CHAPTER SEVEN

How Trust Is Broken: Betrayal

“I’m really upset with Lynette!” said Patrick, an outreach coordinator. “She didn’t deliver her part of the project as she promised. She let me down and she let her other co-workers down. There is no longer trust on this team.”

“I don’t understand why John went to Craig to talk about the concern he has with me,” Scott, an executive assistant, said. “Why didn’t he come to me directly and give me a chance to address it with him? It hurt to hear about this from Craig. Now I wonder who else John talked to about me. Can I really trust him?”

“We trusted Donald, and he betrayed us!” Elena, a retail clerk, said angrily, referring to her boss. “He lied to us. I’ve got a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach. I’m angry and hurt. I don’t like working in an environment where I’m lied to and betrayed. I spend too much energy watching my back! I don’t know who or what I can believe anymore.”

Betrayal is a big word. You may view it as dark and negative; a connotation that triggers painful memories you’d rather forget. It may represent a significant occurrence of hurt and deceit in your life—perhaps a time when you were lied to, cheated on, or taken advantage of. But in reality, betrayal occurs with each and every instance of broken trust—regardless of its size. That is the simple truth. It’s also true that every single one of us has been betrayed and has betrayed others, even if we haven’t meant to. There is betrayal among colleagues, bosses, and employees—within families, neighborhoods, and churches. You and your friends betray one another, and we all at times betray ourselves. Betrayal is universal and a natural outcome of interacting with other people.

You may not be comfortable with this truth. You may want to run away from it and scramble toward the positive energy that comes from trustworthy relationships. Yet, to capture that energy, you must appreciate its absence. Betrayal and trust ebb and flow as inevitably as the tide in your relationships. You pour your heart into building trust and revel in its presence. Then, because you’re human and can’t sustain perfection, you slip up and betrayal pulls your trust out to sea. You work harder, and trust returns. You stumble, and it’s diminished again. There is no conquering this natural cycle of trust and distrust. You can only embrace it, learn from it, and be ready to handle the next big wave.

 

Every single one of us has been
betrayed and has betrayed others.

 

So when you feel that you or others have broken trust in your workplace, it doesn’t mean that you work with “bad” people, that you’re naive, or that you yourself are of questionable morals. You’re simply engaging with the human experience as best as you’re able. Trust will be built. Trust will be broken. By you, and by all of us. The more holistic and realistic your view of trust in your relationships, the better you’ll understand why betrayals occur and how you can show up differently the next time by practicing the behaviors of The Three Cs more faithfully.

This understanding of betrayal will help you to trust again when you’ve been betrayed, take ownership when you’ve betrayed another, and have empathy for the people in your life when they speak to you about their pain. Your wisdom will transform you into a guiding light both at work and at home, illuminating the path toward wholeness and health for everyone around you. Trust begins with you.

Let’s continue by learning more about the shades of betrayal and their impact.

The Betrayal Continuum

Betrayal takes different shapes and forms and comes in a variety of sizes. It occurs on a continuum from unintentional to intentional and from minor to major. Intentional betrayal is a self-serving action committed with the purpose of hurting, damaging, or harming another person. Unintentional betrayal is self-serving but is committed without the conscious knowledge of how it will hurt others. Major behaviors grab your attention right away, whereas minor betrayals are more able to be ignored—at least in the short-term.

BETRAYAL

Major Betrayal

Major betrayals impact you immediately and dramatically at your deepest core. Major intentional betrayals are often the result of fear and self-serving interests and include situations in which people deliberately fail to honor their commitments, knowingly withhold information, deceive fellow co-workers, or even sabotage others’ work to further their own ends. Major intentional betrayals are hurtful, ill-intended words or actions that break down trusting relationships. As one concerned employee told us, “It’s especially painful when you’re stabbed in the back without warning by those closest to you. It knocks you off your feet.”

Major unintentional betrayal is often associated with the insensitivity with which change is managed related to reorganizations, shifts in strategy, mergers, acquisitions, lay-offs, and reassignments.

