Trust Comes from Experience

Trust comes from the experiences that people have with one another, but, paradoxically, in order to have good experiences, you may need trust. Even if most team members don’t have experience together, having even a few who do can help establish an anchor of trust and model it for others. Trusting those recommended by others you know and respect can also help. As Chin says, “I can take people sight unseen from those who are ultra trusted.”

Another way to get through this situation is to develop genuine trust and respect among at least some of the team members to help keep everyone grounded amidst the pressure. Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, sees teams that have experience together as a competitive advantage because they can often move more quickly, with quality: “Whether you’re spinning through the sky at 10,000 feet, or trying to do something more grounded, there will be times when you need to build trust fast.”

In The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age (Harvard Business Review Press), Hoffman and his coauthors describe “tours of duty” as a way to boost trust in an organization. Whether it’s a short-term rotation where people across the organization learn about each other and build relationships or share institutional knowledge informally, or a longer-term “transformational” rotation where employees are really learning about different aspects of the business and cross-skilling to grow their careers, they say that the best way to build trust is to do work together.

Part of what happens when people have experiences together is that they develop a mutual respect for differences. Alberto Villarreal, an award-winning industrial designer who’s now working on Google’s mobile hardware offering of phones, tablets, and Chromebooks, says that seeing what someone is capable of—and knowing what you are capable of—is key. “I wouldn’t question an electrical engineer about battery limits; they are the experts there. But we industrial designers are experts in beauty. Even if everyone has an opinion on aesthetics, at the end of the day there has to be an expert in what makes something beautiful in a way that nonexperts can’t,” he explains. But making yourself the authority on “beauty” takes more than a declaration. Villarreal says external indicators, such as awards or other validation from experts in the field, helps to establish his bona fides initially, but he knows that showing people his deep skill set and having others see his successes goes further than anything else. While we saw earlier the danger of giving into experts by default, there is something to be said for channeling expertise where it counts—just don’t do it blindly.

Try It, You’ll Like It

One of the things I consistently heard from those working at creating something new or within very tight constraints is that when a team of people trust each other, they stop arguing different perspectives based on theory. Instead, they find it faster and more productive to simply try out an idea and see if it has merit on its own. Because they’ve likely had the experience of trying something “crazy” together and having it work out, they are more open to trying the next crazy idea. But at the same time, teams that have tried out contentious approaches and seen them crash and burn have developed a way to shrug it off and say, “Well, maybe next time.” In both cases, the experience of working through a big idea makes a team stronger.

Chin says that in the editing studio for their films, he watches Vasarhelyi and editor Bob Eisenhardt just try ideas out when they are proposed, rather than arguing about them. Vasarhelyi is such an experienced filmmaker that her intuition isn’t something that she can always rationalize in the abstract. She’s had the experience of trying different approaches in other settings, with other teams, and that experience transfers to new collaborations. The cumulative experience of the team gives them an advantage, even when the individuals themselves are still building up their combined experience.

Early in my career, I spent a lot of time and energy rationalizing ideas and recommendations for clients, trying to “win” an argument on principle, convinced because of my own experience that I was right. That approach not only cost me a lot of emotional energy, it probably also cost me some trust. Along the way I learned to just try out “crazy” ideas from clients, if only to have some actual, tangible thing for us to look at together. I’ve also had ideas that seemed brilliant to me as they occurred, only to find as I tried to prototype them that in fact they were terrible. It turns out that practice builds trust, and theory breeds argument.

Being open to trying ideas out helps build trust, but it shouldn’t be confused with the real prototyping and testing that you’re more likely to do once the team has decided on a direction to pursue. While doing some A/B testing of variations can tell you a lot about how different versions of the same concept perform, the disagreements that make or break trust in a team are generally more profound than variants.

If you find that your team’s having unproductive disagreements over superficial things rather than more fundamental aspects, that’s a good sign that they don’t have a basic level of trust to depend on. And, if the team is having fundamental disagreements about strategy, core technologies, or audience needs, it might be time to take a step back.

