Fixing the trust crisis with Rachel Botsman (transcript)

Please note the following transcript may not exactly match the final audio, as minor edits or adjustments could be made during production.

[00:00:00] Rachel Botsman: It's a good time to have a conversation about trust. 

[00:00:05] Adam Grant: Hey everyone, it's Adam Grant. Welcome back to ReThinking, my podcast on the science of what makes us tick with the TED Audio Collective. I'm an organizational psychologist and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking.

My guest today is Rachel Botsman, my favorite thought leader on trust. She teaches at Oxford, her TED talks have millions of views, and she regularly motivates me to rethink my views. 

[00:00:34] Rachel Botsman: If I could blow up a misconception about trust, it would be that transparency leads to more trust. If you make that a value in your organization, I would seriously question like, what are you promising?

[00:00:46] Adam Grant: Rachel is a dynamic speaker and a relentlessly curious conversationalist. She's the host of a new audiobook, how to trust and be trusted. It's perfectly timed to a moment when so many people and institutions are facing a crisis of trust.

[00:01:04] Rachel Botsman: There are a lot of misconceptions about trust out there. So let's start to blow some up. By doing a quick exercise together. I'd now like you to think about three people in your life. It could be a friend, a family member, a work colleague, someone famous. It really doesn't matter. Now what I want you to think about is who do you trust the most. Of those three people, who do you really trust?

I know it's a bit odd to think about, but nobody's gonna know. Not even me.

[00:01:51] Adam Grant: Rachel Botsman, do you have trust issues? 

[00:01:54] Rachel Botsman: Do I have trust issues? 

[00:01:56] Adam Grant: Yes. 

[00:01:57] Rachel Botsman: I think everyone has trust issues in different contexts. I find it very easy to trust myself around creative risks and financial risks, weirdly, but find it quite tricky to take physical risks. So I think trust issues doesn't have to look like relationships that you struggle with, or that it's difficult to make friends.

I think a lot of trust issues stem from your relationship with risk and look really different in different people. So from a young age, I was really interested in how people selected friends, in bullies, in the relationships between adults and children, and how that power dynamic worked. Bad boyfriends broke my trust, but that's, we are not going there, so that's a different story.

[00:02:52] Adam Grant: I, I think that might also be a universal human experience. 

[00:02:55] Rachel Botsman: And good for you as well. 

[00:02:57] Adam Grant: Maybe. 

[00:02:58] Rachel Botsman: Maybe. 

[00:02:59] Adam Grant: I really like your definition of trust, and it's different from, I think, how most people think about trust. Describe it for me. 

[00:03:06] Rachel Botsman: So the way I define trust is that it's a belief and that it's a confident relationship with the unknown.

There's more definitions of trust than there are of love. A lot of trust definitions, they define it as knowing what to expect. Knowing what the outcome is. And I think trust is the opposite of that. That's why trust and uncertainty are so intrinsically linked. If you have high trust, you can navigate uncertainty.

You can be really comfortable with the unknown. And the reason why, when I started to see trust through that lens, it really started to reframe everything. 'Cause I started to understand why there was a relationship between high trust cultures and innovation, why there was a relationship between high trust families, and openness.

Why there was a relationship between people that deeply trusted one another and could disagree. It's because of that confidence in the unknown. 

[00:04:05] Adam Grant: As a relatively trusting person, I've done things when it comes to, you know, whether it's helping a stranger who reaches out for an introduction or advice or, you know, taking a, a gamble on, on someone I don't know that well, who has a startup idea and investing in it.

Those have never felt like risky decisions to me, because I'm confident that even the worst case scenario is not gonna hurt me in a meaningful way. And I think that that captures for me, the lived experience of saying, yeah, like I, I trust that even if this person wants to take advantage of me, I can protect myself against that.

[00:04:42] Rachel Botsman: You can trust people when the worst outcome is actually pretty low risk to you, whether that's physical risk or financial risk, but more trust is required when that risk level goes up, which is why, you know, in times of uncertainty, in times of chaos, when there's lots of unknowns, that's when you need more trust in your life, and it's when you don't have that trust and there is that uncertainty that things really start to break down.

[00:05:13] Adam Grant: One of my favorite studies of trust, asked the question of whether people who are highly trusting are Pollyannas. 

[00:05:20] Rachel Botsman: Hmm. 

[00:05:21] Adam Grant: This is Carter and Weber, I think are the, the authors. They show that people who tend to trust others more are actually better at detecting lies because they get lied to more often, but they also see the full range of what human beings are capable of.

