Whether it’s a missing $10 bill at home or a botched SaaS rollout, trust with kids and in business builds slowly and vanishes in a single slip.

Artificial Intelligence cannot build trust or understand why a certain action ruins trust at lightning speed. Artificial Intelligence might be crazily efficient, but building trust is never efficient. Building trust takes an awful lot of time, for bothpersonal relationships and business relationships. 

Therefore, trust is a decisively human thing.

As usual in my articles, I try to bridge personal and entrepreneurial life. Just like trust, merging different perspectives is yet another human quality that most AI tools still have trouble with.

Kids

I have three kids in their early teens. Now and then, an odd 10 bucks bill disappears when it shouldn’t. Or a few lighters are suddenly gone. Or the sweet stock is eaten up when my wife and I come home from work.

Of course, the kids all say that it wasn’t them. Or it was their siblings.

All the occurrences mentioned above aren’t the end of the world, but they are ideal condensation points to discuss the importance of trust with kids.

As kids grow, they expect more autonomy and freedom. Yet, if odd things happen at home, autonomy and freedom are abruptly cut back by their parents. On the other hand, they are extended if parents can be sure the house won’t be burnt to the ground if they don’t constantly supervise their kids.

Trust is built slowly, yet it is lost abruptly if something goes wrong. That’s a concept kids have difficulty understanding. That’s why understanding trust requires leadership by parents.

Partners

How many times have you spoken to your spouse about trust? Honestly, I can’t recall ever speaking about trust to my wife. Double-check with her if you like, but trust has been given in our 20-year+ relationship.

Speaking for myself, I would be pretty alarmed if my wife suddenly talked about trust. Knowing that I haven’t ever misused her trust, I would ask myself why the topic would suddenly come up.

It’s the same in business: You shouldn’t talk about trust with business partners, especially not at the beginning of a partnership. Yet in my role as Founder & CEO of Yonder, a B2B SaaS company, I have experienced a bizarre conversation on trust with a business partner — needless to say, the partnership didn’t move beyond its initial phase.

Trust is something that needs to be earned, and not talked about.

Teams

The same applies to our team at Yonder. We never speak about trust, we just get stuff done — no matter what time of the day or night. When we’re out of the office during the day, we’re transparent about it. When we screw up, we own up to our mistakes. If someone convinces another person that they’re right, we say, “You’re right.” Irrespective of the hierarchy.

Never has somebody used the word “trust” explicitly in a conversation.

That’s the fabric of trust.

Customers

It’s usually the supplier who has to earn the customer’s trust, and not vice versa. As in all other aspects of life, winning a customer’s trust is laborious and time-consuming. In the case of B2B SaaS products like ours, trust is often built during the onboarding phase, which typically comes in the form of a mid-sized project. During this period, a customer learns how your product works, that your team is responsive, that you don’t blame others for your mistakes, and that bugs get fixed quickly.

Of course, you can destroy customer trust with a single inappropriate action. But customers can also destroy trust beyond repair from their side.

To make one thing clear: Most of our customers are great to work with. But as always, there are outliers to whatever is deemed normal. Over the years, I have seen customer behavior that raised red flags: It starts with recording video calls, goes on with terrorizing our team members, and in one isolated case even led to a customer falsifying our RFP answers.

For the case of the customer falsifying our RFP answers, I happily walked away from that 6-digit contract to leave this untrustworthy customer to our competitors.

Conclusion

Trust is a decisively human trait, and it works the same for kids, partners, team members, and customers. 

And for all groups (besides the kids!), I suggest you walk away from untrustworthy people — life is too short.

And what about the kids? That’s the only group you should talk about trust. To make sure they grow into responsible, trustworthy adults who aren’t abandoned by other people for their untrustworthiness.