Hey everyone. I'm Varun Rajan. Welcome back to the Push Pull Podcast where we dig into career transitions and the future of fulfilling work and more broadly what it takes to build a work life that actually holds up. I put something out on LinkedIn this week, and I wanted to use this episode to actually unpack it because I think I was gesturing at something that deserves a little bit more than a LinkedIn post, but the short version of what I said was. That I'm worried that we're losing trust in ourselves and in each other, and I think that shows up in two places that look unrelated, but are actually the same problem. One is the job search, and the other is how companies are explaining what AI is doing to their workforces. They're both exhibiting symptoms of the same failure mode, different scale, but same core problem. I recently picked up the Speed of Trust by Stephen Covey, Jr. If you've ever read The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, that was actually written by this guy's dad and this book, the Speed of Trust, has been around since 2006. It's been on my list forever and I've. Finally picked it up. And look, if you've ever been in an organization that felt like it was grinding itself to death with process and politics and approvals, and nobody quite saying what they actually meant, this book will feel uncomfortably accurate. Uh, and that's all I'll say for right now. But the core idea is simple. Trust is not just a soft skill, nice to have. It is economic. When trust goes down, speed goes down, quality goes down. Cost goes up. Covey calls this the low trust tax. You've paid it, in your own personal relationships. Every organization that you've ever been in has paid it. We just usually don't call it that. But let me start with something that was a little bit more personal. I was coaching somebody this week. He's in ops and data analysis is part of the job, though, not the whole job. And he wants to move into a more dedicated analysis role, and he's interviewing for one right now, real go-getter, learning the tools on his own time, filling the gaps himself because he knows that's where he wants to go, and he's not waiting for anyone to give him permission to get there. And every time we tried to work through how he would tell that story in an interview, he'd stop himself and say, well, here's how I've been trying to spin it, and I think I'm gonna spin it this way. And I told him to stop because the second you call it spin, you've already made a decision. You've decided that the real version, the one that's in your head, that you're not saying out loud is the true one, and what you're presenting is a performance or a cover story. And that's self-deception, which comes through interviewers. Feel it. You feel it in interpersonal conversations all the time when somebody is. Fronting or trying to put up some kind of perception or persona that isn't quite them because they feel that they would be better received that way. I feel it in these coaching conversations, there is a texture to somebody telling a story that they don't quite believe versus someone telling a story that they've actually worked out for themselves. So what I suggested was not to see it as spinning a story or spinning a whole bunch of stories I wanted to emphasize that this was reframing because here's what's actually true about his situation. He identified where he needed to grow and he went there without anyone asking. That is a story about conviction And those gaps that he's filling, those gaps are now amplified by the fact that he did it on his own time, on his own initiative, and because he cared enough to close those gaps, that's not spin. That's a reflection of his character and competence. Those are two different things, and so I keep coming back to this idea of reframing. Almost always a version of what happened that is both honest and constructive, not because the hard parts didn't happen or the gaps don't exist, they did, and they do. But you can talk about what the environment was, what made it difficult, what you learned, where you decided to go, As well as where you're deciding to go right now, what are the friction points you're encountering? Why will the next role that you're targeting that is maybe looking for someone that has already crossed those gaps is actually going to be the right spot for you to close those gaps in a way that's going to make you an asset to those organizations more so than your competition that's going after that job. And that version is more useful to you and the person across the table, than, than whatever this raw version is. Because the raw version is usually just pain and frustration and imposter syndrome without any context. It's not more true, it's just less thought through, less considered. And Stephen Covey would say, and I'll get to Covey, a little bit more thoroughly in a minute, Covey talks about. Five waves of trust and. I'll get to that in more detail a little bit later on in this episode, but he argues that self-trust has to come first. That is not a soft observation. It is structural. If you don't trust your own account of what happened to you and what you have done in response and what you pursued proactively, you cannot build the relationship level trust, which is the next wave. that makes the next thing work. You're building on a shaky foundation because everything you say will have a slightly uncertain quality to it because you haven't settled on what you actually believe. The signal that you found is the honest version. Stop making it feel like a performance. It just feels like the thing that happened and what you did with it. Now, zoom out a little bit. Yeah. Over the last two years we've watched wave after wave of layoffs at tech companies, and a significant portion of these layoffs have been framed, at least in part as AI related. The story being, we're automating work. We need fewer people, the future looks different. We're being strategic about where we invest and we. Hey, that's partially true. AI is genuinely changing what many roles look like. I'm not here to deny that, and I'm fundamentally optimistic about AI and what it can do for teams, what it can do for individuals, what it can do for businesses, But I think it's almost common understanding now that a lot of what got called AI driven reduction was really pandemic over hiring. Meeting investor pressure and macro correction companies doubled their head count from 2020 to 2022 because capital was cheap, growth felt infinite, and then rates went up and growth slowed, and