Tactics for Tech Leadership Podcast

S1E6 – Navigating the Challenges of Building Trust

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by

Andrew Parker
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Show Notes

Mon-Chaio and Andy explore the research on trust and how to translate that into successful tactics for building trust in technical organizations … including situations when strong trust may not be necessary for high-performing teams.

References

Transcript

Mon-Chaio: Trust is a valuable commodity and one every high-performing organization strives for in spades. However trust is also very nuanced. There are many different types and levels of trust. Each requiring different tactics to achieve. It is critical for both individuals and organizations to understand what the research does and does not say about trust.

And marry those insights with battle tested practices only then can they get the most out of the time and money spent on their trust building initiatives? Welcome to another episode of the TTL podcast. So for the past week, moncho and I have been debating trust. We are gonna try to walk through trust in teams, distrust in teams and tactics that you can use, depending on your context and what you can do to improve that trust aspect.

Andy: But first of all, Mancha, I’d like to ask why is trust matter?

Mon-Chaio: I was going to mention this if you didn’t mention it, I think perhaps for our listeners they might say, fine, you’ve been talking about it, but you two talk about a lot of things that perhaps we don’t care about. Thankfully, you don’t record them, or maybe

Andy: Or maybe we do.

Mon-Chaio: Right? But as we were talking through trust, we thought it might be an interesting topic because. There is so much out there that says the foundation of a high performing team is trust. If you look, for example, at Harvard Business Review, they have an entire section dedicated toward how to build trust within teams. It is a central part of what they think successful teams require. And they spend a lot of research, energy writing papers about this. And I think beyond that, you can see that throughout the industry, people mostly will say, yes, we need to build a high trust team. Or they will use proxies of that to say, we need a team with psychological safety. And that is built on top of trust perhaps. And so, I do think trust is important, but I also think that trust is really muddy, right?

There’s so many different ways to think about trust. What does it mean?

Andy: And this is something that I found when we were reading up for this. As we were going through various papers and articles, we found so many different definitions of trust. And they’re all slightly different.

Mon-Chaio: Mm-hmm.

Andy: In the end, the conclusion I came to was if we just kind of go with our gut feel about what trust means, it’s probably good enough for most of us. Do you think that’s

Mon-Chaio: I agree. I agree. I think that there’s some small portions which if you read the research you might say, oh, that’s a little bit unintuitive, or I. It’s a nuance I hadn’t thought about, but it’s an important nuance to bring in. But for the most part,

I would say that our gut feeling tends to do a pretty good representation of what research says in many different fields.

Andy: And I think the nuances of each individual researcher or paper or discipline, because we were finding differences between disciplines, between law and psychology and sociology, I think in some ways those will only matter if you have a particular problem on your team.

I think for most of us though, we can just go from our intuition that trust is this positive feeling about other people in terms of how they’re going to be behaving with you.

Mon-Chaio: I think that makes sense. Why don’t we take a stab at, in 15 or 20 seconds, talking about what do we think trust is and the portions that we agree about with regard to trust.

Andy: Okay. Yeah. I’ll take a quit stab. I actually liked one definition I did find, which is very simple, very plain, which is that trust is a positive expectation about someone else’s behavior. And distrust is a negative expectation of someone’s behavior.

Mon-Chaio: I like that. I would also add there are some people who talk about trust, who say it is the ability to predict somebody’s behavior.

Andy: Yes. And I’ve heard that as well, which we’ll get to in tactics, won’t we? that prediction of someone’s behavior will become important.

Mon-Chaio: Absolutely. So you mentioned a positive expectation and a negative expectation to somebody’s behavior is one thing that we can ground on as a definition of trust.

Another perhaps is that we can agree to the fact that there are different levels and types of trust. Some weaker, some stronger, or maybe just some different than others, and that you can grow in trust or you can decrease between those levels in trust.

Andy: Yes. And one of the papers that you brought up had a very interesting analysis of this, which may not always be true, but I think it’s still a useful idea to have, which is that as you gain more trust, As you move up in your trust scale. If we

can measure something like that, that as you get higher, you’re kind of more robust actions that would destroy trust or remove trust don’t have quite as much of an impact, the higher you go.

