2

Collaborating Well in a Competitive Culture

The ability to collaborate effectively with diverse peoples will be especially valuable during the age of climate change, but unfortunately, sophisticated collaboration skills of empathy, hope, and trust are in short supply in the general population. In our highly competitive culture, these skillful habits are often misunderstood, emotionalized, and under-rewarded. Consider the discussion of empathy in Sonia Sotomayor’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings. President Barack Obama had said on the campaign trail that he wanted to appoint judges with empathy for marginalized people who most needed the protection of the law. For example, in a 2007 speech at a Planned Parenthood conference, he said, “And we need somebody who’s got the heart—the empathy—to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom. The empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old—and that’s the criteria by which I’ll be selecting my judges.”¹

Shortly before nominating Sotomayor, he stated at a press briefing, “I view the quality of empathy, of understanding and identifying with people’s hopes and struggles, as an essential ingredient in arriving at just decisions and outcomes.”² But this view was controversial. Numerous Republican senators vigorously opposed Sotomayor’s nomination based on their concerns that empathy was inconsistent with objectivity and that it implied bias in favor of people with similar life experiences. Senator Jeff Sessions put the point forcefully:

No senator should vote for an individual nominated by any president who believes it is acceptable for a judge to allow their personal background, gender, prejudices or sympathies to sway their decision in favor of or against parties before the court. In my view such a philosophy is disqualified. Such an approach means that the umpire calling the game is not neutral, but instead feels empowered to favor one team over the other. Call it empathy, call it prejudice, or call it sympathy, but whatever it is, it’s not law.³

Sotomayor’s life experiences and her judicial philosophy seemed to embody Obama’s stated criterion. She grew up amid poverty in New York’s South Bronx, struggled with diabetes from age six, saw her mother’s difficulty financially supporting the family, and witnessed the pain of addiction in friends and relatives. Later, after becoming a federal judge, she argued that her life experiences would and should affect her work as a judge precisely because they gave her an understanding of life circumstances that more privileged people might not have. She famously stated that she hoped a “wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would, more often than not, reach a better conclusion.”⁴ Some senators worried that her emphasis on personal experience might lead to bias and nonrational (i.e., emotional) decision-making. Sotomayor clarified in her testimony, however, that a person from any background could be a good judge, and that empathy did not imply deciding cases in favor of clients like her. She was successful in muting the critique of her views, and she was confirmed on August 6, 2009, on a 68–31 vote. Since Sotomayor exemplifies sophisticated collaborative skills, I will continue to use her as an example of key points.

The issues senators raised about empathy have been applied well beyond the law. They mirror general arguments made by Paul Bloom in his best-selling book, Against Empathy.⁵ Bloom’s arguments focus on the emotional dimensions of empathy—sharing another’s feelings—and take such emotional resonance to be a risky basis for much decision-making in comparison with more rational approaches. As we will see, the skills associated with empathy go well beyond sharing emotional states. More sophisticated versions of empathy avoid its alleged deficits.

One reason for our failure to appreciate collaborative skills like empathy is the competitive framing of major institutions like law. In the United States the legal system emphasizes use of competitive skills. We find who is guilty through an adversarial process. We settle many disputes through adversarial lawsuits, and we discover how to interpret the law through a competition between opposing arguments. Empathy appears to have no place here, except perhaps in humanizing a defendant and advocating for lenience. In Europe, however, much legal practice is less adversarial and empathy more respected. Some US legal theorists have championed the role of empathy in legal practice.⁶ If we had a greater emphasis on collaboration in our major institutions, we would have more practice in the skills it involves and a better understanding of what expertise in these areas looks like.

Collaboration, like competition, is a family of strategies for achieving goals within a group. A paradigm case of collaboration is when multiple stakeholders voluntarily pool resources to achieve a beneficial outcome that none could achieve alone.⁷ The shared resources can include information, influence networks, time, and funding. On the other hand, competitive strategies involve one party exerting sufficient power over others to dictate an outcome, either democratically, economically, or militarily, which the losing parties do not see as acceptable. Whereas competitive processes typically aim at a result where some groups win and others lose, collaborative processes aim at a result where all groups meet enough of their needs and accept the resulting allocation of benefits and burdens as roughly fair.

Many activities involve both collaboration and competition. A common example is team sports, where teammates must collaborate with one another in order to compete effectively against another team. Policymaking is another example. The development of the Affordable Care Act required a great deal of collaboration between insurance companies, drug companies, the medical establishment, and governmental bodies, though it was passed through a largely competitive political process. This point notwithstanding, in group decision-making one family of strategies often dominates. In the Paris Accords process for addressing climate change, collaborative strategies predominated. At a regional level, the Chesapeake Watershed Project was an exemplar of a successful long-term public/private collaboration.⁸ By contrast, early attempts to address the severe population decline of the spotted owl in the Northwest forests resulted in a much more competitive process, with loggers and environmentalists each trying to “win” a victory that was unacceptable to the other group.

