What if various people or departments in an organization spoke different “languages” of trust? Similar to “love” languages, where a parent or spouse might give love by giving gifts, but the another gives and receives love by quality time, or words of affirmation. The two won’t communicate love as well as they could, and they might even grow to feel unloved and unwanted, even though each is trying to express love. Harts contends that similar languages are at play in the workplace. She lists seven “trust languages.” My only critique is that the book doesn’t fully hit its goal. It’s more a list of seven ways of growing trust in the workplace: tips in areas like transparency, acknowledgement, security, feedback, or follow-through. But Harts doesn’t address how miscommunication can occur between those “speaking” different languages. She just covers how a person can be hurt from the supervisor or C-suite person failing at a language. For instance, what if an HR director cares too much about feedback? And the employee getting the review cares too much about sensitivity and acknowledgement? How does each learn that this is even happening? And then to what extent they should adapt, or ask the other to adapt? To go back to the author’s illustration of love languages, this would be like the parent who only gives material gifts to show love, but the child does not care about gifts and only longs for the words “I love you” or “I am so proud of you.”

This book reads as a conversation between you and the author, Minda Harts, as she outlines and describes the aspects and obstacles to building trust in the workplace. Yes, trust is important; it’s the foundation for all other efforts, especially engagement/motivation, personnel development, strategic buy-in and so on. Without it, many efforts are just viewed as manipulative.

Harts describes her advice as trust languages; sensitivity, security, transparency, feedback, authenticity, acknowledgement, etc. This framework might be slightly different than what you may have seen as dimensions of trust; competency, integrity, openness, vulnerability, reliability/dependability are the main ones. As the author goes through her aspects, she gives multiple examples and provides survey questions, self-reflection points, checklists, practical steps in order to build trust. If you’re looking for a way to augment or improve mutual trust, trustworthiness in your teams and organizations, there are some guides in this book.

While the languages are helpful and necessary in every workplace, I believe, I’m not sure if they are the stimuli for trust-building or the result of having built trust and then working on keeping the team aligned and motivated. Harts admits there are values such as mutual respect, maintaining dignity and such that start trust. Each person needs to start with a choice of believing the other person(s) is trustworthy or not. If they start with the stance that the other has to prove themselves trustworthy, no amount of trust language will convince them otherwise. Any slip, error, unfiltered moment will sabotage any trust built. Any “compliance” with sensitivity and so on will be viewed as just being politically correct (PC) or inauthentic obedience to the corporate “law.” Whereas, if the choice is believing the other is trustworthy, these languages will enforce that belief.

Likewise, while Harts shows different people with different wants/needs (such as how they want to be recognized), it seems the assumption that each person wants all of these languages “spoken” in equal amounts. Often on teams, you have to learn and discern who needs you to be reliable, who needs you to exhibit strong integrity, who needs you to be open and vulnerable, who needs to feel accepted… In the framework of this book, some may want more security while others want more sensitivity or acknowledgement. This might need a whole chapter in the book: how to balance competing needs with a team, department, organization.

This is not a bad place to start if you’ve haven’t thought about how to raise trust in your organization from a 4 to a 6, or an 8 to a 9.

I’m appreciative of the publisher sharing an advance copy of this book.

This book is great for leaders and employees. Chapter 2 was my favorite. Started by talking about the epic scene from a few good men where Kack Nicolas say to Tom Cruise. You want the truth you can’t handle the truth. Comparing that to how leaders feel that their employees can’t handle to truth. This book is chock full of relatable and actionable steps to improve the workplace, by building trust. Be honest the moments I have been all in with my director is when she has been honest and open. She treated me as someone she trusts, stopped playing Pattie cake. We are a family, we are a team, thanks for all your help you deserve all the credit. Later to give me no credit.

I have actually started to use this to help build trust with her.