Building Trust Through Vulnerability

Brené Brown, a research professor and best-selling author, has made a big point out of how sharing your own vulnerability makes a group stronger. She argues that perfectionism, the opposite of vulnerability, gets in the way of what we are trying to achieve: “Perfectionism is very different than self-improvement. Perfectionism is, at its core, about trying to earn approval…perfectionism is not the key to success. In fact, research shows that perfectionism hampers achievement.” In a collaboration, admitting you don’t know the answer actually creates more trust than insisting your theoretical knowledge is right.

But you need to cultivate vulnerability, especially if you don’t hold a great deal of power or authority, to overcome the urge to be perfect and expert. You, as a proponent of successful collaboration, can create the environment for vulnerability by first being vulnerable yourself or by encouraging, or even staging, moments of weakness and introspection from senior leaders. Many executives are coached on this point and may be surprisingly open to sharing their (probably well-rehearsed and safe for consumption) weaknesses.

Sharing your weaknesses need not (and probably shouldn’t) involve sharing your deepest, darkest secrets. In fact, if you aren’t comfortable with the idea of being open, start small. I often make a point of throwing out terrible ideas to teams so that I can have an opportunity to admit they weren’t great. That’s also a chance to then praise the work of others that is stronger, thereby giving them a boost. I share stories of failures I’ve experienced so they can laugh with me at my mistakes and help me make more. When a group has shared the experience of making mistakes together, their reaction to being wrong or “crazy” is more likely to be a welcome moment of laughter—the best medicine.

Leading Teams Toward Trust

There are some environments where working with a broad range of people is standard operating procedure, and getting access to lots of different people isn’t the challenge. Blair Reeves, Principal Product Manager for SAS, says that enterprise product management is very different, and that’s the subject of his book with Benjamin Gaines, Building Products for the Enterprise (O’Reilly). Creating, selling, installing, and maintaining enterprise management tools inherently takes all kinds. Reeves works across several very large teams including sales, engineering, support, and more because they have a small number of large customers, compared to a company like Facebook with its massive user base. He says that at that scale, “people become small dots.” The focus of product management in those two very different environments comes down to how many internal partners are needed and available.

Because the teams he oversees are already quite cross-functional and have diverse skills and perspectives, for Reeves the challenge is providing enough leadership to let others build trust in a safe space. He has to remember to remain focused on the roadmap and looking forward, using deep knowledge of the customers and industry to make a first guess at where the products should go. But he also has to be transparent about what assumptions have gone into his predictions, and be open to having the roadmap changed as the world does.

Leading teams toward trust also means not getting sucked into micromanagement. If you take your eye off the bigger picture, you’ll find it hard to refocus there. You have to allow team members to use their skills and good judgment and learn to evolve them in order to build trust. As ER doctor Jon Rosenberg puts it, “I’m doing my best when I’m at 30K feet. Someone needs to keep a hold of the big picture, and not get sucked into the details.” This requires a leader who is trusted, certainly, but it also requires the leader to trust the team to work through all of the moving pieces to realize the vision.

When collaborations don’t have ample room between a leader and follower, or the group is chasing an unclear vision, it’s obvious to people outside. Many of the negative perceptions about collaboration stem from stories of team members who aren’t able to trust each other and take on roles, instead clamoring to be seen as the leader. As Nilofer Merchant, author of The Power of Onlyness: Make Your Wild Ideas Mighty Enough to Dent the World (Penguin), puts it, businesspeople sometimes perform like six-year-olds playing soccer: everyone is bunched up around the ball, following the action. Until people trust each other to do their part in the moment, no one can make a play. And this may take practice; studying soccer positions in a book or off of a whiteboard won’t actually help you play them, and certainly not as a team.