After working sixteen years in his dream job in enrollment services with a major university, Mike received a mass email that he was being let go due to restructuring. He discovered that the message had been sent to thirteen other people as well. “I had put my heart and soul into that job,” he said. “And they didn’t even have the decency to tell me I was fired to my face. It was completely unexpected.” Even after he found another position with a competitor, Mike felt bitter and resentful toward his former employer. They had made him feel incidental, disposable, and worthless. “I wanted to get back at them, to show them they had made a bad mistake when they let me go.”

Minor Betrayal

Although major betrayals do happen, most forms of betrayal are minor. Minor betrayals can be intentional, such as when people gossip behind one anothers’ backs, spin the truth rather than own it, and hide their personal agendas. Or they can be unintentional, such as failing to pass along pertinent information, deliver on a promise, or tap others’ expertise as a project progresses. It’s important to remember that betrayals are considered unintentional, not because people don’t intend to act in a certain way but because those actions aren’t intended to cause harm to others.

Although minor betrayals can be small and subtle, the accumulation of their impact is not. Because they happen each and every day in the workplace, they have the potential to add up to pervasive, insidious drains on your self-confidence and energy.

Take a look at the box (on the next page) of minor betrayals people tell us they experience. Do you recognize any of these? Our research shows that 90 percent of employees experience these types of trust breaking behaviors frequently. Rather than deal directly with these transgressions, people let them go unaddressed. They are swept under the carpet or ignored. Oh, let’s not waste time on that little stuff. Let’s get on with it. We have too much to do.

Although you may try to deny, ignore, minimize, or rationalize these small breaches of trust, they don’t go away. Unresolved, they grow and contribute to negative feelings in your relationships and workplace. Their cumulative weight is equivalent to, if not greater than, a major betrayal. They create an “energy leak” that leaves you feeling spent, discouraged, and unproductive. Your enthusiasm and interest are replaced with exhaustion and apathy. You and others move from feeling pride in your workplace to wondering Why do I stay here? You close your hearts and minds to one another, and even to yourselves, as you attempt to protect your core from the attacks of a painful work environment.

Your Experience of Betrayal

How you position your experience of a breach of trust along the betrayal continuum depends on your perception of intent and impact—in other words, the degree of a person’s intention to harm you and the amount of pain, damage, or loss you experience. For instance, accepting credit for someone else’s work may be a minor intentional betrayal in one circumstance, but if the person who falsely accepts credit gains greatly at the other’s expense (for example, if he or she gets promoted for work a co-worker deserved credit for), it becomes a major intentional betrayal.

The opportunity for betrayal in any relationship at work or in your personal life is influenced by the amount or degree of trust you have in that individual, situation, team, or organization. An important aspect of trust has to do with expectations. If you have few or no expectations, you aren’t as susceptible to disappointment, hurt, or strong feelings of betrayal. If, however, you have higher expectations and greater involvement and loyalty in the relationship, you are more vulnerable to betrayal. The more you have invested of yourself in a relationship, the more deeply hurt you may feel by a breach of trust.

It’s not necessary that you diagnose your experience of betrayal to determine if it was major, minor, intentional, or unintentional. There is no right or wrong answer. We provide you with this framework of betrayal to help you understand your experiences and the vulnerability of trust. Whether a betrayal is major or minor, intentional or unintentional, the experience affects your Capacity for Trust in both yourself and others. Often, the impacts of major and accumulative minor betrayal are the same.

The Impact of Betrayal in the Workplace

Betrayals fray the fabric of relationships. Major betrayals cut the cords of connection between people; minor betrayals wear away at them bit by bit. Trust is energy producing; betrayal is energy depleting. Trust feeds performance; betrayal eats away at it.

Major betrayal clouds peoples’ thinking, saps their motivation, and derails creativity. In a climate of major betrayal, productivity plummets. You don’t need to read the news headlines to understand how the major betrayals of corporate scandals and ethical breaches cost companies, customers, employees, and stockholders billions of dollars.

