You Know the Five Love Languages. But Do You Know the Seven Trust Languages?

As workplace consultant, and author Minda Harts traveled the country in recent years, she heard a common theme. 

“People would tell me that they didn’t trust their company or they didn’t trust their colleague or they didn’t trust their manager,” she said in a conversation with CFW. “But I realized what they were really saying was that they didn’t know how to communicate what they needed to be able to have more trust.”

That’s when she had her breakthrough idea. “I thought, we have five love languages for our romantic and platonic lives. What are the languages for the workplace?”

These insights led Harts to write her new book, Talk to Me Nice: The Seven Trust Languages for a Better Workplace, which will be released next month. 

The seven trust languages she introduces are transparency, security, demonstration, feedback, acknowledgment, sensitivity, and follow-through.

Harts offers these tips for building trust in your workplace:

• Begin by asking a simple question: “What does trust look like for you? What do you need from me to be successful?”
• Listen for which of the seven trust languages they name, explicitly or not. “One person might need you to just follow through more consistently,” she explains.  “Somebody else might need you to demonstrate you did what you said you were going to do.”
• Remember that the average person will work 90,000 hours in their life,” she said. “Every interaction that we have is either going to enhance or erode trust. So, let’s start bringing trust inside the building and in our Zoom rooms.”