It’s pretty well known that for teams to work well, there needs to be trust. The thing is, it’s said so often that I think it’s lost its meaning a bit. Everybody says they trust folks, but then their behavior doesn’t actually show that. Personally, I think many people don’t even realize that the behavior they’re exhibiting indicates a lack of trust, and this behavior comes from a misunderstanding of what it means to really trust someone, and so that’s what I wanted to cover today.
To be very clear - to me, trust means that when you hand work off to someone to be done, you believe that it is going to be done well enough to the point that you don’t need to check it to be sure. I can’t put this in any clearer terms. If you need to check someone’s work, you don’t really trust them to do that work.
I know that’s a really harsh way of stating it, but I do think it’s important to make that clear. I also think it’s important to make it clear that it doesn’t mean that people work completely in isolation in high-trust environments. Trusting someone to do the work also means that you trust them to collaborate with others, to seek feedback & other ideas, and to change their mind if needed. Basically, trusting someone to do the work also means that you trust them to get help when they need it.
This is a big difference, and I think the best analogy I have for this is basketball.
Passing the ball
When you’re handing work off to someone, it’s like you’re passing them the ball. Now they’re in charge of what happens next, and they’re making the decisions on how to move that ball towards your team’s shared goal of getting it in the basket.
But you’re still on the court there after passing them the ball. What you do matters! You could check in with them and say something like “if you need any help or any other ideas, I’m here for you. Just holler if you need me.” Saying something like that to a colleague is the equivilant of putting your hands up and shouting “I’m open!” on the basketball court.
When you do this, your teammate might pass it back to you. Or they might pass to somebody else who’s also open. Maybe it goes to a couple different people, but the person making the decision on what to do next is always the person with the ball, and that’s the big thing. That’s where the trust comes in to play.
Running over and grabbing the ball
When you don’t actually trust someone to make the right choice, you might say something like “please figure out a way to solve X problem - just check with me before you merge the PR so I can review it.” Sometimes this is less explicitly stated and instead it’s encoded in a process, like rules that every change to a certain screen must be reviewed by someone specific before they’re allowed to go out.
In that case, you’re passing someone the ball and telling them the work is theirs, but then you add that extra step at the end. That step at the end is sort of the equivalant of running over to the person with the ball and ripping it out of their hands. They didn’t pass it to you - you took it. And that’s not what teammates should do!
I get that these checks are there for good reasons. We want things to be done at a certain level of quality, and maybe we tell ourselves that this is part of good mentorship or things like that. But the reality is, when you institute these checks, you’re telling those people that “you can’t do this without this safety net.” That’s a lack of trust.
You can be available without being a checkpoint. The difference between the two isn’t how involved you are, it’s all about who makes the choices. Feedback that someone asked for is collaboration. Feedback they can’t ship without is a gate, and a gate is literally what we put up when we don’t trust other people with our things.
Don’t pass to someone who isn’t ready to catch it
So if you’re going to trust people to do work without you double checking it, it places a lot of importance on which work you give to which person.
I think this is one of the most underrated skills in leadership. You shouldn’t ask yourself “do I trust this person” as some general character assessment, but the much more specific question of how much can I trust this particular person with this particular piece of work right now. Those are very different questions, and the second one has a different answer for every combination of person and task, and even sometimes with time being a factor (like trusting someone to do time sensitive work if you know they already have a lot on their plate).
If you hand someone work they’re not yet prepared to do at the quality it needs, you’ve created a trap with no good exit. Either they do the work poorly and you’ve set them up to fail at something you could have predicted, or you took control of the work by adding in checks that weren’t asked for, and now you’ve created exactly the situation where you’re making it clear you don’t trust that person to do that work. It’s easy to blame this on the person who “didn’t do a good job,” but really that’s on you as a manager. You gave them the work that you knew they weren’t ready for in the first place!
But the real problem is that this often becomes bigger than just these small cases over time. After enough examples of this, systems get built to enforce the behavior that we don’t want to have. These systems aren’t created by some malevolant manager who hates seeing work done efficiently and well, but by reasonable people responding to the feedback they’re given. After a few bad choices in handing off work, or even worse a bad hire or two, then systems evolve to compensate for those failures to make sure the impact doesn’t make it to users.
Obviously that’s slow, and slow is usually bad, but I think the bigger cost of these systems is the negative impact it has on the level of ownership & engagement that people get to have with their work. You by definition don’t own your work if someone else needs to check it first, and people are generally much more engaged in work that feels like it’s really “theirs.” Only when you trust people completely can they feel like they’re in charge of the outcomes of their work.
Accepting work you’d have done differently
But the thing is - trusting people is hard! This is just a human thing and isn’t even related to work situations. There are going to be times when you pass someone the ball, and then the work comes back and it’s not what you had expected. Maybe it still functions as intended, but just differently than you would have done it. Maybe they made some tradeoffs you wouldn’t have made.
Well, now it’s on you as the leader to swallow your pride and buy in to their choices, and there are two big reasons for that.
The first is that if it genuinely is a mistake, making that mistake is how that person learns. I always say that the only way to learn something is by making a mistake or by learning from someone else’s mistake. The thing is, when you make the mistake, the learnings from that experience land way harder. People often repeat mistakes made by others, but rarely repeat mistakes they themselves made. Yes, there’s a cost to this, but it’s part of the work of developing your team.
The second reason is a bit more uncomfortable: sometimes we’re just wrong. Most of the time, people in leadership positions got there because they were really good at their job for a long time. They know what they’re doing, they’re often “the smartest person in the room,” and they’re usually correct. But “usually correct” and “always correct” are worlds apart! Especially since the person who did the work is much closer to the details of the work and frequently has context & knowledge that you as a leader don’t have, there are many times when even the “smartest person in the room” is wrong.
That’s a real cost, and it’s the one I think gets undercounted when people defend approval processes. If everyone eventually just does what we would have done, we’ve spent a lot of money to build a team that produces exactly one person’s judgment. All the insight of the people closest to the work gets filtered out on the way to us, and we never even find out what we lost.
Making people trustable
So what do you do about the people you genuinely can’t trust with the work in front of you?
Frankly, I think you only have two options. Either you get them off your team somehow, or you coach them, teach them, and level them up until they can be trusted with it. I think the wrong thing to do is keep them on the team, keep giving them work, and then managing their work with a bunch of checks & processes. That’s the option that feels kindest in the moment and is actually the worst one for everybody, including them.
The responsibility for a leader to be able to coach & develop their team has long been stated and rarely been something that is easy to grasp, but I actually think this helps provide clarity there. If you think of your job as one of making your teammates more trustable, then that’s a great sign that you’ve done well in improving their skills. You need to build their skills so that the trust to do the work is warranted, and then you need to get out of the way and give them a chance to demonstrate that. And this very much includes the collaboration piece, by the way! Part of making your teammates more trustable is helping them learn when they need to pass the ball to someone else, and that’s also a skill you can coach and develop just like any other.
But with all of this, it has to start with trust. When someone joins the team, you extend it before it’s been earned, because there’s no way for them to earn it otherwise. Which means you have to be willing to let them fail, and you have to build a culture where failing is okay. It’s not because failure is good, but because the culture you would need to create to prevent failure is worse.
In the end, you don’t want to end up with a team where everyone works alone and everything gets done well. In great high-trust teams, the ball is constantly moving. People are always bouncing ideas off each other, collaborating and learning from one another, and working together to build solutions that are greater than the sum of their parts. Working in a high-trust environment doesn’t mean working in isolation, but it does mean that the person who owns the work chooses when, where and with whom they collaborate with on that work.