Small untrustworthy actions on a low trust team will kind of bring it down quite a bit. You might kind of lose almost all trust, but if you already have quite a bit of trust, an untrustworthy misstep. more likely than not, will not take it all the way back down to a low trust team.

Mon-Chaio: Right. I agree with your resilience part. I’ll give you an example of this in a non-business relationship, my wife and I have been watching Indian matchmaking on Netflix.

Andy: I’ve

of that, fascinating.

Mon-Chaio: It’s a show about an Indian matchmaker who tries to match, make with Indians from various parts of the world, the us, the uk in India. But she’s dealing with a lot of modern clients, obviously, cuz it’s a Netflix show set in 2023. And you will see her clients go on dates that she set up. And a single misstepping communication or misunderstanding or unstated thing will bring them back down to the point of, I never want to meet this person again. And she comes from the older world of arranged marriages where you give people time. When you hear these missteps, you think, oh, this is just step one, right? I have to be with this person my whole life. So let me look past that for now and see what positives I can find and continue on my way. So I think it does make intuitive sense, and if we remember our dating lives back before we were married, I think it does make intuitive sense that right now when your wife has untrustworthy actions that she performs, it doesn’t cause you to be like, Hey, we’re out.

I never wanna see you again. Right. But perhaps if it was a first date, you’d be like, oh, you know, this is a deal breaker, I’m gone.

Andy: And also you touched on a tactic that we could go over a little bit,

Mon-Chaio: Mm-hmm.

Andy: Which is one on the side of someone trying to preserve trust which is assuming positive intent, if something happens. Not immediately deciding that it was a bad thing that the person was intending so eroding trust in your own mind, but trying to reframe it in a way where you can assume positive intent. In order to give them another chance give a better explanation of what’s going on. And that actually is one personal tactic to use when in a situation you see something happen and thinking of what other explanations are there, it won’t necessarily build trust, although it might, especially if you test those other stories you come up with to explain the intent the person had in their action.

But it definitely helps slow the erosion of trust within the team.

Mon-Chaio: I like it. And it is something that I try to use to varying degrees of success.

Andy: Yeah, sometimes it’s really hard and, and sometimes you actually need to lean on another person to help you find that other story that

Mon-Chaio: That positive intent, right? I really dislike this person. It’s been five interactions, so help me see what you see in this person. Right? I think the other part of that, and maybe this is a good chance to segue, is I’d also think it depends on whether that is a relationship worth building trust in both in terms of the time you have to spend as well as the results that you’re going to have to get out of it

Andy: Yeah.

Not every interaction in relationship needs high trust to function.

Mon-Chaio: that is correct. Also, when you assume good intent, you put yourself in a vulnerable position,

Andy: Mm-hmm.

Mon-Chaio: which I would argue allows somebody if they were attempting to actually take advantage of you versus just being misunderstood, allows them more inroads to take further advantage of you, right? Isn’t this how Grifting works?

Andy: I think it is. and it’s a very good point, which is that we’re talking about trust and building trust. it always takes a bit of vulnerability and it becomes a question of how vulnerable do we want to be or can we be in a particular situation?

Mon-Chaio: Mm-hmm.

Andy: And vulnerability, we should probably define that a little bit. Vulnerability is your openness to either social or emotional harm in some way risk that, something could happen. And it could be either social, like you have a colleague who is out to get you because they’re all out to get you. Uh, or it could be emotional where. You need to do something and your self-esteem, your own self image may take a hit because of what you learn.

Mon-Chaio: I like that you use risk or harm. I think that is so central to vulnerability. You often hear or read in literature this idea of openness or transparency and how you build high performing teams by being open and transparent. And I agree that that is important, but I think there is a clear distinction between being open and transparent in a way which has no possible negative impact toward you. Versus one, which does open you up to harm, and I think one builds trust much stronger than the other.

Andy: Yes, absolutely. From my own experience, sometimes it doesn’t even take all that much actually. It’s still something that can feel very vulnerable. I was working with a team and on that team I would just talk about my day. I worked from home, they were in other places in the world, and I would just talk about my day, what I was up to, what I’d been doing that weekend.