Minor betrayals contribute incrementally to disengagement. Rather than being focused on doing their work, people spend time and energy protecting themselves. The office hallways, break rooms, and dining halls are filled with the whispers of people talking about occasions of breached trust and betrayal and wondering How much longer can I cope? When will something be done? I thought I belonged here; now I’m not sure. Maybe I don’t have what it takes after all.

Minor betrayals are deceptive in impact. As they mount, they have the power to thoroughly dismantle an organization’s morale, productivity, and overall effectiveness. They disrupt focus and concentration, and they create a cyclone of wasted energy within a rising tide of emotional upheaval. Betrayal is systemic; it affects the entire organization and everyone in it.

Charlotte, vice president of a Fortune 50 corporation, oversaw the implementation of the company’s new performance management system. She overhauled her organization’s approach and developed and rolled out a leadership development-training program, among a host of other initiatives. She executed her plans throughout the company, worldwide, in record time. Charlotte had a 150-person global unit of highly committed and very talented people with deep pride for the work they do. This unit facilitated initiatives throughout the company that regularly make tangible improvements in people’s lives.

The unit paid a high price during three restructurings in two years, however, with the loss of 35 percent of its people and significant budget cuts across the board. Despite Charlotte’s best efforts to keep her team aligned, little things began to fall through the cracks. Channels of communication and collaboration—already challenged to include people working all over the world—gradually broke down. Roles and responsibilities shifted, leaving decision-making boundaries blurred. Expectations began to go unfulfilled or unspoken.

Anxiety levels in the company began to rise. People no longer understood the direction of their unit or the direction of the company. They didn’t know what the future held and didn’t have a place to go to talk about it. This created mistrust and misunderstanding. People went at one another’s throats: fighting for resources, hoarding information, and working at cross-purposes with one another. Quality of work declined, the timeline to delivery went drastically off course, and the group’s reputation was compromised. High levels of trust had previously enabled Charlotte and her unit to succeed, but when trust diminished, the unit’s overall performance declined.

Charlotte’s organization suffered a series of minor betrayals that mounted as change was mismanaged. Everyone knows that change occurs. People no longer expect a stable organizational structure or environment. They realize that leaders cannot guarantee tomorrow. But they do expect—and deserve—acknowledgement of and respect for the impact change has on their lives and relationships.

 

Trust feeds performance; betrayal eats away at it.

 

When reassignments, firings, or demotions are handled insensitively or without due attention and respect to their impact on people directly and indirectly, trust breaks down. People start wondering about the direction the organization is moving, how they fit in, and if they want to fit in. They ponder What is it going to be like to work here? Or they worry whether they’ll even have jobs at all. Rather than step up and take on new challenges the organizational changes require, people are contracted and distracted. Rather than look forward, they look backward and become attached to “the way it used to be.”

“We were downsized twice in one year. When people left, we lost relationships,” Marlon, a draftsman in an architectural firm, shared with us. “Yet we’ve been expected to behave as if nothing happened, to simply focus on getting the job done. The loss of those relationships hurt, and it hurt even more that leadership did not recognize that. We needed to grieve.”

Whether it’s rooted in organizational change or “business as usual” interactions between co-workers, betrayal hurts. It hurts because people have endured disappointment and suffered loss. They may have lost professional opportunities, close working relationships, or their hopes of what might have been for the future. When people hurt, they may want to get even. As trust begets trust, betrayal begets betrayal.

The Effect of Betrayal on Your Capacity for Trust

Betrayal has deep impact. It goes to the core of human vulnerability, cutting through to your deepest emotional layers to affect your Capacity for Trust in both yourself and others. As one employee sadly shared, “This betrayal makes me feel angry, sad, and lost. It destroys my faith in the betrayer, but also makes me question my own judgment for trusting in someone undeserving of my trust.” Betrayal replaces your self-assurance with self-doubt and erodes your confidence, commitment, and energy.

As mentioned earlier, betrayals range in intensity. If you’re not heavily invested in a relationship, being betrayed may cause you to feel unsettled, irked, or discouraged. When those in whom you’ve invested a great deal of yourself betray you, however, you may experience extreme emotions of shock, anger, alienation, inferiority, or worthlessness. One member of a telecommunications company reflected on being betrayed by his co-worker: “I had to get support from human resources. I asked for a transfer as soon as possible. I couldn’t work with someone I didn’t trust.”

