Building trust or being polite?
Have you ever had a conversation or meeting with someone more senior where you’ve been honest, and they have appeared supportive and understanding, only for you to discover later that they have said something completely different to your manager?
You’re not alone.
There is something uncomfortable about discovering that what you thought was a confidential or supportive conversation was not quite what you understood it to be. The next time you speak to that person, you are still polite. You may still engage with them professionally, but you probably won’t be quite as honest and open.
That is the difference between being polite and building trust.
Politeness can make an interaction feel positive in the moment. Trust is built through what happens afterwards. It develops through repeated experiences and through the confidence that what you say, what you are told and what happens next will be consistent.
That distinction matters beyond individual relationships. It can influence how people experience organisations, how they interpret leadership behaviour and how credible they believe the organisation’s messages to be.
Trust isn’t created by saying the right thing
Organisations spend considerable time defining what they stand for. Values, purpose, behaviours, pillars, employee value propositions and employer brands all have a role to play; however, none of them creates trust on their own.
People experience those messages through behaviour and signals.
A value might say “we listen”, but what happens when someone disagrees with a senior leader?
An organisation might say it encourages people to speak openly, but what happens when someone makes a mistake?
A manager might tell someone that their development matters, but are they given the opportunity to demonstrate that potential?
These moments are where organisational language becomes part of the evidence. I think this is where trust becomes particularly interesting.
Trust is not about whether I like you; it is about whether I can predict, with some confidence, what will happen if I am honest with you.
If I raise a concern, will it be heard?
If I challenge something, will I be supported or remembered for the challenge?
If I admit that I have made a mistake, will that become part of how I am perceived?
The answer to these questions can become more influential than the original conversation.
The signals we don’t always notice
Much of my research has explored ways in which people interpret organisations through the signals they receive.
People do not experience an organisation as a collection of statements on a website. They experience it through conversations, decisions, behaviours, relationships and moments that matter.
Some of those moments can reinforce what people have been told. While others create a contradiction.
A manager may tell someone that their contribution is valued, while the opportunities they receive suggest otherwise. An organisation may talk about inclusion, while everyday behaviour leaves people questioning whether they can genuinely belong. A company may promote openness, while people learn that challenging the status quo comes with consequences. Those experiences can speak volumes. It tells people whether their contribution is recognised, whether they belong, whether it feels safe to speak and whether the organisation is likely to do what it says it will do.
They also influence how people interpret the next experience.
The Trust Loop
We rarely experience these stages consciously.
Unless you consider yourself an overthinker, you probably do not walk away from a conversation thinking - That interaction has provided me with a negative signal, which has reduced my level of trust, and therefore I will modify my future behaviour.
But something does change. People might:
Become more careful about what they share
Stop challenging ideas in the same way
Think twice before asking for help
Become more anxious before the next meeting with that person
Continue to be polite, while becoming less open
The interaction itself has ended, but the signal remains. That signal can influence what happens next.
Experience - Signal - Trust - Behaviour - New Experience
The loop can work positively too. When what happens next is consistent with what people were told, confidence increases. When people experience that they can speak openly, ask questions, make mistakes and challenge ideas without being punished for doing so, trust has something to build on.
Trust therefore becomes less about one conversation and more about what happens repeatedly afterwards.
When trust becomes the risk
This is where trust connects with another part of my research. When we do not know how an organisation or individual will respond, the perceived risk of being open increases. And when risks increase, behaviour can change, and people will choose self-preservation. They may also hold back information, stop contributing to ideas, become less visible or reduce their willingness to advocate for the organisation.
This doesn’t happen because someone consciously decided to disengage. It can begin with something much smaller:
A conversation that did not feel quite right.
A promise that was not followed through.
An opportunity that went elsewhere without explanation.
A challenge that was remembered for the wrong reason.
One experience may not be enough to change someone’s relationship with an organisation. Repeated experience can be different. Eventually, a person may begin to consider whether the relationship, the team or the organisation is somewhere they still want to invest their time, energy and credibility.
What does this mean for Talent Attraction and Employer Brand Leaders?
My MSc research explored employer brand and talent attraction within professional services and considered the perspectives of recruiters working within the environment. One of the themes emerging from the research was the challenge of creating and maintaining a credible employer brand.
Notably, the most frequently cited barrier to maintaining a strong EVP was the lack of a clear EVP (Figure 1), suggesting clarity of messaging is underdeveloped. This is particularly significant as only 30% of survey participants indicated their organisation’s employer branding strategies were reviewed on an annual basis, whereas a higher concentration of participants indicated they were unsure when strategies were reviewed or were rarely reviewed (Figure 2).
Figure 1: Survey Results - What is the biggest challenge in maintaining a strong EVP in professional services?
Figure 2 - Survey Results - How often does your company update or refine its employer branding strategies?
At face value, this could be interpreted as a messaging problem; perhaps the EVP needs to be clearer, employer brand activity needs to be reviewed more frequently, or internal communications need to improve.
These things may all have value, but I think there is another question worth asking: What happens when people understand the message but do not experience it?
An organisation can tell employees what its values are. It can tell candidates what it is like to work there. It can create compelling stories and engage employees to share experiences. But if the experience does not support the brand identity, credibility can become a challenge to maintain.
When the message and the experience contradict each other, which signal do people trust? The message? Or their own experience?
The war for talent changed the conversation
There is a wider context here too. The language of the “war for talent” encouraged organisations to think differently about how they attract and retain talent. Employer brand developed partly in response to that challenge, giving organisations a way to communicate why someone should work for them.
That thinking remains relevant; however, the environment has changed. People have access to more information about organisations than the employer brand team controls. They can see how leaders communicate publicly. They can read employee reviews on Glassdoor, Indeed or Reddit. They can observe how organisations respond to difficult issues. They can see how colleagues engage with company content on LinkedIn and what they choose to say themselves.
The employer brand is therefore not confined to what an organisation publishes; it exists alongside what people experience and what they are willing to say about the experience.
That raises the question I think employer brand and talent attraction leaders should consider carefully: Have we given people enough reason to put their own credibility behind us?
So are we building trust or being polite?
Perhaps this is the question organisations should ask more.
Not: Do our employees know our values, mission statement, purpose, employer brand or corporate brand?
The expectation is that they do.
Instead:
Do our employees feel able to speak openly?
Are people willing to advocate for the organisation and for each other?
Have we given them enough reason to put their own credibility behind us?
Trust is not created through a values statement, and it can’t be manufactured through employee advocacy programmes. It is built through repeated interactions where what happened next is consistent with what happened before.
Perhaps the strongest employer brand is not the most compelling story or the right channel to tell it on; perhaps it is the one where employees don’t need to be given a story to tell; instead, they are trusted to tell the truth about their experience.