Scaling Trust, Episode II

“So this company Zef mentioned, the one where his new boss told him on his first day that half the people should be fired, that’s us, right?”

I was catching up with a former colleague this week. One of his team members had read my post, and assumed it was about their company. It wasn’t. What’s “funny” about this is that this person knew exactly who my boss was while I worked there. And if he would have known my boss at all, he’d realize it’s patently absurd to think he would talk, or even think about people this way.

So how does that happen?

How is it possible that an employee can misjudge or misinterpret the intentions or behavior of a “higher up” to such a degree?

And it’s not a random occurrence. I’ve experienced this happening to myself. I read some document, add an (in my mind) innocent comment or question, and then later hear from the document author’s manager that my comment is somehow interpreted as some sort of harsh criticism.

“You explained this wasn’t my intention at all, right? I was seriously curious and just asking questions.”

“Of course, I said: believe me, Zef would never mean it this way.”

That’s good. But still... why would people assume this in the first place? Don’t they know me at all?

And here we hit the crux of the issue: they really don’t.

Excellent news! We’re back to the good old topic of trust.

Yes, more soft stuff. To compensate, let me quasi-promise that next week I’ll pick a more hardcore technical topic. Maybe I’ll argue why Kotlin is a silly language, and Rust is the future of the universe. I’ll be able to come up with something controversial. Trust me.

Knowing people is really hard to scale. And if people don’t know (enough) about you, they may not trust you and may assume the worst.

What’s worse, if this perception is not corrected, it can compound over time. People build stories in their head constantly, especially in the absence of real information.

“And then they said A (which I think really meant B), and then later made it even worse by claiming C (which given that they meant B before, probably means D). OMG! Can you believe it!?”

Next, confirmation bias kicks in and we get to unproductive territory that is hard to recover from.

“Ah, another statement from them fancy senior management people with them fancy iPhone cases, they’re so out of touch.”

This is highly contextual of course. If all is fine and dandy, probably everybody assumes the best in people. However, when the pressure is on, when there is some level of fear or uncertainty, this comes far less natural to people.

And it’s exactly in the tough times where you benefit from a solid level of trust.

We can work on this though. Maybe. To some degree. Let’s approach this from first principles.

Who do you trust the most?

First of all, I would hope that you trust yourself. If not, that’s a whole different issue and a bit beyond what we can cover here.

Second, hopefully you trust a spouse if you have one, family, and a close group of friends. If not, again, we have a whole different issue.

After that, hopefully a close group of colleagues. Likely the ones you work most closely with day-to-day. You talk to them regularly. You talk to them not just about CSS best practices (there are none, CSS is a mystery to all, just make it work), but also about their cat (I don’t have one, I’m allergic). People are not a purely transactional creatures, relationships matter, and this type of talk builds and maintains trust. That said, I have built a ton of solid relationships on the foundation of a shared confusion about CSS.

Where we see clear return on investment on these trust levels is when your close colleague, friend, spouse says or does something that you cannot immediately make sense of. Because you trust them, you’re going to assume good intent. Even though what they say or do seems off, you trust that you perhaps don’t understand the full context, all will be well, and you support them.

This is what we’re aiming for. This default mode is super valuable and saves a lot of time and energy wasted on interpretation, second guessing, back channel conversations and gossip.

Sounds awesome, so let’s do that. We should just have a trustful relationship with all the peoples.

Solved. You’re welcome.

However, let me be Dutch and get practical here. I would love to be BFFs with everybody, or at least regularly talk with everybody about their life and cat. And not just with the people in my (in)direct teams, but all other engineering managers outside my scope, product managers, designers, and executives as well.

Realistically though, I’m not sure that I can. That’s all I would do day and night. I need my beauty sleep. And I hope our trust relationship is sufficient for me to just tell you to your face: so do you.

So what are our options if we’re in a position where it’s valuable have a reasonable trust level with, well, almost everybody?

Strategy #1: suck it up, and just do it: talk to everybody in a structured way. For instance, through regularly scheduled one-on-ones. It’s undeniable, if you have some basic socializing skills, these are a great way to keep in touch, and to maintain a base line of trust and connection. It just requires genuine interest in people and time investment.

Strategy #2: AMA (Ask Me Anything) sessions. Set up an hour every month or so where you’re hanging around in a call and people can pop in and out if they have questions. Hopefully this leads to some interesting questions in a casual setting where people can get a bit more of a sense what a catless existence looks like (I’m fine, thanks for asking). And perhaps get some specific questions answered while at at. This is the modern day, remote work version of going for a beer with a group of people after work.

The honest reason that I personally haven’t set one of those up with myself, even though it has been suggested to me, is that I struggle with the potential perception of pretentiousness of this. “AMA with Zef” implicitly signals: I am important/interesting enough for such a session and invite a ton of people to it.

“AMA with Fred, the cleaner, ask me anything!” No offense to Fred, he does important work — I just don’t anticipate (perhaps wrongly) a lot of questions. Nor am I sure that everybody’s trust level with Fred is going to make a huge impact on company results long term.

Strategy #3: I randomly walked into this one, and I only discovered it when I needed to find a new job. Having to find a new job is a time where a trust network makes all the difference. I posted about my predicament on LinkedIn, and quickly messages started to trickle in.

“Hey Zef, it’s been a while since we worked together. Not sure you even remember me, but I’ve been following you and your writing over the years and always felt like we stayed in touch. Let’s talk!”

That’s right. What we’re doing right here, you and I, this is my third strategy. I have found that a surprisingly scalable and effective way to keep in touch with people is to broadcast a sizable amount of text in every possible direction at a regular interval. Text that is valuable enough for people to plough through, and as a side effect maintains some level of connection. Mostly one directional, but that’s ok. Obviously, this doesn’t work for everybody. Realistically, a lot of people are not going to read your stuff. It requires some serious investment in writing effort and skill as well. It works for me because it’s not my primary goal, more of a nice side effect.

Scaling trust is hard, and likely a mission impossible to achieve perfectly. Nevertheless, it’s a mission worth pursuing and find ways to get better at.

Trust me.