And that openness where it was a bit of vulnerability. I was talking about things that were not work.

And people could have taken exception to that. And they could have said, oh, that’s a terrible thing. I don’t like that. Or just decided they don’t like me, and actually withdrawn. And what it did though was built a bond that was much stronger than if we had just always focused on the task at hand.

Mon-Chaio: Mm-hmm.

Andy: And in fact when I left that job, I had one of those people tell me that she had never had a manager do that. And it was liberating. That we could actually talk about what was going on at home.

Mon-Chaio: I think that’s an interesting example. I feel like I have seen that happen as well. I’ve also seen it not be as effective. used to run a meeting where a good chunk of it was us talking about our day and our personal lives as well as less trans communication of information where I’m communicating specific information that you need to do your work. Interestingly enough, I found that meeting to be less and less attended. It was well attended when there was peer pressure, but when there wasn’t peer pressure, people just dropped out. There was the, I’m really busy. There’s a lot of stuff I have to do, I have to debug. So I do think it is a good tactic. I just have found that it hasn’t always worked that well.

Andy: Right.

What do you see as the differences between when it’s seemed to work to help build that engagement and that trust and when it didn’t?

Mon-Chaio: I don’t know, I can only posit some guesses. One guess is the want of the other party to reciprocate.

Andy: Yes. Yeah.

Mon-Chaio: And I think we can start to talk about how do you build trust for people that don’t want to reciprocate trust or may not think it is important I also mentioned the peer pressure part, when people were in the office, it was very much of, Hey, let’s go together. I think this meeting is important

Andy: Ah, yes, this is a common issue in remote teams is the kind of slow disengagement from what used to be very enjoyable activities,

and now it’s turned into a burden.

Mon-Chaio: Right. So I think it’s important, and I’m working with you pair programming, or I’m just in the pod and it’s four o’clock and it’s time for the meeting. Let’s go. If we do think it’s important to bring the reluctant folks along. I think the peer pressure stuff tends to work I think it tends to bring them along, and I think oftentimes in a remote first world, they don’t get brought along by the peer pressure.

Andy: I’d like to go on to that topic that you’ve brought up about people who are reluctant.

Mon-Chaio: Mm-hmm.

Andy: And I think to me, it opens up an interesting question go to a programming metaphor here.

Mon-Chaio: Mm-hmm.

Andy: Is trust a directed or undirected graph, if the people or the nodes and the edges are the trust relationship, does the edge from me to you

have to be the same as the edge from you to me.

Does it have to be symmetrical or can it be asymmetrical?

Mon-Chaio: I think it can be asymmetrical.

Andy: Yeah, I think so too. To me, that’s the only one that logically works. If I accept that you are a separate person, it has to be

asymmetrical.

Mon-Chaio: It’s asymmetrical to me within bounds though. We talked about at the beginning that we both agree that there’s different levels of trust that can build on top of each other, and this concept of the higher levels makes it more resilient. I like to think that perhaps on those edges, it can be asymmetrical within some delta of, let’s say the bottom level of trust is zero and the top level is a hundred. And so you might say it can be asymmetrical within six points

Andy: So within a fairly tight bounds, you’re thinking it can’t fairly be reciprocated.

Mon-Chaio: I don’t know if I would say tight even, but some bounds.

Andy: I would agree. I’m not sure how tight they need to be, but it also brings up a really interesting thing in one of the other papers, which is that trust and distrust are separate things.

And I thought this was a really useful concept. So the idea is that rather than trust and distrust being two opposite ends of a single continuous spectrum, trust and distrust are separate concepts that we hold in our head which works because I can trust and distrust you at the same time.

Mon-Chaio: That’s right.

Andy: I can trust you on certain things and distrust you on others. And that kind of blends together into the overall picture I’ll have with you. And what it means. Is that you can have different amounts of trust and distrust going on at the same time.

Mon-Chaio: Mm-hmm.

Andy: And in fact, you could even say that a group that is entirely high trust could be not functioning well.

