Trust is ultimately about a willingness to make our vulnerability visible to another – and to believe that they won’t take that show of vulnerability and abuse it to hurt us. Vulnerability can take many forms from revealing a secret fear to a friend, to sharing key insights with a collaborator or admitting to a supervisor that we need more support.
This is from a great piece on Why trust is a must when working together - some reflections on the Social in silico blog.
Trust has always come up for me in knowledge management conversations, but as this blog post discusses, it is really the center of being able to work together successfully. Having trust in a relationship makes it okay when I "give up" something that serves my purposes for the benefit of the larger good (which likely serves my purposes even better). I'll only do that when I have confidence that I won't lose out. I don't necessarily expect direct reciprocation, but rather that what we build together will be awesome for everyone.