Which comes first, trust or vulnerability?

I work in a corporate environment, beige cubicle and all, but I don't have a typical job and I certainly don't have a typical boss. My boss, Jenny, is an incredibly talented coach, organizational development consultant and facilitator and, it turns out, one of my most dear friends.

Jenny has this way of saying things that shift everyone's thinking in the room. When she offers an insight, sometimes you can hear an intake of breath as someone confronts a long-held belief as someone else says, "Wow, I never thought of it that way." She has expanded my worldview more times than I can count, and for that, among other things, I am eternally grateful. Her incisiveness cuts through any static in the conversation to get right to the heart of the issue.

Anyway, the two of us were facilitating a session on team effectiveness principles for coaches last month, and we were talking about the importance of trust on a team, one of my favorite subjects. And Jenny asks the following question, one that stuck with me: "Which comes first, trust or vulnerability?"

So? What do you think?

For me, I need to explore the context first before attempting to answer this question. Let's start with trust and what difference it makes on a team. According to the Drexler-Sibbet Team Performance Model, which serves as the overall framework for our team effectiveness work, Trust Building is one of seven essential stages that teams go through on their journey to high performance. Stephen Covey, author of the book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, once said: “Without trust we don’t truly collaborate, we merely coordinate or, at best, cooperate. It is trust that transforms a group of people into a team.”

Without trust, teams experience a range of "symptoms," from outright conflict to facade. Extreme mistrust is typically characterized by a host of unproductive behaviors, like arguing, back-stabbing, and blaming, where people are in self-protective survival mode, everyone out for him- or herself. It's extremely difficult to focus on the work because there's so much underground "noise" and the results suffer. More often, though, I see the "facade" version of mistrust, characterized by caution, politeness, surface relationships, and calculated communication, undermined by gossiping and passive aggressiveness. You know what I mean, right? Like when you're in a meeting politely nodding your head while internally thinking, "these people have lost their ever loving minds." Then you leave the meeting and go talk to one or two people you do trust to recount how ridiculous everything was. (We call this phenomenon the "meeting after the meeting.") It's like you send in your corporate bobblehead while leaving your true self at home. Let's just be really clear, if your true self is narrating a completely different story in your head than what is coming out of your mouth, this is a sure sign of a lack of trust.

Many people have never gotten past this whitewashed veneer of trust, especially on a corporate team, so they think that politeness equals trust. It doesn't.

True trust is different. There is a demonstrated level of competence and reliability on the team. Team members have confidence in each other's abilities to do their jobs and do them well. They know who to go to for what purpose. They leverage each others' strengths. They fulfill on their commitments.

But this isn't all.

True trust requires a demonstrated level of vulnerability, which translates into being able to be open and honest with each other, sharing their true, unfiltered opinions in a constructive and respectful way--without fear of retribution. They are not holding back, hiding parts of themselves that they think won't be accepted. They know that if they disagree or make a mistake, it will not be held against them. They give each other constructive feedback while keeping each others' best interests in mind and focusing on what's best for the team. There is deep, genuine care for each other as human beings. They have each other's backs.

It's hard to even describe this level of trust unless you have experienced it.

So how do you create that level of trust, especially in a group setting? This brings us back to the question at hand: which comes first, trust or vulnerability?

Think about it for yourself. Are you willing to "go first?" Do you reveal something about yourself or express a dissenting opinion before you know how it will be received (vulnerability first) or do you wait until there is an established level of trust and safety--where you've seen other say something courageous and they were treated with respect--before you take an interpersonal risk (trust first)?

You might lean way or another, but ultimately, this question is really an unanswerable chicken-or-the-egg kind of question. Trust and vulnerability go hand in hand and can't really be separated. For true trust to exist, all members of the team must show up completely as themselves, which means being vulnerable.

Society has taught us that vulnerability is synonymous with weakness—but researcher Brené Brown says that it’s just the opposite. Vulnerability is the willingness to show up and be seen by others in the face of uncertain outcomes. Instead of demonstrating weakness, it is actually a measure of extreme courage.

So perhaps the real question is: Are you willing to take the risk to build or maintain a deeper level of trust in your relationships, even when it's scary and you're not sure how it will be received? In my opinion, vulnerability is the key to having deep abiding relationships, so it's worth the risk.