Although most people acquire at least rudimentary collaborative and competitive skillful habits, they tend to have a preferred approach to group problem-solving. The more we use a cluster of skillful habits, the better we tend to get at them. Once we are good at some skills, we tend to use them more frequently. They become the default, instinctual approach to a set of problems. When most people around us use competitive skills in a social problem-solving context, a social norm is created that reinforces cultivation of more advanced competitive skills. The skill sets associated with the collaborative family of strategies are likely to be less well developed and less salient. The above points are compatible with the observation that the skillful habits we tend to use depend on context. A mostly collaborative person can be quite competitive when playing games, even though that same person is skillfully collaborative when negotiating intergroup conflicts.

The emphasis on competition in US culture is reflected in the nation’s version of capitalism, its media, its politics, its dominant approach to leadership, and even its educational system. We celebrate strong leaders who can best opponents. Our media frame public debates in terms of arguments between two opposing sides, with each convinced the other side is benighted and must be stopped.⁹ As a result, there is little room for collaborative compromise. Education is largely based on an individual pursuit of learning and grades, rather than growth of the general knowledge of a group. Daniel Markovits argues that the version of meritocracy found among elites in the US fuels hypercompetitive lifestyles, as parents work increasingly long hours to maintain their lifestyles and to maximize their children’s opportunities to compete effectively for college placement.¹⁰ Such competition can motivate extra effort, but it is unlikely to cultivate the skillful habits necessary to solve social problems collaboratively. This competitive emphasis has served us fairly well during the growth and conservation phase of the national- and global-scale adaptive cycles, but it is increasingly preventing us from effectively addressing challenges that affect our ability to flourish.

Focusing more on collaborative problem-solving strategies and strengthening the collaborative skillful habits of empathy, hope, and trust will be crucial for flourishing in our times. Empathy helps determine the direction for fruitful collaboration by identifying how individuals in a group can meet enough of one another’s needs. With empathy blind spots, we lack the understanding of perspectives and desires that guide potential collaborative partners. Hope provides fuel for a collaborative process. Collaboration around divisive issues is hard; we need to develop the skills of good hope to sustain the pursuit of shared solutions. Without sufficient hope, many people will seek non-collaborative paths for meeting their own needs and ignore the needs of others.

Trust is an important lubricant. Collaboration becomes extremely inefficient if participants have insufficient trust in one another. In such cases, people tend to protect themselves and avoid sharing ideas that increase their vulnerability. This self-policing significantly limits the kind of creative thinking necessary for reframing problems in ways that make mutually beneficial solutions possible. Without the sophisticated skills of trusting well and healing breaches in trust, it is unlikely that we will build the partnerships necessary to effectively tackle wicked problems, and it is likely that the social capital critical for resilience will continue to decline. Before examining these skill clusters in more detail, we should explore the reasons for thinking they are important.

Empathy and Collaboration

We return now to empathy, not as a mere emotion, but as a complex set of skills that are essential to effective collaboration. At its core, empathy is an ability to understand the perspectives of others in all their rich significance. Without empathy, we have a hard time jointly designing a solution to a group problem that meets enough of others’ needs to secure long-term support.

One of Sonia Sotomayor’s stories illustrates nicely the role of empathy in collaboration. When she was a student at Princeton University, she was a member of Acción Puertorriqueña and Princeton’s Third World Center, which were advocating for a more diverse faculty and staff. Many of her peers wanted to take an adversarial approach with administrators, but she argued for a more collaborative approach. As she reflects on this, she says, “My strengths were reasoning, crafting compromises, finding the good and the good faith on both sides of an argument, and using that to build a bridge… . A respectful dialogue with one’s opponent almost invariably goes further than a harangue outside his or her window. If you want to change someone’s mind, you must first understand what need shapes his or her opinion. To prevail, you must first listen.”¹⁷ The groups used her skills and did succeed in motivating Princeton to hire its first Hispanic administrator, an assistant dean of student life, whose job was in part to support minority students. The result was not all they wanted, but it was a success on which they could build.

In the above passage Sotomayor is primarily focused on the skills of cognitive empathy—the ability to know what is going on in another’s mind. This is typically distinguished from emotional empathy—the ability to share the emotion another is experiencing. And both of these are distinct from concern about what another is experiencing. Thus, Heather Battaly describes empathy as “knowing, sharing and caring.”¹⁸ It involves the ability to know what others are thinking and feeling, to share some of those feelings, and to care about those feelings. These elements of empathy may appear separately or together. Researchers often focus on one of these elements to the exclusion of others.

The foundational empathy skills involve “reading” others’ thoughts and feelings. Most children acquire rudimentary skills in this area by the age of four. Some people become highly adept at reading others. An excellent poker player will recognize “tells” that signal when someone is likely to be bluffing. A good speaker must be able to read a crowd, and a good business leader must be able to sense what stories will motivate employees. For people on the autism spectrum who lack such skills, social interaction can be challenging. At first glance, emotional empathy may seem less like a skill than an inclination to feel what another is feeling. The same might be said about caring about others’ feelings. But skillful sharing and caring involve learning to exhibit these dispositions in the right way at the right time, and to communicate them appropriately.

