What is trust?

Trust involves having faith or belief in an individual or an organisation, and relying upon an individual or organisation to do something, it can even involve placing oneself in someone else’s hands.

Relationship building

Relationship building in interpersonal relations is important for developing and maintaining trust because it allows both parties to observe how each carry out their duties in the relationship, how each keep their promises, and how reliable each party is. Relationship building allows both parties to assess how trustworthy each is, developing trust gradually with incremental steps throughout the relationship.

Building trust

Trust between individuals and teams is critical to success because business is fundamentally about making connections between people. Without belief in the abilities of others, or knowledge/experience of others’ reliability, it would be very difficult to conduct business that involved any form of reliance upon another. Modern businesses of any size typically involve many collaborative activities with individuals and teams working together; without trust between these individuals and teams, the risk of collaborative inertia would be increased due to the level of suspicion, and resultant questioning and verification required in order to confidently work together.

(Source: The Open University, 2012).