Recently, I ran into a great podcast, "Trust vs. Suspicion" by Andy Stanley, that in a way talks about this concept. He describes the relationship between trust and suspicion and gives some guidelines on how we can change our mindsets. One of the things I personally found interesting was his example from Patrick Lencioni book "The Advantage", where he talked about how human nature naturally leads us to be suspicious of someone's intent. Specifically he talked about what Lencioni referred to as the fundamental attribution error.
"The fundamental attribution error is the tendency to attribute the negative or frustrating behaviors of colleagues to their intentions or personalities. On the flip side, attributing your own frustrating or negative behaviors to environmental factors."
- Patrick Lencioni
To put it in a real world context, imagine you see your co-worker constantly getting up to take personal phone calls while working a project with tight deadlines. You may immediately attribute that to their intentions or personality; for example, they may have a lack of respect for their peers and the organization, or you may think they are looking for ways to leave the organization or do not care about the deadlines in front of you. All things you've made up because you have decided to be suspicious of the individual's activities rather than just trusting them and assuming positive intent. On the other hand, if you were taking those personal phone calls, you would not necessarily see an issue with it because you knew you were working late and just wanted to make sure the family was okay or just needed to make arrangements so things were taken care of while you worked on the deadline. You instantly believe you should get that benefit of the doubt from others, but you do not extend that belief to others.
The key here is to recognize that you are doing this and work to change your mindset. Start looking at it from the other's perspective and trust that they have positive intentions. Give them the benefit of the doubt that you feel should be afforded to you.
"Change the way you look at things, and the things you look at will change"
- Wayne Dyer
Andy Stanley goes on in the podcast to talk about how organizational leaders should handle this once they recognize this is part of human nature. I thought he made a great point: make it explicit, talk about it as a leadership team and decide to fill gaps with trust and not suspicion. As he said there is no win organizationally filling gaps with suspicion, but there is a huge win in filling it with trust (even if ultimately proven wrong in the end). Being intentional about the way you want your organization to think and act is critical.
Although my work environment largely has a culture of assuming positive intent, it's very easy to get away from that way of thinking in tough times. We understand that it can be a difficult journey fighting human nature, so if we see our peers stray or start going in a negative direction, we do our best to not feed the fire but to provide words of encouragement or guidance to each other so we can course correct ourselves and get us back on the better path.
If you are a leader of your organization, your organization's culture (assuming you've been around a few years) is largely a make up of how you work and communicate. You want to definitely build up an environment of trust first, assume positive intent first, and ultimately it will lead to less drama within your organization and in turn better focus and better results.
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