The problem with Trust

I stand in the entrance to the conference room at our Skype office in the refurbished beer factory on Söder Mälarstrand, in the heart of Stockholm. My cheeks flush with embarrassment as I listen to my direct report, Amir, accuse me of not trusting him.

Amir is a relative newcomer to my team. He joined when a sister team merged into mine two months back. This happened when Microsoft made the highly dubious decision to get rid of SDET roles entirely, transitioning them to the SDE job family and transferring the QA responsibility onto the dev team.

Amir is a good QA engineer, but he isn’t an experienced developer. I first began worrying about his skillset two weeks after he joined, when he asked me what a stack trace was. Amir is smart, but not a coder. And so, yeah, I didn’t trust him, so I began double-checking his work, questioning his assertions, making sure he understood what he was doing.

Apparently, I had done so ineptly, hence the accusation, and the blooms of shame now spreading across my cheeks. I firmly believe that trust isn’t earned, it’s given. A manager must trust their directs for the team to function the way it ought to. And so, I apologize to Amir. I tell him it’s unacceptable for me to display a lack of trust in this way, and that I will change my behavior.

And I do. A month later I check in with Amir, and he says that, yes, he isn’t feeling the same as he had before.

Great story, right? I’ve written about this incident in the past to illustrate the importance of trust. The thing is, looking back at it twelve years later, I realize that both Amir and I profoundly misunderstood the concept. This is what I want to write about today.

I was wrong

A few weeks ago, I read the terrific The Five Disfunctions of a Team. The first disfunction mentioned, of course, is Lack of Trust, and the book goes quite deeply into the concept. The book made me realize that trust isn’t merely blind faith. Some people genuinely need oversight, as Amir in the above situation clearly did. (I got lucky in that Amir was smart enough to catch up quickly, and the rest of the team stepped up and helped him.)

Trust is a mutual understanding that whatever is done is done with the best possible intentions. In other words, Amir could have trusted me enough to understand that when I dug into his assertions, I was doing it not to harm him, but to help him grow.

Trust goes two ways. A manager must trust that their team members are doing their best, and genuinely want to excel. Beyond that, blind trust is unwise, especially when a report’s capabilities seem lacking.

And their reports must trust that whatever actions the manager is taking, they do so not out of malice or spite, but to help fuel growth.

Communism, revisited

A brief aside. Communism is a wonderful system. Everyone gets what they need, giving what they can. A true utopia. Right?

Why doesn’t it work? Because people are fallible. Some give less than they can and take more than they need. The system falls apart, and you get the USSR, North Korea, and China.

Or, in a team setting, you get Amir and me, talking past each other about trust. Sure, trust ought to be given, but that’s not how that actually works, is it? I can’t force my reports to trust me. I do have to earn that. So, in that situation, me saying to Amir something along the lines of the following, wouldn’t go over very well.

“No, Amir, it’s you who doesn’t trust me. You ought to trust that when I’m double-checking your work, I’m doing it for your benefit.”

I have to make Amir feel trusted, and do it while also making sure he’s set up to succeed, meaning the gaps in his skillset are mitigated, whether through involvement of other engineers, or through structured learning.

The value of being intentional

People assume things. This is especially true in a relationship with your boss. For example, when my boss doesn’t give me regular positive feedback, I assume he’s unhappy with me. When Amir saw me double-checking what he was doing, he assumed I wasn’t trusting him, or trying to manage him out.

His complaint, therefore, makes sense, but not in the way either of us thought. The issue wasn’t that I was double checking his work, the issue was that I wasn’t intentional about explaining why I was doing it and getting his buy-in from the get-go. Trust but verify, sure, but above all, communicate!

Conclusion

"Trust” is such a loaded word. Not only is it conflated with virtue, it’s also confused with oversight or lack thereof, and with effective delegation. Some think trust must be earned (e.g. Amazon’s “Earn Trust” Leadership Principle) where others, like me, think it must be given. The problem with either view is the ambiguity surrounding the word.

A misunderstanding of trust creates subtle, pervasive cultural problems where your reports don’t know what to expect from you, and where trust isn’t built but eroded over time. Being explicit with your intentions can go a long way toward building that trust, as does a willingness to be vulnerable and accessible.

My run-in with Amir ended on a very positive note; we’re still in contact over a decade later, and long after I moved back to the US. But with the misunderstanding we had, the situation could’ve gone astray in multiple different ways.

If I had to do it all over again, I would’ve been more intentional with Amir, making sure that he understood I had his best interests at heart from the beginning. This could’ve been done via 1:1s, via clearly setting expectations on both sides, and via being super-transparent that my oversight was meant to help him succeed rather than punish him for mistakes.

Doing so would’ve both allowed me to be more involved in his growth, and removed the anxiety and frustration he must’ve been feeling before he came to me with the concern.