Betrayal is deeply felt—so much so that people use physical words to describe their emotional states after being betrayed. They tell us they feel as if they’ve been “punched in the stomach” or “kicked in the teeth.” A leader in a pharmaceutical company shared: “I really got beat up in that board meeting this morning. I felt betrayed by those who said they’d support my new ideas. I’m not sure I can trust any of them now.”

Major Betrayals Diminish Your Capacity for Trust

When a trusted friend and colleague stole Sharon’s creative idea for an ad campaign she’d been working on for months, the betrayal shook her deeply. A designer for a major advertising agency in New York City, Sharon became righteously enraged when her colleague received a large year-end bonus as a reward for her successful ad campaign. Sharon cut ties with her colleague and became extremely cautious about sharing her ideas with anyone.

A major betrayal, intentional or not, is shocking and devastating. What you thought was bedrock becomes shifting sand; what you thought to be true becomes false; what you thought permanent becomes impermanent. Your world turns upside down, and you may be tossed into emotional chaos. “My experience of betrayal is that I’m standing on a rug, and the rug is suddenly pulled out from under me. I’m tumbling helplessly out of control,” a former client once told us.

 

Major betrayals are shocking and devastating, and they
undermine your perceptions of yourself and others.

 

Betrayal can deeply wound your ability to trust everyone around you. When you suffer a major betrayal, you may find yourself wondering whom it’s safe to trust. Or you may make a promise to yourself that you won’t trust anyone. It’s common to transfer your feelings to other relationships when trust breaks down. It’s human nature to take betrayal personally. Even if you can forgive, you don’t forget.

Betrayal can also impact your ability to trust yourself. Being left out of a significant decision that has implications on your work or life, being lied to about the status of an initiative, being passed up for a promotion you were led to believe was yours: these situations can all bring up feelings of worthlessness and may diminish your self-esteem and sense of confidence. You wind up feeling attacked, wounded, and vulnerable. You may question your value and self-worth, asking, “What is wrong with me that someone would treat me this way?” Betrayal deeply wounds your relationship with yourself and others—not just with your betrayer.

Minor Betrayals Test Your Capacity for Trust

Lou, an executive director, sat down with his employees to review how a plan to restructure the department would impact their roles and responsibilities. He discovered everyone had heard the news already. He felt betrayed that the person he’d confided in had breached his confidentiality.

Minor, everyday behaviors that break trust may seem small and subtle, but their impact is not. They accumulate over time and create a climate of distrust. They impact your commitment and ability to have confidence in your own and others’ work. When you sense your colleagues’ intentions and motives are not sincere or authentic, you may feel angry, helpless, and fearful. You may pull back, disengage, or become resentful—or even lose your ability to trust in general.

Minor betrayals can be most insidious because they often don’t get addressed—yet they don’t go unnoticed. These minor breaches of trust can create significant hurts, which lead to a state of major betrayals, particularly when their impact is chalked up to “just the way it is around here.” Minor betrayals accumulate until one day people realize the extent to which they’ve been quietly misled and hurt through deception, dishonesty, or omission, and they head for the exit door on that relationship, job, or company. Or worse yet, they stay and join the ranks of the working wounded. They do as little as they can get away with.

 

Minor betrayals often go unaddressed—but they don’t go unnoticed.

 

Most betrayals in the workplace are not intentionally malicious and are not designed to hurt others. They occur when people are overworked, overextended, stressed out, and trying to do more with less. When you allow others to get away with minor breaches of trust, however, it becomes easier for them to betray you in major ways. The cumulative effect of these betrayals damages your working relationships and eats away at your Capacity for Trust. You begin operating from a place of fear and worry about whether to trust others. Your behavior reflects this fear and influences how others approach you. Distrust breeds distrust and ultimately leads to more betrayal.