A more detailed account of empathy skills emerges from an examination of the reasons why objections to empathetic judges we considered above ultimately fail. Kathryn Abrams outlines the three primary objections as follows:

1. Empathy biases us toward groups of people like us because we tend to empathize more with those like us. Thus, it reduces impartiality.
2. It compromises rational decision-making, because it is grounded in emotion.
3. It renders us less objective, because it involves situating ourselves within a group and a context.¹⁹

To be sure, we would not want judges who are routinely partial, irrational, and subjective in their rulings, nor would we want this to characterize our everyday decision-making. As Paul Bloom and Jesse Prinz argue, such attributes are poor guides to ethical decision-making.²⁰ But I have suggested these attributes apply only to those with underdeveloped empathy skills.

Let’s start with the bias concern. A person who excels at empathy recognizes the limitations of her empathetic capacity. She can detect her blind spots and biases. She is good at listening and imagining the viewpoints/experiences of distant others and out-groups, including those with whom she disagrees. She has learned how to deepen and broaden her empathetic responses. It is not hard to understand what a close family member is feeling and to share that feeling, but it may take a lifetime to become good at understanding a vast variety of peoples, to be disposed to share in their joys and sorrows, to recognize where such capacities are limited, and to know how to expand such capacities when the situation calls for it. A number of studies suggest that people do tend to empathize more with those who are like them. However, taking this as evidence that empathy is a poor guide to decisions is like arguing that reasoning is a poor guide to decisions because studies show people commonly reason fallaciously. The problem is not with reasoning or empathy, it is with underdeveloped use of the tools.

The second objection presumes a dichotomy between emotion and reason, according to which reason provides a balanced and systematic approach to decision-making and emotion involves nonrational distortion, bias, and even pure fantasy. This dichotomy has been widely criticized.²¹ Rather than seeing emotion and reason as competing approaches to decision-making, we should view them as interwoven into the fabric of human understanding and jointly involved in much decision-making. For example, emotions are often justified by the reasons for beliefs that generate the emotion. I might be angry at my brother because he has not repaid a debt. My justification for the anger involves my reasons for believing he has not repaid a debt and for thinking that he should have done so. Moreover, we often use the insights of emotion to generate the premises from which good reasoning proceeds; my joy at a surprise visit from an old friend may lead me to reason that I should do more to nurture my friendships. Once we rid ourselves of the reason/emotion dichotomy, we can develop more sophisticated views of empathy.

Collaboration involves developing skills of rationally negotiating our own and others’ emotions. Our emotions often convey vital information; they reveal meaning and enrich understanding, and underlie much motivation. Emotions need not compromise rationality if they are wisely managed. The skills of good empathy include not only the ability to share deeply in others’ perspectives and feelings, and to communicate this sharing effectively, but also to detach from this shared feeling in order to evaluate what to do in the context. Imagine two parents whose child is involved in an escalating fight with another child. They need to emotionally appreciate their child’s perspective but also do the same with the other child. Then they may be able to find a way to de-escalate the anger and reach a solution that each child can accept. The parents must share and care about the feelings of both children. Emotional empathy here does not imply agreement; rather it adds to the depth of understanding of how the children frame the situation and what motivates them. The trick to integrating emotional and cognitive empathy into good collaborative decision-making processes is to hone our skills of engaging fully with others’ emotions and then detaching enough to fully consider other relevant information. The skill of engaging and detaching from emotional empathy is crucial for good leaders, and also for judges. In a collaborative setting this depth of understanding is very helpful in developing ideas for workable solutions to a problem. It makes collaboration more effective.

The third objection also targets the emotionally laden perspectives associated with empathy. An emotion situates us somewhere in the world where having it makes sense. If I feel anger, I am in a position of having been mistreated. But the objection then states that situatedness reduces our objectivity. On this view, objectivity can only be complete if we approximate a point of view independent of all situatedness. Thus, the objection claims that judges should try to reason from the law alone, and not from their particular situations or those with whom they empathize. But can we really approximate such objectivity? Hilary Putnam describes this view of objectivity as trying to achieve a “God’s eye point of view,” which is impossible for us.²² We must all engage with each other from our situated points of view, but empathy enables us to adopt alternative points of view, which may temper our own perspectives. Sotomayor quotes Martha Minow in defending a similar view of objectivity: “There is no objective stance, but only a series of perspectives—no neutrality, no escape from choice in judging.”²³ As Kathryn Abrams notes, “The judge who is truly dangerous … is not the judge who recognizes her situatedness and its contributions to the inevitable choices she faces in judging. It is the judge who does not understand she is situated at all… . A person who understands her individual perspective in this way has no incentive to look for anything beyond it when she considers a case.”²⁴

The skill suggested by this response to the objection involves recognizing how our—and others’—emotionally colored points of view shape thinking and action and guarding against viewing any perspective as the uniquely objective view. This skill is also an element of humility, which is the subject of the next chapter. This skill enables us to better see the limitations of multiple points of view advanced in a collaborative setting and to creatively adjust proposed goals in ways that maximize broad support.

Once we become aware of some component skills of sophisticated empathy, we see why the objections to having an empathetic judge miss the mark. We also see that most of us fall short of excellent empathy. We can become better at reading others’ thoughts and feelings, at recognizing and expanding the limits of our empathy, engaging and detaching from shared emotions in decision-making, and challenging the points of view we bring to a context without becoming skeptics. I have illustrated some benefits of such skills in collaborative process, but they are also highly beneficial in building new relationships quickly. This is particularly important when we must navigate release.