all of that excess had to unwind. And that's. A business correction. It's not primarily an AI story. The problem is that saying we overhired during the pandemic is an uncomfortable thing to say. When the stakes are that high, it requires admitting that leadership made bets that didn't work out. AI is changing. The nature of work is a much better story. It's forward looking. It sounds strategic, and it makes the exec team sound visionary instead of a group of people that need to hit a number this quarter. But is it reframing or is it spin because. I think people see through the spin because employees at these companies, whether they were let go or not, feel the gap between those two things. They may not be able to name it. They may not have the language for exactly what's off, but they feel it, and the cost of that feeling is real. Disengagement, cynicism, resistance to the next initiative leadership asked them to buy into, including notably the AI tools. Those same companies are now betting on, and that's what Stephen Covey calls the low trust tax. When trust goes down, speed goes down, cost goes up. It doesn't show up on a balance sheet as. You know, distrust expense. It's not a line item. It shows up as slower adoption, more process, more politics, more people privately rolling their eyes while publicly nodding along and dropping emojis in the Zoom chat. it compounds every communication sent in. A low trust environment is less effective than the same communication would be in a high trust one. the Speed of Trust, first came out in 2006, And that's 20 years ago. But it has held up extraordinarily well in my opinion, partly because the core argument is basically timeless. Trust is not a soft, squishy trait. It is something that you can measure. It is something that you can regain. It is something that you can build deliberately, and most organizations are paying a tax on it constantly and calling it something else. Covey's Framework Maps Trust across five Waves. Self trust, which we talked about a little bit earlier, relationship. Organizational market and societal. Each wave is built on the ones below it. You can't manufacture trust at the market level in your brand or your customer relationships or your public reputation if you haven't built it at the organizational level. You can't build at the organizational level if leaders have not built it at the individual and relationship level. It's not a communication strategy. It's basically infrastructure. The organizations that will actually get ROI on the new wave of digital transformation are the ones that, are getting honest with their employees. because the employees in those organizations will extend good faith to new tools, new processes, and that good faith is what makes adoption real rather than compliance. Because compliance is not adoption. And I've seen this enough times in my own work to know there's a new tool that gets adopted. there's a new tool that gets introduced, but the tools that get adopted are the ones that people trust, The one where the rollout was honest about what it was trying to accomplish and why, what were the trade-offs that we were willing to stomach and why, and what are we going to do to de-risk any sort of, any sort of friction that comes from this adoption. The coaching conversation I had and how I'm considering the layoff narrative through the lens of trust, like I said, are the same failure at different scales. An individual who calls his own story spin and an organization that reaches for the spun or clean explanation rather than a. Well framed, honest one are both paying a trust tax and both are building on a foundation that has many cracks in it. And there's a version of this that I've seen play out in practice that I keep coming back to in my last couple of episodes. I talked to James Warren, who's the CEO of Share more stories, and he runs a platform called SEEQ, which is a research tool that captures employee and customer experience insights. And he walked me through a case study that mapped employee sentiment and customer sentiment at a company over time, and they correlated pretty significantly with each other. When internal culture was struggling, when employees felt disconnected, disrespected, unclear about what was expected of them, the customer experience reflected it. Not immediately, but the curve tracked. And that is Covey's speed of trust framework. In practice, you cannot hold the market level wave together if the organizational wave is broken. You can try, you can put resources into brand and NPS and customer success, but the signal is almost leaking from the inside out. And the same is true for the individual. If you're telling a story that you don't believe about your own career, your own transitions, and your own motivations, that comes through in every conversation that you have. Interviews, yes, but also the way that you show up in the first months of the next thing. the way you carry uncertainty about whether this was the right move. Self-trust has to come first. For an individual, that means doing the work of finding the honest version of what happened, not the flattering version or the one that you think hiring managers want to hear, but the honest one, which is usually way more flattering anyway, because it involves agency rather than victim hood. And for an organization that means being willing to say, we met a bet it didn't fully work out, and here's what we're doing now. Even when the cleaner story that sanitizes all of that friction is available. And that's what I mean when I say conviction over certainty. Certainty is a clean story. Conviction is the story that you actually believe and can stand behind because you're honest about where it gets messy. And that's where I land. So if any of this connects to something that you're working through, or a career story that doesn't feel quite right, or an organization that you're watching, navigate a change that feels off somehow, uh, I genuinely love to hear about it. feel free to hit up my dms. Uh, and you can also reach me at Varun. That's V-A-R-U-N, at push pull podcast.com. And, uh, yeah, please, uh, rate my podcast, drop a review if, uh, this resonated on YouTube, apple Podcast, Spotify, wherever you're watching or listening, share it with someone who's in the middle of figuring out how to talk about something that they're not quite sure how to frame yet. I've got a lot more conversations about these kinds of things coming up very soon. And, um, super excited to share those discussions with you all. Thanks.