If you are, if you are somebody who doesn't trust others, you're constantly guarded and you don't get to see the full spectrum. Whereas if you are trusting, you get to see people who are kind and honest, and you get to see people who are deceitful and manipulative, and observing that, I guess that complexity and that variety helps you get more attuned to what is trustworthy and what isn't.

And I'd love to hear you riff on that a little bit. 

[00:06:02] Rachel Botsman: And I think in that study they tested in interview context right as well, that that people were better tuning into trust signals, so they could to detect when someone was lying or slightly embellishing the truth, which I think is really interesting that once you open yourself up, and this is where I think the vulnerability piece comes in with trust, like once you allow yourself to be exposed to different situations and different people, you become a better read as to whether someone is telling the truth or whether someone is lying versus being really guarded and shut down.

I think there is a difference between giving your trust away too easily and people who make fast trust decisions. So this is something I've personally had to learn that I have gained so much in life by being a trusting person. I would say the positives far outweigh the negatives, both professionally and, and personally.

I think it makes me a better friend. I think it makes me a better parent, a better teacher, all those things. But what I used to do is make very quick decisions in high stakes environments, and that is something where I think we need to recognize that we need to slow down, that we don't have enough information to make a decision about this person.

You may have seen a study on this, but poor hiring decisions that were made due to speed and the damage that caused, there must be a high correlation where people went with intuition or they did those terrible reference checks where you're just reinforcing what you know. So I think this idea of knowing, I call it a trust pause, but being really conscious of when in your life you make a quick decision and what really drives that.

So for me, it's when I'm under pressure, I really need to fill a gap. I'm a little bit desperate. That drives the poor decision making. 

[00:08:00] Adam Grant: This goes to something else that you've highlighted that I've found really helpful, which is to be a little more nuanced about what do I trust someone to do. I keep thinking about this with Elon Musk.

I trust him a lot more on hardware than software, even before he bought Twitter. He's very good at building rockets and electric cars. I don't think he knows that much about programming, let alone managing, a tool for people to communicate and share information. 

[00:08:30] Rachel Botsman: Mm. I have many pet peeves around trust, but the generalized way we talk about trust in the world today is just not helpful.

So context is everything. Asking someone what you trust them to do and what you don't trust them to do. It's a really powerful differentiator. And like you said, there's people you might not describe as trustworthy like Elon Musk, but they are very competent at certain things. So trust really only becomes useful when you put it in context, which is why, you know, when you see, with all due respect, these trust barometers and these surveys or companies that try and measure trust in a very generalized way, I question their usefulness because it's missing context. If you bring it down into a personal level, context has also really helped me in terms of understanding narrative. So sometimes when you think there's a breakdown of trust, it's because you don't understand the context or the narrative around the other person, what their intention, what their motive is, and if you actually ask that question, you realize that they didn't intend to do any harm.

There was just something going on in their life. 

[00:09:39] Adam Grant: This speaks to so many different levels of trust. It's true for people, it's true for organizations. I think you've used an example of Amazon and your trust in them and your distrust in them. Walk me through that one, 'cause I, I found that illuminating. 

[00:09:53] Rachel Botsman: So I do this thing sometimes when I'm speaking to audiences and I ask the audience to clap for the brand that they trust the most.

And 99% of people clap for Amazon. And the reason why when you ask the audience is they start talking about how, well you know Amazon delivered the packages on time and it's really easy to return these things. And then I say, well, is that convenience? Or is that trust? And there's a pause. And then you say, well, do you trust that Amazon treats all their employees fairly or do you trust that they pay their fair share of taxes?

And it's a completely different conversation. It, it sounds so obvious when you say it. But I think it is a real shift in the way you think about trust, because I know I've been skiing with you and I, I don't trust your sense of direction and that is- 

[00:10:45] Adam Grant: Neither do I. 

[00:10:46] Rachel Botsman: No, but that is really useful to know, right?

I mean, I find it refreshing 'cause I can trust you with so many things and you're so competent, but the fact that you have no sense of direction. But that's really useful to know, right? If you know those things about people and that if you can really own those things and say, don't trust me to drive you, I'm a really bad driver. Don't trust me for directions. And sometimes I don't think we're honest enough about that. So this idea of context and trust really is key. 

[00:11:15] Adam Grant: Yeah, you definitely shouldn't ever trust me for directions anywhere, including to places I've been to many times. But I, I think that a lot of people struggle with this.