In becoming better empathizers, we realize how much more morally complex the world is; we become much more aware of the tradeoffs we are making; and we see that the challenge of managing conflict is ever present. In effect, having strong empathetic skills makes us highly attuned to the challenges of finding just win/win collaborative solutions to problems. To rise to these challenges, we need to build our capacity to hope for sustainable collaborative solutions to our problems. Hope provides the motivational energy to persist even when the odds of success are low.

Hope and Collaboration

As with empathy, many people underestimate the significance of hope because their understanding of it is underdeveloped.²⁵ We often use the word “hope” to express a mere wish that something occurs. For example, I may “hope” that you are having a nice summer or that your exams went well. This sort of hope is usually explained as involving a desire that something happen and a belief that satisfying the desire is possible, but not certain.²⁶ This view of hope involves no evident skill or action-orientation. Such hope can easily be written off as wishful thinking, like the “hope” that other people will solve the climate issues without requiring any sacrifice from us. By contrast, the kind of hope that signals a strong sense of agency and involves key skills regarding regulating agency is a set of skillful habits one can cultivate. These make up what Victoria McGeer calls “the art of good hope.”²⁷

The importance of hope is nowhere more salient than in our response to climate change. If we think that technological progress will adequately address climate change, then we do not need to have hope regarding this goal. We can simply be optimistic. However, as we saw in chapter 1, this optimism is unlikely to be warranted. As Paul Hawken puts the point, “When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand the data.”²⁸ Byron Williston has a similarly grim outlook.²⁹ The probability that we will avoid significant climate disruption change seems very low in light of our history of inaction, the difficulty of reaching just, sustainable agreements to decarbonize the economy, and the long lifespan of atmospheric carbon. A natural response to such pessimism is self-deception and/or despair. We either avoid looking at the facts or we give up on solutions and try to maximize the enjoyment of our current lifestyle before this becomes impossible. As some might say, we party while Rome burns.

Nevertheless, Williston argues that effective responses to climate change require developing the virtue of hope: a full emotional and behavioral engagement with the pursuit of the hoped-for goal despite its low probability of success. His justification is pragmatic. If we despair, we lose our capacity to act. As a result, we have a moral obligation to develop our capacity for hopeful action. Here, hope is action-oriented; it supplies the motivational energy to pursue long-shot goals. Without applying hope skills to climate change, we will all be worse off because we will further reduce our odds of rapid decarbonization of the economy.

Paul Hawken follows his point about pessimism with the observation that “if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse.”³⁰ His use of optimism seems very close to the kind of hope I have in mind, since he takes it to be compatible with a pessimism based on the facts. This is different from the more common view that having optimism about a goal involves the belief that one has good evidence that one will reach the goal. Given this common meaning of “optimism,” we should not be optimistic about rapidly decarbonizing the economy, but we can be hopeful. Engaging with those who are working hard to make that long-shot goal a reality helps to fuel our own hope.

The skillful habit of hope involves finding new challenges stimulating and redoubling efforts when reaching a goal looks less probable. A sports team that often comes from behind to win a game seems to have such capacities, and its coach or team captain might have the skills to stimulate hope in team members. As C. R. Snyder notes, “The advantages of elevated hope are many. Higher as compared with lower hope people have a greater number of goals, have more difficult goals, have success at achieving their goals, perceive their goals as challenges, have greater happiness and less distress, have superior coping skills, recover better from physical injury, and report less burnout at work, to name but a few advantages.”³¹

One can break the skillful habits associated with hope into three interrelated categories: skills focused on self-regulation of one’s own agency, skills involved in fostering hope within a community, and skills required to assess the reasonable application of hope in a context. The main skills involved in regulating our own agency include focusing on goals and past successes, rather than on constraints and past failures, rehearsing hopeful cognitions to boost motivation, and developing multiple creative pathways for achieving a goal. They also include social skills that assist one in accessing a community that helps to bolster one’s agency.

McGeer draws a strong connection between self-regulation of agency and engaging in a hopeful community, because the development of hope in early life depends on the scaffolding provided by others.³² Young children are relatively helpless; they typically need the encouragement of caregivers to learn how to overcome frustrated desires and to persevere in pursuit of some new goal. The parent who repeatedly says “you can do it” after the child has made several failed attempts is in part fostering the development of hope. A parent may also suggest taking different approaches to the problem, or recommend taking some time out before returning with new energy to the goal. Good parenting provides the child with a range of skills that can be drawn on to accomplish increasingly challenging goals; but as the child becomes an adult, parental scaffolding of hope needs to be replaced by peer scaffolding. We can develop friendships that help us to rise above our challenges and to deepen our agency. Knowing how and when to access such peer relationships to strengthen our hope is a key part of regulating agency. Those who fail to develop such friendships are more likely to fall into despair.

