You know when things aren’t working but you can’t figure out why? Here are the signs which give me the “uh-on” moments:
The team avoids spending time together and minimizes contact. Silence despite disagreement. Disengagement in meeting. Closed door conversations that turn into venting sessions about someone. People playing politics.
These are the tell tale signs that something critical has been damaged. Trust.
This post from Anne Raimondi where she refers to the Trust Equation by Steven Drozdeck and Lyn Fischer nails it.
So what is trust? She sums it up:
“Essentially, the amount you trust someone is the sum of how credible you believe they are on a subject, how reliable they’ve proven themselves to be over time, and how authentic you think they are as a person, divided by how much you think they’re acting in their own self interest.”
Whenever someone new joins a firm and asked me for advice, I have always told them: “1. They need to like you, 2. They need to believe they can work with you, and 3. They need to trust you. But the last one you might never get to.”
Whenever I’ve been assigned to big, complex, “never been done before” projects, what made the difference was whether or not there was trust. And trust, no different than anything else, is based on observed behaviors. So here are the variables for trust:
- Credibility: “something people have in a particular role, in a particular setting, at a particular time.” I love the element of time. Too often we equate subject matter expertise with credibility. This is also what I’d call “You’re only as good as your last trade.” Figure out how you make everyone’s life easier from day one….don’t get in the way, don’t change their process, don’t spring things on them.
- Reliability: “You find someone reliable if anything you assign to them is as good as done. They hold themselves accountable for things when they go well and when they go wrong….They’re consistent in behavior, responsiveness, and quality of work”. We used to have a saying “She/He’s a safe pair of hands.” If you’re not reliable, I need to watch you, check on you, check on work, have a plan b if you don’t come through. Or even worse, the team just gets used to being late, being overbudget…it becomes the new status quo. Another saying? “We’re re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.”
- Authenticity: “How easy is it to get to know a person?” It’s not whether or not you know the personal details of an individual…it’s whether or not you are perceived as doing or saying what you mean. For instance, you can’t say it’s about being a team, and then have the team find out there are meetings they know nothing about. She talks about a CEO who sends weekly updates to his board like clockwork. No one on the board can say that the CEO is not transparent. Another key aspect of authenticity is variation. Sending out basically the same update every week gets ignored.
- Self Interest: Raimondi puts politics right where it belongs…self-interest. People will often admit their culture’s are political, but they would never say people are motivated by self interest; “taking credit, fighting for executive attention, pushing for more money and status” Scary? She says it’s irreversible if not caught early.
The greatest compliment I ever got from someone I respected wasn’t about whether or not I was smart, hardworking, execution oriented. It was that they trusted me-it meant more than any promotion, any dollars I’ve gotten in my career. Believe me, if you haven’t had it already, you’ll want that same moment too.