What Happens When Trust Is Broken

How do you respond when your trust has been broken? When you feel betrayed? Do you shut down? Check out? Pull back? Seek retaliation? Do you withdraw your spirit and energy from your work? Do you simmer and seethe? Simply go through the motions?

How do you respond when you learn that you have let someone down—either intentionally or unintentionally—and they feel betrayed? Do you defend, rationalize, or justify your behavior? Do you excuse it? Do you secretly think the other person overreacted? Or do you assume responsibility, reflect on why you chose to behave the way you did, apologize, and make amends?

When The Three Cs of Trust aren't practiced consistently, trust becomes vulnerable. Because you're human—and subject to the everyday pressures of life—it's understandable that you slip up and fall back into old patterns. Hurts, disappointments, letdowns, and breaches of trust are natural parts of relationships, including those with whom you spend the majority of your time. Even in high-functioning work environments and in healthy life relationships, trust can be vulnerable.

You let others down, and they let you down, either intentionally or unintentionally. We all know what it feels like to need to be forgiven. When you accept that you're human and embrace the fact that hurts, disappointments, and letdowns come with the territory of relationships, you're on the road to connecting with others on a deeper level. The key to unlocking your colleagues' passion, ingenuity, and commitment is not to expect perfect behavior from one another, but to have the tools, approach, and language in place to expedite healing when breakdowns do occur.

When trust breaks down, people tend to pull back and withdraw. They begin to question, Is this the place for me? I thought I belonged here. Now I'm not so sure. I thought I had what it took. Maybe I was wrong. They begin to lose confidence in their own skills and abilities. Some may go through the motions. Some do only barely enough to get by. Some become the “walking wounded.” Others become victims. We hear the same story again and again as we work with clients: My heart isn't in this place anymore or I just look out for myself or We've stopped thinking big and taking risks. People of these low-trust companies report “a real loss in energy, passion, and creativity.” When trust in a workplace remains broken and unaddressed, no one wins. Not organizations. Not teams. Not individuals. And not you.

Trust is a workplace's competitive advantage when it's present and its Achilles' heel when it's absent. As subtle instances of broken trust accumulate, people begin to feel betrayed—by their organizations, by their co-workers, and by their own responses to the situation. Their confidence, commitment, and energy diminish. Their ability to trust contracts. At a time when a competitive edge can collapse in days or weeks instead of months or years, no one can afford to ignore the role that trust plays in energizing—or destroying—meaningful productivity.

You see the power of trust when it's present in your personal relationships—and the devastating impact when it's lacking. What happens when you find out your spouse has racked up thousands of dollars in credit card debt that you knew nothing about? What do you do when you discover that your friend has been hiding an addiction? How did your child respond when you were out of town on business for his birthday or missed her soccer game … again? What happened when your teenager lied to you about his whereabouts Saturday night? When a colleague took credit for your work? When your employee skimmed from the register? When you continue to treat your college-age kid like you did when he or she was in high school? When your boss gave vague direction about an important, time-sensitive initiative, then took off for a round of golf?

These experiences test the strength of your ability to trust others. When your trust has been breached or betrayed by a specific person, you can't help but call into question the entire relationship. You need to pay attention to broken trust and feelings of betrayal because not paying attention to them—and not dealing with them—comes at a cost to you. Betrayal creates a continuous leak of your energy. Eventually, the truth about how the betrayal has affected you will come out as your performance at work and quality of life at home suffers.

Broken trust—and the feelings of betrayal that occur when trust is repeatedly broken—is at the core of the human condition and is the heart of the struggle in human interactions. This means that betrayal offers a tremendous opportunity to pause your activity, reflect, listen, and learn. Betrayals can be gifts and teachers if we allow them to be. They serve as catalysts to assess your trustworthiness and strengthen your relationships. When your trust is tested or broken, you learn about the darkest corners of your soul and gain the opportunity to become a better version of yourself—both at work and at home. But that can happen only if you proactively engage the experience, acknowledge your own role in the breakdown, and integrate the lessons you learn into your future interactions.

Restoring trust is not a spontaneous process. It takes time, hard work, courage, and compassion, but the payoff is tremendous. We know this to be true because we've lived it for the past twenty-plus years. The most poignant example of our commitment to our specific, proven healing process occurred a year after the first edition of this book was published in 1999:

We were facing a crisis. Diagnosed with kidney cancer and hospitalized, Dennis had trusted Michelle to carry out their professional obligations on behalf of us both. Michelle reached out for help to a trusted colleague, who offered to step in and support a critical client project with a promise to deliver by the client's deadline. At the last minute, Michelle discovered her colleague did not deliver as promised and had failed to communicate her shortcoming. Michelle was left feeling confused, angry, and hurt by her colleague's behavior.

Michelle realized she needed to take action … fast. She fully acknowledged the situation, got the support she needed and an extension on the deadline, reframed the experience, and took responsibility for her role in the breakdown of communications before the deadline. Later, her colleague apologized and disclosed that her daughter had overdosed on drugs, and she had to take her to a treatment facility during the project's critical timeframe. She'd felt so ashamed that she felt like hiding, which she did. Once she was aware of the mitigating circumstances of the breakdown, Michelle readily and compassionately forgave her friend. She knew how challenging the situation had been because she had witnessed her own brother's fight with addiction. With Michelle's forgiveness, her colleague could begin to forgive herself.

You Have a Choice: Seven Steps for Healing

You want to have trust in your relationships. To have that trust, you need to be able to heal each time your trust is broken. Failing to do so will result in mounting frustration, doubt, and depleted energy. Our Seven Steps for Healing will provide you with a framework to not only recover from the deepest betrayals, but also restore your Capacity for Trust and work productively with those who betrayed you. These steps are more than a theoretical construct. They are a tested, proven, straightforward set of tools that work at individual, team, and organizational levels. As you acknowledge betrayal, allow your feelings to surface, get support, reframe your experience, take responsibility, forgive, and let go and move on, you free yourself from the shackles of doubt, fear, and destroyed confidence that betrayal can impose.

Seven Steps for Healing

By utilizing our own Seven Steps for Healing, we were able to not only survive this experience, but learn from it, build strength into our relationships, and gain further confidence that the only way to approach betrayal is with compassion, intention, and courage. We knew that we couldn't avoid breakdowns in trust from happening again. Because we were equipped with the tools we needed to heal in the aftermath, we didn't need that security. We knew we'd be able to work through our hurt and disappointment constructively, and recover even more quickly the next time.