How You Betray Yourself

Most of us rarely set out to betray or let another person down. But we do. When you betray another, the first person you betray is yourself. You’re vulnerable to betraying yourself when you overlook your own needs and fail to speak your truth.

You said yes to a request when you really wanted to say no or not now. You didn’t request the additional support you needed to meet a deadline, so now you’re working sixteen-hour days. You agreed to move the dates for a business trip knowing it would cut into precious family or weekend time. You agreed to a job assignment you knew you wouldn’t enjoy because you wanted to be seen as serious about your career. After all, it was only for a year. That year turns into a very long year!

How Your Actions Lead to Self-Betrayal

When you agree to terms and conditions that you know are not mutually serving—that you know will come at your own expense—you override your needs and betray yourself. You may push beyond your physical limits and compromise self-care by working excessive hours, eating poorly, and skipping your exercise routine because you can’t take the time for it. You say yes when you needed to say no. You become skillful at self-sacrifice to get your work done. You become pressed and anxious by simply trying to do too much. You put the job and others before yourself. You pay the price.

 

When you betray another, the first person you betray is yourself.

 

What causes people to override their core needs and be vulnerable to betraying themselves? The answer is fear: fear of not being good enough (I have to do more); fear of not being seen as competent (I won’t ask for help because then they’ll be right); fear of not being seen as cooperative (I won’t disagree with others’ views); fear of not being considered for promotion (I’ll take on the extra assignments to show them what I can do, even if it means I don’t take a vacation this summer!).

Darryl, an account manager, faced delivery deadlines and was rushing across town from one meeting to another. Trying to multitask by texting while driving, he had a near fatal car accident. While he recovered from his injuries, he felt the pain of self-betrayal, saying, “I was so fixated on doing my job, I forgot who I am. I am a father. How could I have been so irresponsible to my family? To myself?”

When you override your personal needs and become anxious and overextended, you lose your center point, your sense of being grounded, and ultimately your sense of self. “I have been pushing so hard I can’t feel myself anymore,” said Claire, an interior designer, at completion of a major project.

When you’re not aware of yourself, you aren’t able to be aware of others. It’s in this space of disconnection from yourself that you let others down. In your haste, pace, and ceaseless pushing, you lose your footing. When you have little compassion for yourself, you’re unlikely to have compassion for others. You may unintentionally betray them because you have first betrayed yourself.

 

Fear causes you to be vulnerable to betraying yourself and others.

 

How Your Perceptions and Beliefs Lead to Self-Betrayal

Your Capacity for Trust influences your perceptions and beliefs, which in turn influences your readiness and willingness to trust (or betray) yourself and others. When your Capacity for Trust is constricted, you aren’t as ready and willing to trust. This is when you are most vulnerable to disappointing, letting down, and betraying yourself and others. You may even expect to be disappointed as you lose faith that others will come through for you. The following questions illuminate how you may set yourself up for betrayal when you are not ready and willing to trust in others or yourself. Here, you see the natural impact of your orientation to the four questions presented in the previous chapter, “How You Trust.”

Do You Expect to Be Rejected? If you expect to be rejected or criticized, you test people’s loyalty and commitment to you. Rather than being open to what you might experience and expect the best, you presume the worst: You’ll have to prove to me that you’re trustworthy first. You find yourself on the defense, and you’re ready to run from or beat up those individuals who may present a danger to your delicate sense of safety and identity. In this situation, trust may be a long time coming. If you’re not willing to give it, you will not get it. Remember, trust begins with you.

Do You Contribute to Conflict? Your expectations of conflict generate the very conflict and distrust you fear. Your attitude influences your interactions with others. As a result of betrayal you may be inclined to enter a potentially challenging conversation on the defensive assuming the other person is not aligned with your interests and is looking to battle. You set yourself up to experience the very dynamic from which you are attempting to protect yourself. As one frontline factory worker said to a co-worker, “If you’re looking for a fight, by golly I’m going to help you find one!”

Thought is creative. When you perceive others intend harm before you’ve examined your assumptions, you bring yourself to the relationship with judgment and criticism. You are on guard. When you’re reluctant to trust in others, you behave in ways to protect yourself that cause others to react in a similar fashion. You may not give trust an opportunity to form.

