Low Trust, Low Support

In this chapter we will examine in some detail the importance of trust and support to workplace relationships. We will explore the decision to trust a colleague, the decision to offer support to a colleague, and the decision to receive support from a colleague. Then we will examine the links between the three things. We will explore how those of you who work in highly challenging environments may want or need more support than those of you who experience your work as less challenging. We will examine the difference between healthy and unhealthy challenge at work, and explore how adversarial colleagues represent an unhealthy, draining challenge to those of you who work alongside them regularly. The chapter will identify how ‘being supportive’ means different things to different people, highlighting how misunderstandings can occur when one colleague’s expression of support may not be experienced by another as supportive. And we will examine how adversarial colleagues prefer to operate with little or no trust or support, and purposefully construct their relationships along these lines. The chapter will end by taking a look at your own experiences of working with non-adversarial colleagues whom you consider to be supportive and whom you trust, as well as your experiences of working with adversarial colleagues who you consider to be unsupportive and challenging to work with, and whom you do not trust.