Trust never sleeps: What is the Trust Equation?

Andrew Horwood, a Managing Principal at MartinJenkins, draws on his own experience as a private secretary in a ministerial office – and a little bit of late‑70s Neil Young – to look at how agencies, officials, and private secretaries can build trust with their ministers and with each other.

If you provide advice for a living, the impact of your advice is directly related to your trustworthiness. The Trust Equation, developed by Charles Green, is a useful tool for thinking about what builds trust and how to measure it. The equation looks like this:

Credibility, reliability, and intimacy build trust, while self-orientation – sometimes just called “self-interest” – undermines it.

This article looks at how this framework applies in and around the zone of advice to ministers – including for example officials and agencies needing to build and maintain trust with ministers, and private secretaries maintaining the trust of their host departments.

Andrew Horwood was the Private Secretary in the office of the Minister of Commerce and Consumer Affairs in 2016 and 2017

Credibility: Expertise convincingly conveyed

An adviser has “credibility” when they have expertise and convey it convincingly.

Some roles are expected to include deep technical knowledge, while for others it’s knowledge of the timeframes, dependencies, and deliverables across a programme of work. For private secretaries concerned with maintaining credibility with their minister, they need to know who to call and how to get information quickly.

Across those roles there are some common credibility pitfalls to avoid. Never lie, always triple-check the information you provide, and fix mistakes quickly. Agencies should offer well-reasoned, politically neutral advice that shows an awareness of the broader environment and doesn’t relitigate policy decisions that have been made. At the same time, agencies retain credibility with the public by avoiding being “captured” by their minister or stakeholders.

Reliability: Doing what you say you’ll do

“Reliability” means delivering when you say you’ll deliver and to the quality expected. Trusted advisers are responsive, but careful to manage and prioritise their workloads. They understand their minister’s priorities and so prioritise the most important requests. They can also anticipate demands before being commissioned.

You may need to limit the outputs you agree to provide. When negotiating expectations with ministers, explain how resource limitations and trade-offs can affect what can be achieved.

Agencies should work through their private secretaries to ensure the commissioning from ministers is clear and to keep demands to a manageable scale. 

Intimacy: The trickiest part

“Intimacy” is evident when a person feels safe and secure in confiding in you. It is achieved through both showing empathy and keeping sensitive information confidential.

Intimacy can be the hardest dimension of trust for officials to achieve as it’s appropriately bounded by professional standards set out by the Public Service Commission. Officials need to show they understand their ministers’ political context while maintaining separation from that context. This includes factors your minister may be considering beyond pure policy objectives – like political impacts, trade-offs across portfolios, views of colleagues and stakeholders, and personal motivations. Trusted advisers show they understand the pressures ministers face without adding to them.

Key to intimacy with ministers is communicating information early, with “no surprises”. Where developing interpersonal relationships with a minister is difficult, officials can often develop cordial, highly productive relationships with the minister’s political advisers and press secretaries instead, giving a window on the wider context in which the minister may be receiving advice.

Plus, hey, some ministers do like to connect and shoot the breeze. And some have specific preferences for font size and Oxford commas that you’re best to reflect.

Self-orientation: Pushing your own interests

If you appear to be putting yourself above the interests of the minister or the public, you’ll be harder to trust – for example, if advisers are dismissive of options they don’t like but that ministers might want to consider, or if they prioritise their own careers over the public interest, perhaps by placating their superiors or delivering an output that puts style over substance.

Here, private secretaries may need to filter advice that’s too narrow or self-orientated, ensuring it’s rounded and well evidenced.

On the other hand, sometimes the hardest component of any trust equation is giving advice to ministers they may not want to hear.

A package deal

While it’s useful to break the Trust Equation down into its elements, it’s important to work on them all together. For example, there’s no point being highly reliable if your outputs lack credibility, while an overly familiar relationship creates risks and rarely ends well. The dimensions of this framework work as a package to build trust, both emotionally and rationally.  

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