You get into group think possibly

because they’re not distrustful enough of the other ones thinking to question it.

Mon-Chaio: Mm-hmm.

Andy: And so I think in this kind of like, what do you do with people who maybe aren’t reciprocating that trust building?

Mon-Chaio: Mm-hmm.

Andy: My answer would be, for the most part, let them be. Partly because I don’t wanna pull them into something that’s going to be harmful for them.

And partly because what may appear to me as distrust can also be very beneficial to the group.

Now if that distrust is in like undermining the group and things like that, that’s probably not great. But if it’s distrust on things that actually help the group distrust of just going along with my reasoning as the manager or going along with the lead at all times.

If it’s that distrust of I don’t understand your reasoning here. Tell me more.

I think that can be okay. Or if it’s them purely protecting themselves. Cuz everyone has their own life circumstance and they just don’t trust us enough to tell us really what’s going on at home. That is their prerogative.

And so if they don’t wanna reciprocate me sharing my weekend, that’s all right.

Mon-Chaio: It brings up to me two interesting thoughts. One is, I like the fact that you mentioned that trust and distrust are two separate spectrums. I buy that and I think that, you know, seems intuitively correct

Andy: It’s cuz you don’t distrust me enough.

Mon-Chaio: or the papers, right? Like I read these expert papers, I’m like, oh man, they’re experts in their field. So I tend to agree with you where for a person who has distrust, I’m not sure that it’s important to change that distrust level unless it’s affecting the group to, to some, to some extent. There may be other behaviors in which you want to. Decrease or increase their distress level. I do think, however, that for a person who’s not interested in raising the trust level, That is problematic for a long running group, which intends to be high performance.

Andy: I would say once again, only if it’s creating problems. I don’t need to have trust constantly improve unless it’s becoming a problem for becoming a higher performing team.

But I definitely don’t want it to erode.

Mon-Chaio: That’s a little challenging for me because it’s very difficult to measure. The performance measure of a high performing team? Is it high performance? Can it be higher? Performance

Andy: that’s true. That is a good point. I haven’t thought of it that way

Mon-Chaio: Sometimes that’s a lot of a gut feel.

Or you only know it three months after the fact about whether you were able to accomplish something or not. And you retrospect and you say, oh, if only.

Andy: If only we’d actually had that trust, it turns out that trust was the thing causing the problem. And if we had just been paying attention to it more and building that just as a default, it probably wouldn’t have been a problem.

Mon-Chaio: Right. So I think sometimes it’s very difficult to say, Hey, individual who’s not interested in building trust, are you or are you not preventing us measurably from becoming a high performance team?

Andy: That’s a good point. I will have to think more on that.

Should we try to get some tactics people can use to build that trust on a continual basis?

Mon-Chaio: I was gonna offer another possible tactic, but we can decide which one we like better.

Andy: Yeah. Yeah.

Mon-Chaio: One thing might be to talk about tactics around when and when you don’t need to build trust. Are there different team project composition situations and where you can say, Hey if you have a low trust team, it’s fine and here’s how you can still execute. Versus are there other situations where if you have a low trust team, you have to really step back and say, Ooh, let’s not even focus on the execution part right now, we need to spend three months not shipping anything. You can’t really say that, but you know, you get my meaning not shipping anything and working on this trust.

Andy: I think that’s an interesting one because it actually gets into these different levels of trust as one of the papers define them, and I think we can simplify it. They had three, but I think we can simplify it down to two. So they had calculus based trust and identification based trust.

Mon-Chaio: Mm-hmm.

Andy: And let’s take the scenario.

You’re a software contractor. You get hired into a company, you’re on a six month contract. You’re there to join a project, to do a particular job for them. Say you’re a DevOps engineer and they need you to set up a terraform system to handle all of their. Azure infrastructure in a infrastructure is code manner, they have a few terrible scripts.

You’re there just to get it all transformed over to Terraform in a standard manner. Train up the team a little bit and move on for that. You’re there for a very short time. You’re not part of the organization, you’re not part of that team. Maybe you’ll come back in the future. Who knows? There you need calculus based trust.