I think they struggle with it in part because they only are thinking about trust in the domain in which a promise has been made or where they've had a chance to observe the behavior, right? So in the Amazon context, I can trust Amazon because that's what they stand for: reliable, fast customer service. And that customer obsession is something they deliver on over and over and over again.

And I'm not thinking about maybe the more character related elements of trust. 

[00:11:51] Rachel Botsman: Look, I'm not a fan of everything Amazon does, but I think it's very smart in terms of brand strategy and even culture strategy, is that they are very clear about what they are and they're very clear about what they're not.

And you know, if you talk to Amazon leadership team, they won't really talk about sustainability and they're quite comfortable with that because their brand proposition is purely built around the capability side of trust. It's purely built around competence and especially reliability. Like that is the number one trait, and this is where I think a lot of brands and companies and cultures go wrong, is they make it too complicated. They try and think that they have to be everything, all these dimensions of trust. 

[00:12:36] Adam Grant: In psychology, I was trained to think about the character element as having a benevolence component and an integrity component where the benevolence is, I have good intentions toward you. I care about your interests. And integrity is, I have good principles and you can count on me to basically walk my talk. 

[00:12:54] Rachel Botsman: Mm. Yeah. I mean, integrity, I've always found the idea of alignment really useful, like visually useful. So like if you imagine two lines, right? And when they are lined up, you've got shared interests, you've got shared motives, you've got, really importantly, shared intentions and expectations, right? That leads to integrity. It's interesting you use benevolence. I use empathy, and I'd love to understand like how you think about those two things differently. Empathy, I think is a really tricky one that many organizations are struggling with, like what it means to be empathetic, and whether that empathy just extends in a professional context or where that line is around being empathetic to what's going on is someone's life. So that is really interesting in terms of leadership and, and the character side of trust, how that trait is changing. 

[00:13:45] Adam Grant: Yeah, I, I, I think I've become less enthusiastic about empathy over time, um, in part because of Paul Bloom's research showing that you don't have to feel other people's feelings to be concerned about their feelings. And sometimes feeling others' feelings actually leads to biased and distorted decision making when you prioritize the people you empathize with over those that you don't, which tends to mean you favor your ingroup and you don't show enough compassion for your outgroup. 

Um, it also means that sometimes you get overloaded by empathic concern and you end up managing your own sort of like pain and distress as opposed to reaching out to the person who's suffering. So I think, I think if I were to get rid of all the jargon, I would just say we're looking for care and integrity as the two dimensions of character.

[00:14:29] Rachel Botsman: I love care and caring because it's active, right? To me, when you, you say you care about someone, you have to move from that state of just listening to support and action, and sometimes that's missing when we talk about empathy. 

[00:14:43] Adam Grant: One of the things that I've found troubling over probably the past decade is whenever I've done surveys asking people how much do they trust their manager or their CEO, I've found when I measure the care and integrity components, they correlate so highly that they're basically redundant. And so if you think that your boss is caring, you also think they have integrity. And vice versa.

And I think for me that's a massive halo effect. The people who are kind to you are not always honest with you, right? And the people who are candid with you don't always care about you. And I, I think we're too quick to lump those two qualities together and assume they go hand in hand. 

[00:15:23] Rachel Botsman: You can care about someone and not necessarily be on their side.

You can be a kind and charismatic person, but not be willing to put your neck out for people. I mean, and that's another, you know, kind people and charismatic people are often really concerned about their reputation. So stepping out that zone and really backing someone is key. I know you shouldn't pick traits, but I do think the deepest trait is integrity.

If I don't believe someone has integrity, I cannot trust them, even if they score ridiculously high on the other things. So I'm always looking for that trait first. And again, I think it's something that can really change how you show up in life and at work. Even thinking about those questions, like how do you figure out someone's interest and motives?

It has got me thinking that the caring or the empathy trait can have a louder signal. I think it's often more visible and easy to display, whereas the integrity piece takes more time and information, which is maybe why we get them conflated. 

[00:16:23] Adam Grant: I'm thinking about the now a pretty vast literature on integrity testing in interviewing and hiring and how a lot of it really is anchored in the idea that, to your point, you can't ask people directly.

Do you have integrity? Who's gonna say no to that question? 

[00:16:39] Rachel Botsman: I'd love someone if they did, and then I'd be like, whoa, you've got integrity if you said no to the question. 

[00:16:44] Adam Grant: Yeah, and maybe that's proof that honesty and integrity can diverge. 

