Taking the Trust Leap

(Photo: Kari Greer/USFS)

As part of the 2018 National Wildland Fire Leadership Campaign - Leading Through Relationships, I would like to delve into one of my favorite leadership pillars—trust. In my mind, trust is the most important aspect of leadership. If you don't have trust in a relationship, you have nothing. (And I am not just talking about a relationship with a significant other or loved one.)

Without trust, we would never move from the start position in the "game of life." As with fire operations, each of us performs some sort of a risk assessment before we do most anything. The thought I want to ponder in this blog is the amount of trust you put into information and entities provided through technological means such as the internet or software applications.

A trust leap happens when we take the risk to do something new or different to the way that we've always done it. - Rachel Botsman

Take for example Siri or Google Maps when traveling. Do you question the overall route these technological guides provide or do you plug and drive? We hear about people ending up in remote locations, lost for days, through blind trust in mapping applications.

Other examples include online purchases and recommendations for various consumer products and services. Are responses reliable? How do we know which vendors or critics to trust? How much trust do you put into the unknown? When is it safe to take a trust leap?

Wildland Fire Leadership Challenge - Digging a Little Deeper

For more information on this subject watch and discuss Rachel Botsman's TEDTalk presentation.

Trust - confident relationship to the unknown

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Consider the following:

• Do you trust those you know more or less than those you don't know?
• Do you have too much/little trust in technology?
• What mechanisms do you have in place to ensure your safety and the safety of your team?
• Have you stopped trusting institutions and started trusting strangers?

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About the Author: Pam McDonald is a writer/editor for BLM Wildland Fire Training and Workforce Development and member of the NWCG Leadership Subcommittee. The expressions are those of the author.