Calculus based trust is basically the trust you get from knowing the procedures knowing the law, knowing your contract. You’re there because you’ve got a very specific job to do and you have the trust that they’re gonna honor the contract. They have the trust that you are going to do the job.

Mon-Chaio: Let me interject briefly. Calculus based trust is you have that trust because, you know there are processes, procedures, or detriments to not following that. You won’t get paid if you don’t do your job. People will get fired if they don’t do something, they’ll get a bad performance review.

So it is negative deterrence based trust.

Andy: Yeah, the place that they got the name calculus based, they used to call it deterrence based. And I actually prefer that more, even though that name

seems to have gone out of practice.

Mon-Chaio: I agree. And I don’t know why it’s calculus now, cuz I think it’s less descriptive than deterrence. But anyway, back to your example.

Andy: So, yeah, that is one of very short term it’s very procedure based. It’s very tied to an agreement and that’s what you’re doing. Does that sound like one where you don’t need to get to that identification based trust, which is one much more about the , I understand you, you understand me.

We can think in similar ways and I can believe that what you do, man, Chao is done understanding my interests and to further my interests

Mon-Chaio: So you’re saying in your example you can do without

Andy: Yeah. Yeah. You don’t need that in that kind of

contractor

Mon-Chaio: that? I think so. I have two questions for you around your example. One is if you are the manager of that group and you have 10 contractors, or maybe they’re not even contractors, maybe it’s a group that’s being brought together for six months to do a thing that the company needs done.

And you see that this is a group that has no identification based trust. It is all calculus based trust. Are you okay with that? And are you saying, look, I don’t need to spend time doing anything to build trust beyond calculation based trust. That’s the first question. And then the second question is, do you think that you would consider this group a low performing group because of the lack of trust, or are we saying that hey, for some types of work, maybe lots of types of work, who knows? You aren’t necessarily lower performing because you have low trust.

Andy: I would say it’s not necessarily direct connection. It’s one of these things where it’s probability and so it not necessarily true. To your question about bringing together a group for a short period to do something, do they only need calculus? I would say I’d prefer higher, but I’d get by with what I’ve got

Mon-Chaio: right.

Andy: now.

The reason I say I’d prefer higher is because I think we’ve talked and debated about this often me saying, I don’t, I don’t think I’m changing my mind. You’ve got me to change my mind.

I’d prefer higher because it does make so many things much easier. It makes the team much more willing to communicate and cooperate to change roles, to allow something to happen that maybe they don’t agree with, even though others think it’s the right thing to do.

Mon-Chaio: Mm-hmm.

Andy: So it allows a lot of those activities to occur much more easily. But this is the thing of going back to our boundaries, discussion. To me, it matters a little bit. What are the boundaries involved? So like the contractor I view it as the contractor is they’re very specifically just to do a job.

There’s actually a boundary in many ways

Mon-Chaio: Mm-hmm.

Andy: now. I know contractors, at least in Europe, get used for much longer engagements and might be around for years, in which case that completely changes it. And in fact, even in the contracting world, there’s a word for that. It’s called going native.

Mon-Chaio: Right?

Andy: But taken as this abstract, I would want to, as much as possible, build up enough of that group identity that I think people could get further away from just purely deterrence based trust and get more towards the identity based trust if we can do that.

And so it wouldn’t be necessarily for that little group of people who’ve come together for six months.

It wouldn’t be just for them, it would be more of like an ongoing thing for the entire department or the entire company that we’d be pulling from.

Mon-Chaio: That jives with the way that I think about things generally as well, so. I think for some people would call them tiger teams. People that are brought together to solve one specific issue that’s causing problems. Or for short-lived teams, teams that are only around to ship a product or ship a feature and then they break apart. think you can be a relatively high performing team with just deterrence or calculus based trust. And in fact, identity trust, I think, takes a long time to build.

And it’s not linear, right? Where we talked about being vulnerable, you’re vulnerable, and if you’re shot down now you’re less motivated for a little while before you’re willing to be vulnerable again.