[00:16:48] Rachel Botsman: Totally. 

[00:16:49] Adam Grant: I can count on you to tell me the truth, but not to do what you say you're gonna do.

One of the, the workarounds for that is you ask people to predict others' integrity. And in general, people are who are suspicious about other people's principles are generally doing it because they tend to project their own lack of integrity onto others. And so people who think others are thieves, for example, are more likely to steal themselves.

[00:17:15] Rachel Botsman: So what's your favorite integrity question? 'Cause even the question also like, why do you want this job? That's not a great like, deep integrity question. Like is there one that you find that is really revealing? 

[00:17:25] Adam Grant: The one that I like most is to ask what's wrong with our interview process? 

[00:17:29] Rachel Botsman: Hmm. 

[00:17:30] Adam Grant: You've been through it now.

Tell us how to fix it. And I'm looking for whether the person is willing to stand up for a principle they believe in, even if it might be uncomfortable or you know, potentially jeopardize their ability to get the job. 

[00:17:46] Rachel Botsman: It's such a great question because also like the way they think about design, the way they think about systems, the way they think about culture, the way they think about what's being missed about them, I love that.

That's brilliant. 

[00:17:55] Adam Grant: It's also a learning opportunity, right? A long time ago, a lot of organizations figured out that if they wanted to serve their customers better, they should ask their customers what they wanted and what they thought of the quality of the, the service they were getting. Same thing here.

If you, if you wanna create a better interview experience, why would you not ask people what that was like and how you could improve it? 

[00:18:15] Rachel Botsman: Mm-hmm. I've often wondered about the merit of making someone really angry. 

[00:18:20] Adam Grant: Wait, what? 

[00:18:22] Rachel Botsman: In an interview. Like I've never seen it as a technique, but like if you could make someone really angry or frustrated in how they responded to that situation. 

[00:18:30] Adam Grant: Oh.

[00:18:32] Rachel Botsman: Like the, we stay in one temperature, one emotion, is where I'm getting at in interviews. How much can you see of a, of a person, how much they really reveal when they're in that one emotional temperature. Whereas if you go to the hotter emotions like jealousy and anger and frustration, I, I really dunno how you do this in a responsible way, but it's something that's really intrigued me that I think you'd get to their motivations and who they are as a person.

[00:18:54] Adam Grant: I actually have been in some ways thinking about the opposite. Too many interviews are basically showing us how you perform under anxiety. And in most jobs for most people, your baseline is not gonna be extreme nervousness. And so that's not necessarily a representation of, of your best performance. And so what I'm always trying to do is figure out how do we dial down the anxiety so that people can, can relax and put their best foot forward.

I think your approach might be more palatable to say, look, you're gonna feel some strong negative emotions. Why don't we convert some of the anxiety into frustration? It's a more active emotion. It tends to, to lead people to feel stronger. And then let's see if they can stand up for themselves in a way that's still respectful.

[00:19:37] Rachel Botsman: I don't think it's just happening in education. You see it in the workplace as well. This idea of a comfortable culture, and this, this ties back to trust, right? That there is this conflation that high trust means comfort and it, it's the opposite of that. Like it's those relationships where you have high trust that you can cope with that conflict, you can cope with that discomfort and that disagreement. So how can we bring that into environment so that it comes back into the classroom? It comes back into the workplace? That the first challenge, people are not taking it personally and, and walking away and getting defensive.

[00:20:10] Adam Grant: You have this great distinction that I think is utterly overlooked in the entire field of trust research, which is we shouldn't just look at capability as uni-dimensional. You say there's a competence component and a reliability component, and I think we tend to lump them together. Talk to me about the virtue of splitting them apart.

[00:20:31] Rachel Botsman: I see them as so different. They're like two children. They're just different makeup. That's how different I see them. So the competence piece is the easiest to understand and competence really is whether you have the skills, the knowledge, the resources, the experience, and even the time to do what you say you're gonna do.

So can you follow through? Do you actually know where your skill gaps are and do you have the humility to, to relay those? So that's competency. We work on that from a really young age. So you look at most education, you look at most training and development. It's built around that competency piece.

Reliability is totally different. So you have people highly competent and then really unreliable, and reliability has a very strong relationship to time. And our respect for time. Are you someone that runs late? Are you someone that reschedules at the last minute? You know those people that you always get the email from?