Martin Luther King Jr. is an exemplar of the skillful habits of hope, especially communicating hope. This skill requires knowing your audience—having appropriate empathy, so that you can use language and cautionary tales that will strengthen motivation. It involves being able to describe the depressing facts of a situation without diminishing hope and articulating the dynamics of hope and despair using familiar examples from life experience. His famous “I Have a Dream” speech gives voice both to the long struggle of Black people to achieve justice in the United States and to a renewed determination to make “all men are created equal” a reality. As he urges his audience not to give up, he says “This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope.”³³ The speech is a powerful rallying cry for a people to continue to work toward the goal of genuine justice; it is a masterpiece of hope communication.

Anyone who has been a leader of an organization or community knows how important it is to be able to foster hope. As a provost in a small college, I often tried to tap faculty skills of hope when internal conflicts threatened to prevent us from overcoming our obstacles and achieving some important objective. Often this involved creating opportunities for peer-to-peer problem-solving that would renew the hope that together we could achieve something. No great orator, I found that my best skill for fostering hope involved a kind of coaching that helped build confidence that together we could succeed.

The above skills will often fail to generate good hope unless one can also assess the limits of reasonable hope in a context. Appropriate assessment skills increase the chances that one avoids wishful thinking and unreasonable optimism. As a teacher, I sometimes had students who had great motivation for learning and good work habits but whose goals surpassed their abilities by a significant margin. They hoped for A’s when B’s would be a significant achievement. Pushing oneself hard to earn an A is often worthy, but not when falling short risks despair. A cancer patient may hope for a full cure, but when she learns that the cancer is terminal, the skills of good hope require her to adapt her goals so she hopes for something she can reasonably work hard to achieve—perhaps a good death. There is no rational calculus for assessing the appropriateness of hope. That involves weighing the constraints on achieving a goal, the importance of the goal, the motivational limitations of those who must act, and the potential for unforeseen roadblocks. In the case of climate change, it is the tremendous moral importance of rapidly decarbonizing our economy that warrants hope, even when the constraints seem to make the probability of success very low.

Sometimes the severity of the constraints on achieving a goal makes it very hard to grasp what achieving the goal might look like. In such cases, we must frame the object of hope in a very general way. Jonathan Lear called this “radical” hope and attributed that trait to Plenty Coup, the chief of the Crow, who urged his tribe to adapt to the onslaught of white settlers rather than to fight them.³⁴ His hope was that his people could retain some of their identity, culture, and sense of agency by agreeing to live on a reservation that preserved a portion of their ancestral lands. He did not know how this could be possible or what it would look like, but he still managed to persuade the Crow to pursue these goals, rather than to fight to the death. Both Thompson and Williston argue that we must cultivate such radical hope that we avoid climate catastrophe.³⁵ We cannot fully understand what achieving that goal will look like and what sacrifices it will require. The skills associated with radical hope are necessary for increasing our own motivation to make sufficient changes in our own lives, and also to support the collaborative processes necessary on a global scale to avert the crisis.

The skillful habits of good hope apply to action on all scales, but to strengthen our skills we must practice them on the local scale, that is, in our personal lives and in our local organizations. Not long ago, I was asked to moderate a forum for a new organization focused on clean air in the Glens Falls, New York, area. After an excellent talk by an expert on pollution and public health and a short panel discussion with local officials, audience members began to express their frustration with local inaction regarding a large trash incinerator and several other polluting businesses. Local officials became defensive, and a cynical tone started to dominate the proceedings. Instead of raising public awareness and building support for this new organization, the event threatened to leave people angry and disempowered. It was an opportunity for several of us to practice skills of good hope. We described the dynamics we saw in the group, explicitly empathized with the full range of stakeholders, identified actions the group could take that might be productive, highlighted hopeful voices, and obtained clear support for some action steps from local officials. Some anger and cynicism remained, but most people agreed to come back for further meetings to see what we could achieve together. This small but common kind of situation suggests how regularly we can find opportunities to practice the skills of hope. In interpersonal relations, in group projects for a class, and in interactions with friends and relatives, we inevitably make tacit choices about whether to foster hope.

Trust as a Collaborative Skill

Without hope, participants may check out of a difficult collaborative process. Without trust, they are likely to create premature stalemates where no one is willing to make the first move to break through entrenched conflict. In low trust contexts, most people try to protect their interests and avoid being manipulated. In extreme cases, such as intractable international conflicts, a series of trust violations between the parties makes each side fear that any trust will be taken advantage of. No one is willing to look weak by suggesting compromise. In most polarized political decision-making processes, lack of trust leads to seeing disagreement as a fight to be won rather than a compromise to be fostered. Those with whom one disagrees become enemies to be defeated.

Some amount of trust is required to start the work of creative solution development that will garner support from most stakeholders. Thus, many collaborative processes begin with trust-building exercises in which relationships between participants begin to be built. The more trust that can be developed, the more vulnerable and experimental people can be, which is essential to effective and efficient collaboration. Outside of explicit collaborative settings, trust is crucial for smooth interpersonal interaction.³⁶ One can ask directions without fear of being fooled, and receive change in a transaction without counting it. These small efficiencies magnify as the stakes increase; in business, organizational partnerships, and marital relations such efficiencies are part of what make relationships work well.