So it is not always an upward slope. And if your team is around for three months, six months, nine months, man, are you willing to deal with the ebbs and flows of that? I would say generally probably no.

And if you were gonna try to spend time working through that, you may even become less effective than if you were simply to execute through calculus based trust during that short time period.

Andy: yeah. And I think that is the tough position that leaders are in.

They need to decide, are they in a situation where it’s effective or needed to model that vulnerability. To start building that trust, because that’s really where a lot of this is gonna need to start from.

As humans, we quite often look to particular people who we consider to have authority or leadership, and they’re the ones that will start setting the tone about how everything’s going to be approached. So if that leader is in a situation and starts trying to have that vulnerability and no one around them believes that that’s the situation, they might change it or they might not, but everyone’s gonna look to them about how they’re behaving.

And so I think that it’s going to come down to the leader’s take on the situation and how much they think they should put into that.

Mon-Chaio: That’s right. That’s right.

Andy: I feel like we need a list of tactics that that leader in that position could use if they so wanted to start building trust. do you think

Mon-Chaio: I would like to do that. Let me say one more thing in this vein. I think what listeners will actually find interesting is, I’m guessing a lot of the future topics that we touch on. We’ll touch on behaviors that we believe work well for not these short-lived teams that break apart after six or nine months.

Right? We might talk about psychological safety. We might talk about the need for collaborative work versus siloed work, right? There was a paper which said, Hey, when teams have low trust, they tend to go more towards siloed individualistic work. It is very difficult to get them to put the good of the group above the good of their individuality.

Andy: Mm. Mm-hmm.

Mon-Chaio: And there are a lot of companies I’ve worked for, which have the mantra company first, team second, self third, which I actually love and I use. I think though you have to realize that if you’re in a situation or if you’re structuring your orgs in such a way that you’re breaking your teams apart every six to nine months, it’s very, very difficult, if not impossible.

To ask your folks to also have that mantra of company first, team second, self third.

Andy: Yeah.

Mon-Chaio: So I think that that is something that listeners should keep in mind, which is today we’re talking a lot about, hey, some of the tactics that you can use if you’re in these situations where you probably don’t need long-term trust building.

However, I think for both of us, maybe just for me, we do think that ideally and as much as you can, not in all parts of your organization, but as ideally as much as you can, you should be building longer term organizations that can build a longer term trust.

Andy: See, I see these as very similar. I think it’s because I aim for teams that are very fluid,

and so the trust building within that particular team won’t be. Vast. It’s more of a continuous activity happening within the entire organization so that we can create those teams that come and go.

Mon-Chaio: I think we actually agree. I think it’s just the boundaries and our definitions that are different. To me, the fluidity within your teams. I wouldn’t even call those an organization. Right. I would just call those teams or whatnot.

Andy: Okay.

Mon-Chaio: But the organization is long lasting.

Andy: Yes.

Mon-Chaio: I think it is important for that organization to be long lasting and if people agree that it is, then you can start to build high trust within that organization.

Andy: Yeah.

Mon-Chaio: Whereas if you have a company which doesn’t have that long lasting organizational boundary, then you’re just teams that are breaking apart all the time.

Andy: And I’ve seen that with companies that are entirely made up of short-term contractors.

Mon-Chaio: Mm-hmm.

Andy: The technical team has no ability to build that larger trust. So they are very much more based on, what’s my task? Gimme my task, gonna do it, and I’ll move on. And they don’t

have much hope getting beyond that.

Mon-Chaio: right, and this also touches on something we touched upon, I think episode one maybe, or maybe it was that episode that we didn’t publish ever. some organizations think that they can have teams that are fluid and breaking apart. And at the organizational level, they can build longer term trust, but that organizational number is like 5,000.

It’s much greater than Dunbar’s number. And so then you say, well, can that be the first level at which you think about a long term team that can build trust together

or not? But that’s a lot to touch on. What specific tactics should we give people here?

Andy: Yeah.

Getting to the specific tactics people can use to build trust. We’ve touched on one already, which is to be vulnerable.

It doesn’t seem like that’s a specific tactic, but it is, there is a tactic there of being vulnerable. It means opening up about the way you’re thinking or feeling.