Like, I'm sorry, I'm really busy. I'm gonna have to reschedule again. And then this one I find quite tricky. Are you consistent in your behaviors over time? And the reason why I find that one quite tricky is because we all show up in different ways, right? On different days. So how we feel and how we behave on a Monday is gonna be different to a Thursday, but there is consistency in expectations, what people can expect, how you're gonna show up, that is really, really important to trust.

[00:22:02] Adam Grant: Well, I, I have, I have a little bit of an, a problem with the way that you're talking about this because I am reliably late. 

[00:22:08] Rachel Botsman: You are. 

[00:22:09] Adam Grant: But you know, you can rely on me to show up. And you know that responsiveness is one of my core values, and I think that's what people care about. It's not whether you can count on me to be on time.

You know that if you add five to 10 minutes, I'll be there. And you also know that whenever you need me, I'm gonna be available and helpful. Isn't that what matters? 

[00:22:30] Rachel Botsman: But you are consistent. So do you know what I mean? 

Like it's a consistent expectation. And then when you do show up, it's the erratic behavior that is the issue.

So, not knowing how someone's gonna show up. My pet peeve, I think more and more people are just not replying to email. Like just they open it like five times and then they don't reply. Just, just reply. Like, just say you're not interested, or close the loop, whatever it may be. That is all tied to this trait of reliability.

[00:23:01] Adam Grant: Look, I, I don't think we should all face pressure to be responding rapidly to everybody who reaches out. I think that's a recipe for just letting your inbox control your life. But I also think ghosting someone electronically should be considered, unless it's like a stranger spamming you, it should be considered as rude as passing someone in the hallway and not saying hi to them.

[00:23:23] Rachel Botsman: And potentially even worse, because sometimes I think when people have made an outreach to me and you can tell it's not necessarily someone I know, they've taken a risk there. Right? And they, and you can tell when someone's really invested the time to think about the email and the outreach, the email, so to not reply is really disrespectful. But I also think like what might that do to them? What might they think about their idea or their project through the non-response, versus just being really honest that it's not something you're interested in. It's not something that you're experienced with, but here's a recommendation or here's something you might wanna read, and then that person feels seen and heard, which ultimately I think is what most people want at the end of the day.

[00:24:06] Adam Grant: I want to talk about the crisis of trust that we're facing in the world. I think that from all the polls and surveys that I've read, it does look like we're at or near historic lows on trust in the media and journalists, on trust, in government, on trust in science, and scientists, and I think these major institutions are the bedrock of democratic society. And I'd love to hear your perspective on how we think about why that's happening and what we do about it. 

[00:24:37] Rachel Botsman: The decline of institutional trust is probably now a 25 year trend, but rapidly accelerated over the last two years, particularly in military, judges, law, certain professions, and so much of it is tied around information and trust in information as well, and not knowing what information to trust. I wrote a book, ooh, like six years ago now that was called Who Can You Trust? And it charted this shift from what I call institutional trust to distributed trust, and it was really about this idea that for the last 150 years, we had designed these systems and the leaders within them that were really top down and hierarchical, and we expected people to look up and be very deferential to the people at the top.

And the argument was that what technology inherently wants to do is to take that power and trust and distribute it through networks and platforms and marketplaces, which is why you see people saying that they trust their peers on social media more than a traditional news outlet. And I still think that idea is right, but I think I've missed something really big. So, from a design perspective, one of the things I'm generally interested in is whether trust can scale. And that these systems have just got too big, too bureaucratic that, that you cannot find any smallness within bigness. Or whether these systems are now so disconnected from our emotional needs that they feel irrelevant. The complexity and the size is a huge part of the problem. And so I'm a huge believer that we have to start to find smallness within bigness. We have to revive trust at a local level, really repair the fabric of communities and the things that people can touch and see when they leave the house.

And once we feel like the thing's working close to our lives and our homes are working, that then starts to transcend upwards into these larger institutions. So it's this top down approach to fixing trust that is not gonna get us anywhere. 

[00:27:02] Adam Grant: This speaks to one of the, the most profound points that you've made about trust for me, which is about transparency.

I think particularly with government and with media, I see constantly calls for, well, too many things are happening behind closed doors. We can't be in the room where it happened. So we need these institutions to be more transparent, and that's the only way we can trust them. And you say not so fast. 

[00:27:27] Rachel Botsman: You know, you have to go back to the definition of trust, which is that trust is a confident relationship with the unknown.

So what are we doing when we call for transparency? We are calling for visibility. We want to see inside things. We want to understand. Essentially it's information disclosure, right? We want to know what's going on. And it's not that I'm saying transparency is a bad thing. I think transparency can be highly effective when it's a tool to help people understand the context around a decision.