How should we understand trust, given its evident value? My answer owes a great deal to Solomon and Flores, who distinguish “authentic trust”—a choice that one makes in full view of the potential for trust violations—from the feeling of trusting.³⁷ Authentic trust requires one to extend trust not through a calculation regarding trustworthiness but rather as a way of valuing the potential relationship and increasing the probability that the other will live up to the trust. For example, a parent may continue to extend trust toward a teenager when evidence of trustworthiness is ambiguous, with the hope that the teen will live up to the trust. Such trust is contextual and conditional. It depends on the specific situation, and it includes an awareness of the limitations on how far trust should be extended. In this sense it is the opposite of a naive trust that is unreflective and automatic.³⁸

Like empathy and hope, trust is often emotionalized. It is thought to be a feeling of safety we have either because of our innocence or our experience of someone’s trustworthiness. Both of these are problematic. Innocent trust may be appropriate for children, who may reasonably take for granted the trustworthiness of caregivers. But such trust does not acknowledge the possibility of betrayal, so it is fragile if it becomes the model for adult trust. Once such trust is violated it cannot be regained. The innocence is lost. On the other hand, if trust is just a feeling we have once trustworthiness is demonstrated, then we risk not gaining the benefits of trusting those who have not yet had a chance to demonstrate trustworthiness and those with whom we might repair a trust breach. This latter view of trust might make sense in a highly competitive society where we might presume that people we do not know are likely to take advantage of us to maximize their own self-interest. It is ill-suited, however, to times where we need to foster collaboration with those we do not know well and where we need to build new relationships quickly.

Trust is better viewed as a set of skillful habits that include trusting wisely, building trust, and repairing trust breaches. Trusting wisely involves making good judgments about the limits of reasonable trust in a context. This skill requires cognitive empathy—an understanding of the motivations of others; it also involves an assessment of their competence in acting on those motivations. Some trust breaches occur because people entrusted with a project are not competent to carry it out; others result from people having insufficient motivation to carry it out. Another aspect of trusting wisely is assessing the impacts of potential actions on the dialectic of trust. This involves imagining what can be achieved through greater trust, and understanding how to build trust incrementally through a series of small successes. A third aspect involves retaining a vivid awareness of the risks of trust while extending trust. It is easier to practice such skills in the context of close personal relationships, where the importance of maintaining the relationship is often highly salient. But trust is also valuable when it extends outside our family and friends into a broader set of acquaintances and strangers. The use of trusting skills outside of our established social networks builds bridging social capital, which is especially important during periods of release and reorganization, when one must collaborate in new ways with new stakeholders.

Solomon and Flores emphasize that trusting wisely is not reducible to a complex cost-benefit analysis of risks of trust regarding an action in a context. My judgments that I can trust my mechanic to repair my car appropriately but not to keep a secret need not be based on cost/benefit analyses. The calculative approach to trusting wisely seems to presume that we can assign probabilities to the benefits that come with trust, but many of these are unpredictable. Also, the calculative view usually suggests a self-interested focus, whereas trust as a skillful habit is focused on the value of the relationship.

McGeer amplifies this critique of the calculative view by drawing an explicit link between hope and trust.³⁹ She argues that trust can be rational despite lack of evidence of trustworthiness because we can be pragmatically justified in feeling hopeful about the person’s dispositions to act in our interests. We can also be hopeful about the role that our trust plays in strengthening those dispositions. We can be hopeful that trust will beget trustworthiness. Trust is a voluntary acceptance of vulnerability to another—a kind of believing in the other’s agency—that we reasonably hope will be appropriately honored. Thus, a trusting person must also be good at hope, and not too risk averse.

Some might object at this point that extending trust to acquaintances and strangers is not rational in the context of a fifty-year decline in interpersonal trust. Putnam and Garrett found that interpersonal trust peaked in the mid-1960s when approximately 55 percent of survey respondents said most people could be trusted; by 2014 the figure was 31 percent.⁴⁰ The average interpersonal trust of generational cohorts seems to stay fairly stable, but younger cohorts have markedly less trust than older cohorts. Other surveys over the same period find similar decreases in trust. Gallup has assessed how much confidence Americans have in institutions since 1979. In this context, trust and confidence are roughly equivalent. The percentage of people saying they have a great deal of confidence, or quite a lot, in public schools has dropped in the last forty years from 53 to 29 percent; in banks the drop is from 60 to 30 percent; in organized religion 65 to 36 percent; and in Congress from 34 to 11 percent. The only major institution to see an increase in confidence over that period is the military.⁴¹

This robust decline in trust does not justify withholding trust where we lack evidence of trustworthiness. This would contribute to a spiral of suspicion. If others believe our trust in them is low, then they must protect themselves by not trusting us. Instead of people starting from a default position of trust, distrust becomes the default. But if we react to the decline in trust by refusing to trust acquaintances and strangers, we become isolated, bound by our limited friend groups, and increasingly cynical. Or worse, we hypocritically imply that we trust others when we really do not. Solomon and Flores suggest that this kind of cordial hypocrisy deeply compromises the vulnerability necessary for efficient teamwork within organizations.⁴² Nevertheless, we do not need to acquiesce to this default of distrust. In our actions, feelings, and speech, we can rebuild trust, starting in local communities.

