Can you quantify trust?

In a previous article, commenter Robert Kist asked:

How are you going to judge if people trust you – what would your indicators be, if you decide to treat it as a metric?

This is tricky. I don’t think there’s a good answer. Bad managers, who are by definition less trusted, can easily rationalize away any attempt at quantification. One quantifiable measure would be employee turnover. However turnover tends to be ignored in the aggregate, since the sample size is necessarily small. Individual departures are blamed on “incompatibility” or “burnout,” when it is without exception due to mismanagement.

Another potentially useful metric is the employee survey. This is an unequivocal disaster, because there are just endless ways to explain away poor ratings. I’ve heard bad ratings blamed on bad weather!

What about the venerable “360 review”, where your direct reports and peers give feedback? This would require some sort of survey, and we know how that goes.

In the end, bad managers will be able to rationalize away poor trust metrics. Unfortunately they are also universally unable to qualitatively identify a lack of trust. Good managers, on the other hand, intuitively know whether trust is getting better or worse. They should make sure there are many avenues of feedback to inform this intuition, but I’m not sure any are worth quantifying, if they are quantifiable in the first place.

Someone please tell me when I start to become a bad manager, please.