Mon-Chaio: Mm-hmm.

Andy: And so that, that can be things like using the phrase and filling in the end of it. The story I’m telling myself is one vulnerability tactic, which is the story that I’m telling myself mancho about what happened last week is, and you tell the person what is the thing I’m saying?

And that is a thing of vulnerability.

Mon-Chaio: Mm-hmm.

Andy: The next one is the one that actually shows up all the time in literature on trust, which is be predictable. If you say you’re going to do something do it. If you say you’re not going to do something, Don’t do it. It seems kind of strange to say, but Yeah, absolutely. That is a very fundamental thing. Which also then brings up, don’t tell someone you’re gonna do something that you can’t do because that starts eroding trust.

Mon-Chaio: I like both those. What has you got for us,

Andy?

Andy: so I’m taking a lot of this from the book Agile Conversations. It’s a layering of different types of conversations. And if you haven’t read the book, I would suggest reading it. Yeah. And the next thing in their trust conversation chapter, which is the first chapter about conversations is another one called t d D for people, is what they call it.

It also is called the Ladder of Inference, and it’s actually a specific way of being vulnerable. So t d d for people is the idea that you start from what exactly you saw. So, man, Chao, I saw right now that you just took a drink of water. Is that right?

Mon-Chaio: Yes, that

Andy: All right. You just took a drink of water. Now that I’ve confirmed with you, that I saw something that you also saw I attribute some meaning to it. And I say I take that to mean that you were thirsty. Were you thirsty?

Mon-Chaio: Yes, I was thirsty.

Andy: Excellent. And the fact that you were thirsty makes me think that maybe you’re starting to think that we’re talking too much. Are we talking too much?

Mon-Chaio: No, not in my mind, but maybe in our listeners.

Andy: Okay. Okay. So I’m glad that the assumption that I put in, I validated that I was wrong and I got your story now.

Mon-Chaio: Mm-hmm.

Andy: So that’s another tactic for building trust, which is this going back and forth through what did I see? What meaningness am I ascribing to that? What assumptions am I bringing to it?

What conclusion does that bring me to? And now what do I think I need to do based on that?

Mon-Chaio: Mm-hmm.

Andy: And it’s just step someone else through my ladder of inference to see if it matches your ladder of inference.

Mon-Chaio: Those are three great things. I like all of them.

What I would also layer on top of it and we often do this right, where I think you come in with specific tactics around individuals and team behavior, and often I come in with tactics on building and company level type things.

Andy: Yep. That’s what I’m learning through these conversations. We didn’t work together for a long time and we took slightly different courses, and it’s fascinating how we end up thinking differently, and yet the same about this stuff.

Mon-Chaio: Right. I would say just at different granularities, right? But I think the tactics that I will offer are complimentary to yours. I agree with all of those things and I think as a leader, not just a leader, even as an individual, you should practice those things to try to up the level of trust within your team.

We both agree regardless, higher trust is better.

There’s no doubt about that. There is a tax just like everything else. To get better at something, you have to put work into it and the work doesn’t come for free. So what I will offer is a little bit of a summary of what we talked about earlier, which is you should consider within your organization whether you are in a situation I.

Where you need to build higher trust and how much of it that you need to build. It’s not linear. It’s not either or. Yes, I need to build higher trust, or no, I don’t. Right? You offered some of those tactics that you can use. The question is, how often do you use those tactics? When do you use those tactics?

Is it for every individual that use those tactics? And I would suggest that if you are in an organization, which is breaking apart a lot, and I’m talking about orgs here, not teams, right? If you’re in an organization which is breaking up a lot and primarily has short-term things that you gather people together to do, then I think you should really focus on strengthening that calculus based trust.

Make sure that you have the right processes and deterrence mechanisms in place get the highest possible effective performance that you can out of your group

Andy: And do you have any

particular things to do to build the calculus based trust?

