Trust

I work for a company which states that trust is the most important thing. There's one glaring problem with this: It is stated generically, not specifically.

In use, the implication is that earning customer trust is the most important thing, but this is only implied, never stated. What is actually stated is that trust is what is most important. Except... the company shows this by purposefully not trusting anyone.

This probably crosses the line into pedantry, but it bothers me greatly, and I'll share why it is bothersome.

Earning trust is a complex and tricky thing. Not because behaving well is usually complex, but because the emotions behind trust are complex.

I firmly believe that companies should be treated like individuals. If you wouldn't allow an individual to get away with sociopathic behavior, then why should you let a company get away with it? I believe that logic extends to trust, too.

Here's a scenario for you to consider. You're in a relationship with someone. You work hard to be trustworthy and to earn trust. Your partner explicitly distrusts you. What is most probably going on? If you're not doing anything to cause distrust (in fact the opposite), and your partner distrusts you, very often that's a sign that your partner is the one doing something distrustful.

I work for a company which states that trust is the most important thing, but despite my best efforts to be trustworthy and upstanding, the company continues to explicitly distrust me, and the company repeatedly extends the restrictions on the things that I can do, making it more and more difficult to do the job they're asking me to do. Now I ask, who is the one likely doing something distrustful...

I get that customers are more likely to trust a company that protects the customer (even from the company's own employees), so the behavior of distrusting employees may debatably help earn customer trust, but companies are made up of individuals. How trustworthy can a company really be if it believes it cannot trust itself?