The skills of building trust in groups involve being trustworthy, effectively communicating our trust, and owning the ideal of creating a community of trust. Where we are leaders, such skills also include delegating authority, showing that we trust others to do good work; micromanaging erodes trust. Perhaps most importantly, trust building involves using a principle of charity in interpreting the behavior of others. We should interpret actions and speech in ways that put them in the best light—that make them understandable and reasonable—unless there is clear evidence to the contrary. The skills of empathy are deeply intertwined with those of charitable interpretation.

Building trust also involves critiquing untrustworthy behavior in others, while humbly recognizing that few of us can avoid it entirely. If people feel that others get away with breaching trust, they may do the same when it would serve their self-interest. It is easier to erode trust in such ways than to rebuild it afterward. We must be careful here, though. Sometimes we find ourselves in situations where all choices appear untrustworthy. For instance, in any genuine moral dilemma, each action is wrong is some respects. Each action appears to breach some reasonable trust. Only when we understand the entire context of an action, including the choices that are available, can we confidently criticize the untrustworthiness of others.

In addition, developing and sharing a reservoir of trust-building success stories is helpful in breaking cycles of distrust and cynicism. The stories generated by the nonprofit Braver Angels are particularly powerful examples. They show how in the course of a weekend ordinary citizens can break through negative stereotypes associated with Democrats and Republicans and come to trust those with whom they deeply disagree. A great deal of good work is being done to rebuild trust nationally in response to political polarization. Many other specific skills for community-building enhance trust, including conflict resolution, stakeholder engagement processes, and social marketing.

The final cluster of trust skills is involved in healing trust breaches. The skillful habits of trust repair differ from trust building because they focus on addressing a situation where an individual or group has wronged another. A few years ago I taught a course on building trust, and my biggest surprise was the majority view that when trust has been broken, it cannot be repaired. Students’ initial response to a significant trust breach was to abandon the relationship and seek elsewhere for someone to trust, even if the violator had been a close friend or lover. Many were not explicitly aware that practices they used when they committed a wrong, such as making excuses or apologies, were actually skills they could improve. Related skills include explaining why a violation occurred, acknowledging the harms it caused, and offering reparations where appropriate.

In a review essay on empirical research regarding trust repair, Lewicki and Brinsfield describe the effectiveness of different repair strategies for different kinds of breaches.⁴³ For example, apologies are more effective for breaches that result in failures of competence than for actions that appear to come from lack of integrity, presumably because one is likely to be motivated to improve one’s competence, but flaws in integrity are less likely to be corrected. Silence is sometimes more effective in the latter cases. Apologies that express genuine repentance and assurance that the violation will not happen again, along with the request to be forgiven, are more likely to be effective than those that leave out such elements. Much depends on the context of the violation, however. Breaches early in a relationship are harder to recover from than those that occur after the relation is well established. Reframing the violation can be important for long-term strategies of trust repair. In a collaborative setting, the violator often must demonstrate a commitment to changing behavior in order for an apology to heal a rift. Genuine forgiving on the part of those harmed will put closure on a breach, even if it is not forgotten. The skill of forgiving well is itself an important part of the trust repair. Trust repair at an organizational level involves similar skills.⁴⁴

The above catalog of trust skills, most of which are familiar, should put to bed the idea that trust is just a feeling. Their familiarity does not mean they are generally well developed, however, as is evident from our ambient level of distrust. Most of us can improve our capacity to foster trust.

Cultivating Collaborative Skills

Fortunately, collaborative skills can be strengthened at any time. The occasions for practicing them and reflecting on the results are ubiquitous. The first steps are to consciously choose to become better at collaborating and, where appropriate, to make such practices the default approach to problem-solving. Sotomayor’s memoir provides not only a wealth of examples of such skills at work but also a useful exploration of how mentors and role models can help us cultivate stronger collaborative skills. She tells numerous stories about how she intentionally developed relationships with individuals who could help her strengthen her skillful habits and who had character traits she wished to emulate.

Sotomayor learned very early in life how to find a mentor. In grade school she struggled. Her fifth-grade teacher, Ms. Reilly, put gold stars on the board next to the name of any student who did something really well. Sotomayor wanted those gold stars, but she did not know how to get them, so she asked one of the “smart kids” how to study. This sounds obvious, but it is fairly rare. Donna Renella did teach her how to study, but more importantly, she taught her that often just asking for help can create a mentoring relationship. As Sotomayor puts the point: “Don’t be shy about making a teacher out of any willing party who knows what she or he is doing.”⁴⁵

Later, an older student, Ken Moy, who coached the Forensics Club, became both a mentor and a role model.⁴⁶ The difference is subtle but important: a role model embodies skillful habits we want to learn but may not know or care whether we learn them. A mentor may not be a strong role model for the traits we are seeking to develop but may know how to help us progress. The mentor’s primary tools are linguistic; they include interpreting a situation, providing advice, critiquing performance, and giving praise. A role model’s primary tool is behavior. Of course, one may be both a role model and a mentor, as Ken Moy was for Sotomayor. He mentored her regarding oral debate, and he served as a role model for analytical reasoning. He also helped her through the process of applying to a top college.

