A Research Paper By Adam Bakai, Personal Coach, GERMANY
The Importance of Learning Trust and How We Could Coach Politicians to Trust Each Other and Work Together, Even Across Different Parties on Important Causes
Democratic politics is known for never-ending debates, behind-the-scenes deals, compromises, and too little progress being made in a too long time. In between, our problems keep growing and new challenges keep arising, which modern democracies are struggling to provide an answer for. Populist politicians are gaining more and more support, while frustration and distrust towards politicians seem to reach new heights every day.
According to the OECD Trust Report[1], only 4 out of 10 people trust their national government. Political parties are the least trusted, these are viewed with skepticism, especially among disadvantaged groups and young people.[2] In case democratic governments don´t find a way to regain the trust of their citizens, democracies will face some serious trouble.
After roughly 4,5 years working in politics, I do believe that one of the reasons this is happening is that politicians don´t trust each other and therefore, they rarely work together. They put their own personal interests or the interests of their parties first. Sadly, those often do not meet the voters’ interests. As not one party (under democratic circumstances) has enough support from the people to be able to change everything alone, real change rarely happens.
My hypothesis is, that if politicians can put their differences and their own interests aside, they would be able to achieve significantly more progress on meaningful matters, they would have to fight less with each other and would gain more trust from the voters – which would free up further energy to work on other important subjects. Below, I will dig into how we could coach politicians to trust each other and work together, even across different parties on important causes.
The Steps of Learning Trust
Learn to Trust Yourself
Dream big, but start small; do what you can do at a time. Israelmore Ayivor
Whatever impact you´re trying to make, the best place to start is yourself. If you want to trust others, ask yourself the question, if you trust yourself? If you want others to trust you, ask yourself, if you trust others.
Trusting yourself means, that you are aligned with your beliefs, values, and purpose. Once we are clear about these, our confidence in our choices will also increase. Then we need to trust the process: trust what you´re doing would eventually lead to the desired outcome. If you see yourself drifting from those goals, re-evaluate and re-adjust your action.
Learn to Trust Others
Trusting others is a key component of politics. But how can you trust others who made mistakes before, who might have let you down before, who are rather opportunistic and want to take every paid position they can get ahold of? If something goes wrong, it is okay to be critical – reflect on what happened, form constructive feedback and re-adjust the actions you made.
What is not okay is to be judgemental. Every time you judge someone, you are projecting outward what you are feeling about yourself. Therefore, judgment can become very destructive and has often nothing to do with what really happened in the particular situation. Let your judgment go and try to remain objective. Let helpfulness guide you. Forgive mistakes and try to learn something from them – regardless of if you made them or others did.
Gain Trust From Your Organisation
Now that you learned how to trust yourself and how to trust others, it is time to take one step further away from yourself and take a look at your direct surrounding. This is where things will become more complicated.
Just because you trust others, it doesn´t mean that they would trust you. You can have noble goals and yet, you can find yourself in a situation where you are left alone, you don´t get the support you need to achieve your goals, or those goals are even conflicting with the goals of others. How can you gain the trust and the support you need?
Sit down and listen to your environment. What drives the people around you every day? What goals do they aim for? What challenges are they struggling with? Once you know these, start mapping those towards your own values and goals and find people with similarities. People with similar values, beliefs, and goals are more likely to help you, and you can also help them accomplish their goals, without drifting away from yours too much.
Always think of “us” instead of “me”. Help people around you to achieve their goals and acknowledge their successes. Treat people around you as you expect to be treated.
If someone makes a mistake, don´t judge them, but help them how to learn from it. This would help you stay focused and don´t get caught in some personal hurt, anger, or distrust.
Take responsibility for your actions. Don´t start making excuses or finger-pointing at scapegoats. If you´re working in a team and you´re responsible for your team, any mistake which might happen is your mistake.
Once you create a community, a working group, you can reach new heights together.
Trust From the Voters
Gaining the trust of the voters might be one of the most difficult things to achieve. Politics is the art of making compromises, therefore you can never satisfy everyone. A lot of politicians also discredited the profession of politicians with their lies, so it´s hard to gain it back from the voters – but it is also essential to be able to get the trust and support of your organization.