So gender pay, right? We need that information disclosed so that you can drive some kind of accountability and change. But it's when transparency is more like, like a Jackson Pollock painting or a hose, right? You're just gonna spray it everywhere and you don't even know like what you're trying to illuminate or bring to the surface.

And if you speak to people in HR or governance or regulation, um, transparency often just leads to a culture of compliance and, and paperwork. 

[00:28:29] Adam Grant: Bureaucracy 101. 

[00:28:30] Rachel Botsman: One of the most powerful conversation I had around this was actually with a major bank during the financial crisis where someone said, senior said, look, everyone's calling for transparency.

Everyone says that I should share everything that's going on. If I share everything that's going on, I'm gonna create blind panic, which is gonna make a lot of people's lives a lot worse. I need the trust that I'm gonna share the right information at the right time. Like that's why you've put me in this role. And ultimately, I think that is one of the most powerful expressions of trust. Secrecy isn't the enemy of trust, it's deception. And often with transparency, you're trying to reveal secrets which doesn't get to the systemic issues of what caused the deception in the first place. 

[00:29:13] Adam Grant: Say that again. Secrecy is not the enemy of trust. Deception is. 

[00:29:18] Rachel Botsman: We've entered this culture where transparency has become surveillance, and I even see this in parenting where, the tracking, right? Oh, it's for safety. I'd like to know, you like to know where they are. And I'm like, yeah, but when does that become surveillance and, and monitoring? And so the intention behind transparency might be good, but how it's experienced by the other person can be completely different.

[00:29:48] Adam Grant: It makes me think a little bit about what is transparency, if it's not the solution to our trust problems? It's often a sign of trust problems. When people call for transparency, it's, it's a clear message saying, I do not trust you. Therefore, I need to look under the hood. Like, I don't trust you. Therefore I need your phone password.

[00:30:07] Rachel Botsman: I don't trust you, so you need to come into the office. I don't trust you, so I need to know exactly what work you're doing. I don't trust you, so you need to sit in front of me and do your homework. Yeah. Once you see it, it's everywhere. 

[00:30:18] Adam Grant: It allows us to proceed with a relationship, um, because we have more information, but it doesn't solve the underlying trust problem.

[00:30:26] Rachel Botsman: Mm. Yeah. And I think it's, it's a very tempting stop gap because it can make things feel better. Right? But nothing really changes underneath in the relationship or the system or the culture. 

[00:30:39] Adam Grant: So what, what do we do then when you have breached someone's trust by deceiving them or letting them down and failing to deliver on one of the one of your promises, what do you do to repair it?

[00:30:49] Rachel Botsman: Well, I think actually before we get at the institutional level, you have to look at incentives. And you have to look at accountability, right? Like those two things are often at the root cause of some kind of trust crisis that people have been incentivized to demonstrate the wrong behavior or, uh, practice the wrong values, and they haven't been held accountable for those actions.

There are solutions to a trust crisis that don't need to call for transparency. In a relationship, it requires an uncomfortable conversation around why you don't trust that person, which is the rub of it, right? Like you have to say, the reason why I need to track you, or the reason why I need to know what you're spending is because you did this

in the past and now that has made me skeptical or second guess, or, and letting that other person explain why they did that and moving on from it can really fix the trust issues. But what we often do is we go to the solution or the bandaid without that, what was that moment of disconnect on both sides where the trust really started to break down?

[00:32:00] Adam Grant: Rachel, do you actually do this? Like do, do, do you sit down with someone and say, I don't trust you? 

[00:32:06] Rachel Botsman: I would never use those words, but I do with- 

[00:32:10] Adam Grant: Because I, I actually, I find the candor refreshing as I, as I hear you say it out loud. 

[00:32:14] Rachel Botsman: You're making me sound like someone who makes people walk into interview and makes 'em anxious and frustrated.

[00:32:19] Adam Grant: I'm making you, you, your words, not mine. 

[00:32:22] Rachel Botsman: No, I am a very candid person and I hope people- 

[00:32:26] Adam Grant: I've noticed over the years. 

[00:32:27] Rachel Botsman: Um, no. 

[00:32:28] Adam Grant: Don't ever do a British accent again, Adam. 

[00:32:30] Rachel Botsman: No, no. Definitely don't. Um, I am, I, I do have those conversations with people who are really close to me. My immediate family. My parents, my sibling, my children, my husband. That circle is pretty small, and some colleagues that I've worked with for a long time. So I will say, I experienced this. This was my observation. Now you tell me your side of the story. And again, there's usually some disconnect in the narrative that I formed, or there's dots that I've joined that are very different from how they see the situation.