Are You Preoccupied with Your Own Problems? When you are constantly preoccupied with your own problems, you may be totally unaware of your self-absorption and how it affects others. For example, if you’re fostering an attitude that the world is treating you poorly, you rarely feel responsible for or sensitive to the pain you cause others. This preoccupation with yourself causes you to be unaware of your actions. As a result, you may break promises, miss deadlines, and be insensitive to the problems you create.

If you have a low Capacity for Trust in yourself, you may feel victimized by your circumstances and unresolved patterns of betrayal in your life. You may come across as needy, emotionally draining, and untrustworthy to your co-workers. Your preoccupation with the past causes you to be unaware of your actions and how you betray others. When problems are brought to your attention, you justify and rationalize your behavior.

Do You Create Difficulty Unnecessarily? If you’re preoccupied with a frantic search for certainty and predictability, you may be unable to understand the complex dynamics of trust-based relationships. You may have little tolerance for differences in others, and you may come across as self-righteous, speak in absolutes, and think in simplistic, black-or-white, good-or-bad terms. If you disagree or don’t understand something, you may react with a verbal attack. You assume the worst and treat your assumption as fact. You may regard life as a battle to be won, and your goal is being right and winning at all costs. If so, you have a limited ability to deal with the uncertainty of new situations. For example, when facilitating a team meeting, you might come across as domineering: My way is the right way, trust me. You may have difficulty leading an open-ended dialogue session that lacks formal structure.

 

The need to be always right and win at all costs creates
distrust and limits your overall effectiveness.

 

Do You Discount People? If you feel hurt, embarrassed, or frightened in your association with someone, you may conjure up an elaborate mental smoke screen to protect yourself from memories triggered by past painful experiences. By devaluing others, you’re able to distance yourself from them. History has shown that in war, countries discount other nations or ethnic groups by labeling them as the enemy and portraying them in nonhuman, demeaning terms. It’s easier to drop a bomb on your enemies if you convince yourself they’re evil.

In the workplace, if you foster this perspective, you may not be able to distinguish individuals from the groups to which they belong and prejudge them without fully understanding them. When your Capacity for Trust is contracted, and you are unaware of this contraction, you’re positioned to fail in your cooperation with others. You’re perceived as difficult to work with, and others are disinclined to readily share information and resources to accomplish the job. You are not invited into collaboration. Your working relationships suffer, and you and the organization are cheated of your potential performance. You lose out on what others have to bring to you.

Betrayal Can Be a Teacher if You Let It

Betrayal happens every day. It’s a natural part of human relationships and can be a gift and a teacher if you allow it to be. You don’t have control over how others treat you. You do have control over how you choose to respond. You can choose to be a victim who is lost in anger, bitterness, and resentment. You can let your Capacity for Trust in yourself and others contract and shut yourself off from healthy ways of relating. Or you can choose to step into and work through your pain on a quest for meaning, insight, and wholeness. Choosing to embrace betrayal and to work through the pain will strengthen and deepen your understanding of yourself and your relationships.

 

Betrayal can be a gift and a teacher if you allow it to be.

 

Knowing how to deal with betrayal is essential to maintaining healthy levels of trust in your relationships. Equipped with the tools we give you in the next chapter, you’ll learn how to trust again—and help others to do so as well. The insights you gain will support you in all aspects of your life, both at work and at home.

Trust Building in Action

Reflecting on Your Experience

1. Reflect on a time in your life when you felt let down, hurt, disappointed, or betrayed, intentionally or unintentionally: What happened? How did you feel—emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually—when it happened to you? How did you respond to the experience? What short-term and long-term impact did it have on you?

2. Reflect on a time when someone felt betrayed by you. What happened? What impact did your behavior had on them? How did you respond to their reactions of your betrayal? What did you learn about yourself and relationships?

---

 

Trust Tip In order to fully understand trust, you must understand betrayal. Betrayal is a natural part of human relationships. Critical to the health of your relationships is how you choose to respond to betrayal when it happens.

---