Protect Trust When Things Go Wrong

And finally, with great power comes great responsibility. You can make or break trust among a team by how you act when things do go wrong. To be an effective leader of collaboration, be sure to not single out individuals to take the heat. Depending on the situation, this is a good time to treat the team as a whole and take responsibility for the mistake yourself on their behalf. You clearly don’t want to shield someone from learning a valuable lesson, but at the same time, hanging a failure (that’s unlikely to be one person’s fault) on someone will ruin the trust not just between the two of you, but with anyone else in the team too.

Sometimes, the “failure” is one of process. The team missed a critical step, such as checking with the legal department at the right time or preserving data correctly. In these cases, it’s useful to ask the team to diagnose that this happened (if it isn’t already clear to them) and have them reflect on how it was missed. If it was because the team didn’t value the importance of the step ahead of time, it’s likely that—given a negative outcome—they better understand it now. If it was out of ignorance, ask the team to think through how they will avoid such missteps in the future. These reflection sessions should be done only with the team, not with intimidating leaders, who may miss the reflection portion of this step.

Sometimes the failure is one of product, where a solution just doesn’t work. If the situation is simply that a given solution doesn’t pass user testing, be sure to reframe this situation as a success, not a failure. As we will see in later chapters, testing ideas and having some of them not work is actually a great thing for the team to experience. But, if the failure is something that made it out into the world and led to negative consequences for those the solution was meant to help, well, that’s a serious problem. In these situations, it’s important to make the team understand how they let their ideas get that far without data to show how well they performed.

It’s common and natural in these situations for the team to try to pin failure on one person or faction. The “I told you so” response, while natural, is not at all helpful, and you should be sure to point out that in a collaborative team, everyone is responsible for the outcomes. If the team disagreed about something that ultimately didn’t work, dig in to understand how that disagreement didn’t get resolved. It may be due to someone who is overly influential, in which case they need to acknowledge their culpability. Or, more likely, those who didn’t agree fully stopped objecting at some point and gave in. I was once doing some backcountry skiing, and our tests of the snow safety were pretty inconclusive. Our guide made us go around the entire group and say whether we thought we should continue or turn back. One person, who had never been outside a patrolled area before, said he didn’t have a strong opinion. The guide quickly snapped, “That’s not an option. When you abstain, you blame.” It took quite a lot of pressure for the man to admit that he was not comfortable continuing, forcing the entire group to turn back.

As we’ll discuss in future chapters, if the group can’t come to a consensus, they can clearly and intentionally decide to “disagree and commit” to a direction. This means that when the group eventually realizes that the direction wasn’t a good one, no one can complain, because they did commit to the direction, however skeptical they were of it.

As the leader, no matter what the cause of a failure or tough spot, you should focus on asking the group to understand and own the steps that led to the failure, not on the outcome or blame. The unity of the group in owning chosen solutions and sharing responsibility is the most important thing to focus on.

Troubleshooting Trust Issues

Creating a real sense of trust in the team doesn’t happen overnight, and will take some support. This section offers suggestions about how to handle complications that might arise around creating and maintaining trust.

Conclusion

Trust is a critical ingredient in healthy teams. It helps them overcome adversity and be more open to sharing ideas and testing them out to make them stronger. But trust isn’t something that can be installed in the team—it comes from experience that people have together and needs time and space to develop. You can help by finding or recruiting people who have a level of trust already established to seed the team and model what trust looks like. It’s also important that leaders stay focused at the right level, keeping the big picture in mind, and let teams learn and grow to develop that trust, especially when things go wrong.

Key Takeaways

• Trust isn’t something that can be installed in a team; it comes from experience working together and learning each other’s strengths and weaknesses.

• When trust happens, team members are more open to trying ideas out rather than debating them or relying on hierarchy to resolve disputes.

• Being vulnerable with one another about struggles and concerns is a great way to build trust.

• Building trust takes time to develop in a safe space; leaders can support this by getting teams to reflect on root causes and share responsibility for backlash when things go wrong.