[00:33:08] Adam Grant: That is very consistent with what I learned when I went through conflict mediation training, which was to say like, here's what my experience has been. Tell me your perspective, because I'm sure there's information I'm missing and I don't live in your head. 

[00:33:21] Rachel Botsman: And also saying, I don't want to track you. Right? I don't wanna watch what you're spending. I don't wanna have that relationship, so really expressing that something is at stake, that you are gonna lose something with this person if we don't fix. This is really powerful. 

[00:33:40] Adam Grant: Thinking about how direct and candid you are, I'm struck by that as maybe an accelerator for you to figure out who's trustworthy and who isn't and, and in what ways?

Because I think the, the, the way that you're direct with people, it leads them to put their guard down a little bit and feel that they can be more forthcoming with you. And I think that means you get sort of a less performed, more authentic version of other people showing up for you. 

[00:34:08] Rachel Botsman: Yeah, I sometimes I think I can be too direct.

I've had that feedback in the past. 

[00:34:12] Adam Grant: Um, I think that's gender bias, but go on. 

[00:34:15] Rachel Botsman: Yeah, it's, it's funny, I've always wondered why do powerful people wanna be around me? I've asked this question so many times, right? They can get council and advice from whoever they want. Like, why did they drop their guard? It's not oversharing, it's not like being too direct with them.

But there is something about the candor that, that leads to a very honest dynamic pretty quickly. I mean, this is so important, like when you give feedback and sometimes you are a rare person in their life that's not trying to sell them something, doesn't want anything from them, doesn't need them to approve what you're saying and, like, that's what I think they're looking for.

[00:35:00] Adam Grant: I wanna make sure we get to a lightning round. Are you ready? 

[00:35:03] Rachel Botsman: Yes. 

[00:35:04] Adam Grant: Tell me about the worst advice you've ever gotten. 

[00:35:07] Rachel Botsman: I've received terrible advice around public speaking. That I should use humor to connect with an audience when I open. 

[00:35:19] Adam Grant: So risky. If it lands, it's great. If it doesn't, it's a disaster and really hard to recover.

[00:35:24] Rachel Botsman: And humor is harder for women, right? And so if you go out there and you're trying to be funny, it's kind of like people who look for trust, right? You're trying to seek a response. And I realized pretty quickly that the magical moments that happen, whether in a classroom or on a stage, is when you've got that resonance, right? And that resonance cannot be planned or it cannot be contrived, and it rises up and you feel that energy and you feel that connection.

And so it's funny, those first few moments of wherever I'm doing something public, I don't overthink them anymore. Like I really go out there and just settle and let the audience know that this is gonna be fun. They're gonna feel something, they are okay with me. And then I go from there. 

[00:36:15] Adam Grant: I relate to the, the uncertainty and the tension of getting on stage and wanting to know that the audience is with me and wanting to feel that connection and knowing that the, the audible sound of laughter is, is going to create that.

And you don't get that kind of immediate feedback with like, with a, you know, an inspiring moment. Like, people don't stand up and clap right? I think a lot of this as a speaker is just getting over the desire for immediate feedback. 

[00:36:41] Rachel Botsman: Totally, right? And also finding a different mechanism that works for you.

So I ask the audience a question and then I hear lots of different responses and I'm pretty good at riffing off that things and humor comes from that because you can tie them all together really naturally. But knowing that that's my mechanic to create the energy and create the connection is, is really changed things.

[00:37:03] Adam Grant: I'm gonna have to try more of this as, as I notice, half my opening jokes bomb. What, what's, what's the best advice you've ever gotten? 

[00:37:12] Rachel Botsman: I had a boss pretty early on in my career that said that I was gonna struggle to work in large organizations and the culture of whatever I was working on would be the most important thing.

[00:37:29] Adam Grant: That's easy to see why. 

[00:37:32] Rachel Botsman: Probably too direct. 

[00:37:34] Adam Grant: I was gonna say, too creative, but both. Tell me something you've rethought lately. 

[00:37:40] Rachel Botsman: I mean, we are speaking like right after the election, and this might sound so obvious, but I'd never thought that hope isn't an emotion. 

[00:37:48] Adam Grant: Oh, it sounds like you've been reading some CR Snyder.

