we heard and understood is important to us, that we have our residents’ best interests at heart and in mind. Our ability to demonstrate authenticity sends the second trust signal that says, “I was not only heard and understood, but I think they actually want to do something about it.” The trust needle begins to rise, and this show of empathy and genuine concern inspires hope.

Delivering

Of course, listening and authenticity fall flat and may ironically cause further erosion of trust if we fail to follow through with what we know and understand by exercising our professional will and demonstrating an ability to deliver on what we now understand the need is. We sometimes refer to this as competency. Competency doesn’t have anything to do with diplomas, credentials, or even talent. None of that matters if we fail to deliver. Competency is marked by action, not by qualifications. When authenticity collides with true competency, trust almost always escalates. You’ve now sent the third trust signal. The one that says, “I was not only heard and understood, but then I received what I needed.” How easy is it to trust a person or institution that consistently listens, understands, and delivers!

Integrity

Nothing will blow a hole into the hull of trust like dishonesty or unethical behavior. One ethical lapse and trust may never be recovered. I’m not saying that a comeback cannot be made, but it will certainly become a mountain to scale. Even the perception or appearance of impropriety can kill trust. A friend of mine was a fighter pilot. He told me that they were forbidden to fly closer than 500 feet above a tree canopy. He set his personal standard at 1,000 feet just to ensure he was always flying well above the tree line. My advice to you is likewise to always fly well above the tree line. A lot of otherwise very honest people have lost professional and political careers over matters and situations that had initially appeared harmless or innocuous. A good rule of thumb is that if you have even the smallest question about the ethical nature of something, stay away from it. Fly well above the tree line.

Sustained Effort

Finally, few things are more harmful to long-term trust than short-term effort. As you begin to address resident trust, make sure that this signals a new way of doing business. It is essential that trust building becomes a part of your cultural and organizational DNA. Your efforts cannot be a flash in the pan. If they are, the next time someone at city hall has an epiphany and decides to embark upon an effort to build trust with your residents, it will be much more difficult to accomplish. 

It’s almost like you can hear the critics say, “Oh, here we go again! We tried that before. It didn’t work then, and it’s not going to work this time.” They can throw these peanuts from the gallery because it’s partially true. A more correct version of this critique would be: “We tried this before; and because we stopped, it’s going to be tougher to pull off this time.” Once you sense the inertia and have a bit of wind at your back, keep going!

As a closing word regarding sustained effort, don’t become disheartened if, despite doing all the right things, your residents don’t rush into your arms. Some of them are skeptical and have felt betrayed by government for years. Others aren’t going to know what to think. They’ll have to see things play out for a while before reengaging. Yet some will never trust local government, come what may. Whatever effort you pursue to regain or elevate resident trust, I can promise that you will receive reactions that fall along a well-formed bell curve. The key is to be patient and press forward knowing that you are doing the right things, and the benefits of doing so are well worth the effort.

Trust, simply put, is the basis for all productive relationships, and this includes your relationships with the people you serve. Without it, even the wealthiest communities are left impotent. With it, even cities and counties of little means can pull off great things. This is because when you enjoy the trust of your residents, you are empowered to avoid the headwinds to progress with which so many of our colleagues grapple. Disengagement and apathy, polarization, agitation, cynicism, extremism, dysfunctionality, outrage, and outright hostility are not just signs of the times and the fate of your community. They are symptoms of trust anemia, and you can begin today to treat this condition by authentically providing your residents every reason to trust their local government again.

RICK DAVIS, ICMA-CM, is assistant city manager of League City, Texas, USA. He is the author of Elevating Trust in Local Government: The Power of Community-Based Strategic Planning. (rick.davis@leaguecitytx.gov)