Member-only story
Simple and Difficult: Earning Trust in the Workplace
A few weeks ago, a fellow manager asked me a strange question:
Have you written anything about earning trust from people? Y’know… the mechanics of it?
A little part of that strangeness is because it’s still a weird feeling to have managers ask me for advice after twenty or so years of not listening to it. But that feeling comes with any sort of question and isn’t worth an article.
This question was particularly strange because it was wrong. Not wrong in its phrasing or the context in which it was asked. Managers should care about earning trust from people. It was wrong in the way that Lovecraftian horrors are wrong (though with a bit less madness). My brain recoiled from it because it was based in some reality that was not my own. It was akin to some software design that I know is wrong even though I can’t initially articulate why.
After some thought, the wrongness can be summed up simply: When are we not earning trust from people?
Before we get there though, there’s an important concept that you should know so that we’re talking about the same thing. People don’t trust people. We say it all of the time: “I trust you”. But that’s a quirk of language. People trust people to do things. For example, you might trust me to use a few too many sentence fragments in my writing. Or you might trust me to have decent leadership skills. But do you trust me to do your taxes? Do you trust me to take that penalty shot with the game on the line? No, you don’t. Nor should you. We say “I trust you” because it is tiresome to always say “I trust you to do that thing” when “that thing” is obvious in context.
When we earn trust from people, it’s not some uniform blanket of trust. It is also not always positive. Sometimes people earn distrust. I’ve worked with people who I could trust to derail any meeting they were a part of. I’ve worked with engineers I could trust to over-engineer any problem they worked on. Everyone has that one friend they can trust to be late to everything. The mechanics for earning trust have no moral judgement. Some trust you won’t want to earn.
Humans are extremely evolved betting machines. We make dozens of bets every day on an unknowable future. Trust is a shortcut. We can’t…