[00:37:51] Rachel Botsman: No, I haven't been reading that, but I always thought that hope was an emotion that pulled people forwards, and I've realized now that it's not, it's more like a compass or a promise, so that when you campaign purely around the emotion of hope versus a campaign that is built around emotions that push against the louder, more negative emotions will cut through.

[00:38:19] Adam Grant: Give me, Rachel, a hot take, an unpopular opinion that you are excited to defend. 

[00:38:26] Rachel Botsman: I think you should live your life by seasonal time and rhythms. Think clock time is one of the worst inventions. I really do not like the modern day notion of productivity. Even the idea that a human being should be at their most productive and their most efficient is really problematic to me.

[00:38:44] Adam Grant: What's the question you have for me? 

[00:38:46] Rachel Botsman: It's a question I get asked a lot, which is, what's the difference between confidence, faith, and trust? And it's a tricky one to answer. 

[00:38:59] Adam Grant: Uh, so interesting. I, I'm the wrong person to ask about faith for sure. Like I don't have faith in anything that can't be verified.

Full stop. I also don't doubt anything that can't be falsified. But that is another conversation. I think on the one hand, your intuition is right from the, the evidence I'm familiar with, which says that it's much easier to build trust one-on-one even than it is in a group setting. And so one of the mistakes that I see people make all the time is like they, they try to do team trust falls and forget that like, yeah, you may trust the group overall, like to, you know, to

do a few things, but ultimately it's your relationship with each person in the group that determines the the confident relationship they have with the unknown. I think that's a reminder that we need to spend much more time in dyads as opposed to just in groups. On the other hand, there are things that we would all trust groups to do and large groups to do that we would never put in the hands of single individuals.

There's a part of me that thinks actually it's the largest organizations that are able to be the most trustworthy, and maybe it's the in-between that's an uncanny valley. We can trust individuals, we can trust huge organizations that have high reliability practices. Uh, and it's the the messy middle where we run into a lot of trouble.

[00:40:25] Rachel Botsman: That's super interesting. 

[00:40:26] Adam Grant: You told me you don't trust me to navigate anywhere, especially when skiing. What else do you trust me and not trust me for? 

[00:40:35] Rachel Botsman: I trust you like 100% with your generosity and your ability to give advice, and I don't say that to many people. 

[00:40:43] Adam Grant: What do you not trust me for? It's what I really wanna know.

[00:40:46] Rachel Botsman: I'm not sure I would trust you to give me advice on creative things. And I mean this in the nicest way, like visual things that are in their infancy or things that don't have hard evidence or data, but that are quite organic and evolving and are gonna have to go through like multiple iterations. I wouldn't come to you for feedback on that because I'm not sure it's how your mind works.

[00:41:17] Adam Grant: It's definitely not. I'm glad you know that. 'Cause I would just end up like ruining the vision. 

[00:41:25] Rachel Botsman: Yeah. 

[00:41:25] Adam Grant: With, with my linear thinking and my desire to anchor the image in a study. I think the takeaway for me from this conversation is that my right brain cannot be trusted 'cause it doesn't exist. 

[00:41:36] Rachel Botsman: It's slightly extreme, but probably like my right brain can be trusted, but my left brain can be a little wobbly at times.

[00:41:45] Adam Grant: That's part of why it's always interesting to talk to you, Rachel. I, I trust you more than anyone when it comes to helping me think more clearly and more accurately about trust, and I've learned a ton from you about it, and today is no exception. Thank you. 

[00:42:01] Rachel Botsman: I really appreciate that. Thanks.

[00:42:06] Adam Grant: My biggest takeaway from Rachel is that the key to trust is not transparency, it's integrity and reliability. There's nothing more important than following through on your commitments and making it clear that people can count on you when it counts most.

ReThinking is hosted by me, Adam Grant. The show is part of the TED Audio Collective, and this episode was produced and mixed by Cosmic Standard. Our producers are Hannah Kingsley Ma and Aja Simpson. Our editor is Alejandra Salazar. Our fact checker is Paul Durbin. Original music by Hans Dale Sue and Allison Layton Brown.

Our team includes Eliza Smith, Jacob Winnick. Samaya Adams, Roxanne Hai Lash, Banban Cheng, Julia Dickerson and Whitney Pennington Rogers.

What else do you trust me and not trust me for? 

[00:43:00] Rachel Botsman: Um, are you looking for compliments, Adam Grant? 

[00:43:03] Adam Grant: No, I'm actually trying to find out what else I need to get better at. 'Cause directions are hopeless.