How to trust those around you

Here’s a tool you can use to measure the trustworthiness of someone, if you’re thinking of enlisting their help on something big.

People often tell me they can’t delegate because no one cares like they do, or is as competent as they are. This is often an excuse, so I designed this tool to help people move out of habitual micromanagement.

“We need more trust!” people say. But as the philosopher Onora O’Neill observed, we don’t need more trust; what we need is more trustworthiness. We should switch focus from our subjective feeling of trust to the evidence-based characteristic of trustworthiness in the other.

O’Neill suggested three criteria: competence, honesty and reliability. I’ve added a fourth: “caring”. And I’ve created a scorecard you can use to make a more deliberate assessment of someone’s trustworthiness. It’s called the Trustworthy Tracker, and it’s available free here: https://dsabuilding.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Trustworthy_Tracker_PDF.pdf

Give the person a score for each criterion (the number in the little box in each cell) and multiply the four numbers together. Maximum score is 135.

People tell me it’s a thought-provoking exercise. Let me know what you think if you try it.