The word politician means a public servant, which means, that you are elected to serve the people and make decisions that benefit them, not you. If you make a mistake, own it and take responsibility for your actions. Be as honest as possible, depending on the matter, and treat your voters with great respect. Be available for them, so they can address their issues on different channels if needed. It is hard to build trust, but it only takes a second to lose it.
Be open to the feedback of the citizens and ask for that feedback on a regular basis. Governments are seen by many as unresponsive to public feedback.[3]
Trust Outside Your Organisation
Last, but not least, you need trust and support not only from your own organization but others outside. Be it a civil organization or even another political party, the more support you have, the more you can achieve.
Find causes that are important to you and at the same time important for your partners. Treat them with great respect and honesty. If you make a mistake, own it and take responsibility for your actions. Avoid blame games and power games, focus on the cause you want to solve together.
Give your partners the benefit of the doubt, that they are led by good intentions, and handle conflicts with great care and solution-minded.
How Can You Gain Trust?
Coaching has several power tools in its repertoire to coach trust, these can also be used in politics.
Responsibility vs. Blame
Whenever something goes wrong, most politicians try to find excuses or start blaming other people or other parties. Voters don´t care about why things didn´t work out – they need leaders to solve their problems and represent their interests.
Wherever people are working, mistakes can and will always happen. The question is, how does a true politician cope with those mistakes?
What does taking responsibility mean? You can either apologize to the public, you can make corrections in your action, or in case of serious consequences can step down from your office. By doing so, people will remember you as someone who puts the people´s interests above their own ones and they could still trust you in the future.
Responding vs. Reacting
We see often in human history that unfortunate events need to happen for us to create a plan and prevent those unfortunate events from happening. Think about airport security before 9/11 happened. Or think about vaccination and lockdown protocols in times of pandemic – we were not prepared for the COVID-19 pandemic.
Reacting to a certain crisis under timely pressure limits our possibilities. Instead, if we choose to respond, we are preparing for scenarios that haven´t become a crisis yet – with a sense of responsibility and trustworthiness. By doing so, politicians could significantly increase their credibility in the eyes of the voters and increase their own impact on society.
Trust vs. Doubt
In the world of politics, one of the first lessons you learn is to question everything and not to trust anyone, but yourself. This doesn´t just apply to other political parties, but the same rule applies within your own party. If you are not careful enough, people would outplay you, and backstab you and you will either be moved aside, or you will never move forward in your political career.
These power games take an enormous amount of energy and limit the possibilities. As an African proverb says: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go with others.” One person usually does not achieve a huge difference, but you can do so by working with others together. If politicians were able to put their differences aside and were able to build trust with each other, they could free up a lot of energy and could channel those to work on common solutions.
Commitment vs. Trying
“Do or do not, there is no try.” – says the famous Jedi master Yoda in the Star Wars movies. The same principle applies to politics as well. It is not enough to just try solving a problem, you need to believe that you can solve it and you need to be committed as well.
In case the father is missing, we need to explore what underlying beliefs are standing in the way and what higher goals politicians are truly committed to. If we manage to combine commitment with action, we are on the right path toward the desired outcome.
Coaching Techniques Which Can Help You Gain and Keep the Trust of Others
It is hard to trust someone, especially in politics. Gaining trust seems equally difficult. There are some underlying values like honesty, respect, and responsibility, as well as some coaching techniques which can help you gain and keep the trust of others. Once you establish trust, you can work on more meaningful topics, and together with others, you can reach new heights, in service to the people around you. Eventually, this would also strengthen our democratic institutions and our faith in them.
References
[1] Nguyen, D., et al. (2022), "Survey design and technical documentation supporting the 2021 OECD Survey on Drivers of Trust in Government Institutions", OECD Working Papers on Public Governance, No. 53, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/6f6093c5-en
[2]https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/b407f99c-en/1/3/2/index.html?itemId=/content/publication/b407f99c-en&_csp_=c12e05718c887e57d9519eb8c987718b&itemIGO=oecd&itemContentType=book
[3]https://www.slideshare.net/OECD-GOV/presentation-of-the-oecd-report-building-trust-to-reinforce-democracy