Later, when Sotomayor was at Yale Law School, she describes José Cabranes, Yale’s general counsel, as her first “genuine” mentor. By this she meant a highly experienced professional who took her under his wing and advised her throughout her career. At his invitation, she went to work for him after her first year at Yale and closely observed his interactions with others. She talks of his skill of engaging “with warmth and depth with whoever he encountered” and his ability to “maneuver with equal skill and self-assurance, a kind of courtly grace, in the most rarefied corridors of power.”⁴⁷ She notes that having a close role model like José Cabranes convinced her that she too could learn to do what he did. At Yale, she honed her skills of judging how and when to collaborate, and Cabranes played an important role in this, as did later mentors she found when she was a prosecutor and when she was in private practice. At each step in her career she developed relationships with people who could teach her how to fine-tune the skills she already had, and to add others in order to succeed in the new context.

In my conversations with peers, I have been surprised at how few people have deliberately tried to find mentors. Many could name a few people who had served as mentors, but few had made it a project to find strong mentors and to build the relationships that would maximize the learning from them. I confess that I have not done that either. I have had some wonderful mentors, but it was more luck and their gracious efforts than my doing. I could have learned a good deal more had I been more deliberate.

Finding mentors is not so hard if instead of looking for a perfect role model we look for insight amid imperfection. We have to know what we want to learn and be willing to watch and listen. Some of my best mentors have been friends, colleagues, or bosses who would not have said they were mentors. They were just open to telling or showing me how they do something. Early in my teaching career I struggled with calling out students who were not performing up to their capacity, worrying that I would breach an already weak relationship in the process. I watched how my colleague Dick Prust could with jovial good humor and evident care call out a student, create a moment of connection in the process, and build trust while also remotivating the student. I could not duplicate his approach, but I developed my own version, which has become a standard tool in my collaborative skills toolbox. This is mentoring writ small, to be sure; it is far from the genuine mentoring relationship Sotomayor had with José Cabranes. It is where we must start, though.

I will discuss other approaches to cultivating broad skillful habits in later chapters. We may achieve a lot through our own initiative and through the support of those we know, but to scale up the acquisition of collaborative traits, we must also look to major institutions, which are inevitably shaped by the dominant competitive orientation of our culture. Education and business are promising candidates. Consider just one data point. Many employers want schools to do more to cultivate teamwork skills. Roughly every three years the Association of American Colleges and Universities commissions an employer survey to assess employers’ perceptions of how well-prepared recent graduates are to meet employers’ needs. The 2018 survey was consistent with prior surveys in showing a significant gap between graduates’ ability to work effectively in teams and the needs of employers in this area.⁴⁸ Of the over five hundred executives surveyed, 77 percent said being able to work effectively in teams was very important, and only 42 percent said graduates were well prepared in these skills. In chapter 7 we will see how education is responding to such needs.

I close this chapter with a final story from Sonia Sotomayor’s memoir My Beloved World that illustrates how cultivating binocular vision is a lifelong process and underscores the role of vulnerability in relationship-building. Recall that Sotomayor has type one diabetes. She had learned how to administer insulin shots herself at age seven. This was one manifestation of her developing self-reliance. Through school, college, and early steps in her career, Sotomayor did not let people know she had diabetes. In general, she rarely opened up about her many struggles. As she says, “Many times I felt there was a wide moat separating me from the rest of the world, in spite of my being, by all accounts, a great listener to all of my friends… . Like my mother, I would suspend judgment, feel their pain, perhaps even point out a fact they had overlooked… . The only trick I could not manage was to ask the same of them.”⁴⁹

While she was working with a private law firm, Sotomayor was invited by a client to a wedding in Venice. She went to her hotel room after the flight to rest, and fell into a diabetic coma. When she did not appear at the wedding, two friends thought something might be wrong. They went back to the hotel and threatened to break down the door when the manager would not let them in. They found her passed out and quickly rushed her to a hospital, saving her life. Sotomayor had become adept at estimating her blood sugar levels based on what she had been eating and managing five to six insulin shots per day, but the system was not foolproof. She realized that she had been extremely lucky to have friends in Venice who had known about her diabetes. She could not count on that luck; she needed to share more about her challenges. She says, “Learning to be open about my illness was a first step, and it taught me how admitting your vulnerabilities can bring people closer. Friends want to help and it’s important to know how to accept help graciously.”⁵⁰ She also learned that many of her difficulties relating to her mother came from her mother’s difficulty in being similarly vulnerable. The growing empathy for her mother, and the mutual sharing that it engendered, went a long way toward strengthening that relationship.

For me, this story is layered with insights about the development of skillful habits across a lifetime. We often find that the strengths that enable us to flourish early in our lives carry with them weaknesses that we must address later. Sotomayor’s self-reliance was a tremendous asset, but it came with costs. She then had to work on those weaknesses over many years to balance appropriately the skills of self-reliance with the skills of relationship-building through sharing vulnerability. Altering our assessment of where to find a balance between contrasting skills involves sharpening our capacity to make good judgments. The process of developing the capacity for judgment is lifelong. We balance and rebalance, and thereby refine our core skillful habits—our character. We tend to think that character traits are set early in life, but we have a great deal of freedom to change them, even late in life. Sharing our vulnerabilities is also a sign of humility, which is the next cluster of skillful habits we will examine.