Mon-Chaio: I think this is what most people talk about when they talk about processes. I don’t know how much you’ve been interviewing these days, but sometimes I will get into interview loops, either as the interviewer or the interviewee, where you start to hear about people building processes as a method of deterrence,

right? So, hey you know, we have to have this code review and the code has to be reviewed by at least two people and it cannot be pushed out until it’s signed off. Or, every Monday we come together to do bug bash, and, the p zeros get bumped up and we take a look at all the P zeros and we see how many of them have been around for more than a week. Right. So I think a lot of this calculus based trust ends up being around this deterrent stuff. Because remember, the whole idea is that we have low trust. So the only way I can trust you is if you don’t fix that P zero bug. There’s a negative impact, and I need to know, one, what that negative impact is gonna be, and two, that it’s actually going to be performed in order for me to trust that you will bear the brunt of that if you don’t do your work.

And so I think laying it out clearly in these processes, and here’s where I think written communication works really, really well, right? Because it’s something that you can always point to, you can point to in a retrospective you can point to in a anything to say like, this is what we’re supposed to do and it didn’t get done.

Andy: So something like do you know team charters?

Mon-Chaio: Yes, I do.

Andy: Yeah. So that would be one form of building that calculus based trust is have that team charter, this is what we’re here for, this is how we’re gonna do it, this is how we’re gonna communicate and a few other aspects of how the team will operate.

Mon-Chaio: Right now I want to state that, at least in my opinion, and probably Andy’s too, but I don’t wanna speak for him, you should always find some grouping where within that grouping it’s a longer lasting grouping where you’re building higher level trust and you can spend more and more time those tactics than Andy talked about as well as others. That to go back to an earlier episode, show that you’re more in a learning mindset versus an execution mindset, right? All of those things provide tax. You’re not typing code when you’re doing those things. So one could argue that you’re not having the output as traditionally measured. Now, you know, we know the output’s not just typing code, but there is a tax to those things.

So I think we both believe that you should have a larger organization that allows you to do those things more fully and in an increasing manner. But I think my tactic is, Within that org, and in those specific cases, you can be very highly effective without having to increase trust even with the low trust team.

Andy: Yep. And I would add on to that, the warning, which is to be situationally aware.

Don’t just assume, oh, this is a short-lived team. I don’t need to worry about these things.

But pay attention to how people are interacting. And if it’s becoming a problem, either, it could be a problem because of the outcomes that the team is able to perform.

Or it could be a problem because of people’s happiness like that they’re butting heads. Sure they’re getting the output, but or the outcomes that you want, but they’re butting heads and no one’s happy even though they’re short-lived. That’s just not nice on a human level. And I would say you might wanna intervene.

To start having some of these difficult conversations, starting with trust to understand what’s happening. And you don’t need to do it in a big group. It could be a one-on-one thing, it could be a small pair if there’s like something going on. But having like that that ladder of inference, using that to understand where those issues are coming from, not only helps resolve the issue, but builds trust in the process.

And I think that’s one of the things is when you are resolving issues, use the trust techniques because it will not only resolve the issue, but it will build the trust

Mon-Chaio: I agree with that. That makes a lot of sense.

Andy: or, all

Mon-Chaio: All right.

I think we have some more individualistic and on the ground tactics. We have some org building stuff, tactics. Hopefully we’ve at least opened the door to answering some of the questions and challenges y’all are having around trust. A obviously there’s a lot more to discuss around this concept of trust. So maybe we’ll have another episode on it at some point in time. Maybe not

Andy: I don’t trust you enough to talk about this again.

Mon-Chaio: right? At least not right now.

Andy: Well, thank you for listening to us ramble on for 45 minutes or so. As we talked about trust and gave you some really good examples of things that you can do, tactics you can employ from team charters and writing things down that are the agreements within your team to the ladder of inference, the t dd for people and being vulnerable using the story I’m telling myself.

But we wanna hear your ideas as well. What tactics do you use to build trust on your teams and when do you decide to employ those tactics? When do you not? We’d love to hear from you, and if you have any other ideas for topics Mancha and I should talk about, just let us know. We’re interested in hearing from you.

Mon-Chaio: Absolutely.

Andy: All right, see you later. Mancha.

Mon-Chaio: Take it easy, Andy. Till next time.

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