The pillars of leadership: Trust
I’m working on what makes authentic technical leadership within an organisation and so I thought I’d post down some notes in a series of posts.
I plan to look at a few of the key aspects of good leadership within a small organisation, first off I want to look at the most important one.
Trust: hard to earn, easy to lose. And yet it’s easy one of the most important thing within teams and companies to foster.
When I talk to leaders it can be really easy for them to forget all the myriad ways to destroy trust within an organisation, and yet if you can trust others and have them trust you in return, you can create a powerful organisational momentum and ability to deliver that can become your secret sauce.
Let’s look at a few ways that I’ve seen trust can break down in early stage organisations:
Certain uncertainty
What is it: Often startups and early stage companies ride on a vision, they’re making a bet on the future and trying to be in the right place at the right time to ride a new paradigm or fulfil a market niche.
As founders and leaders within an organisation it’s often part of the remit to keep people motivated by keeping the vision alive and making sure people remember why they’re at the company to start with, especially when the team is riding out some of the inevitable blows that startups will take. (It’s not all fun and games kids!)
However if a leader skirts the line and starts portraying the vision with too much certainty (not that the future will exist, but that we will get there going in this direction and there’ll be no potholes in the road, oh no!) then you’ve gone from a place of trust to a place of blind faith and that’s a trap for leaders. You want people to have informed trust, to know that there’s risk and reward but that the road is anything but certain most of the time. In my experience faith is lost when the vision starts to become murky or changeable (as happens a number of times in very early stage companies companies) but if your team trusts each other you’ll ride the uncertainty together.
How it plays out: Leaders follow this path pretty often (and is a common cause for my coaching or advice work to come into play) as they fool themselves into and number of the following stories:
- None of my staff will stay if the know the truth about how uncertain this is.
Do you want people to hang around if they’re not in it for the vision even with uncertainty? Wouldn’t you want to know the truth and be treated as an adult? - I don’t want any uncertainty to creep into the team!
Are you setting up your team for success if you don’t give them all the variables? - I’ve always got to be positive, it’s why they follow me on the startup journey!
You’re going to end up pretty leanly and broken if you can trust your team with letting them know who you are really, and I can guarantee they already know it’s hogwash
How to avoid it: Work on being transparent with your team, usually this starts with being transparent with yourself. Don’t fool yourself and others with things you want to be true and instead focus on things that are true. Don’t sell a visions paved with ambiguity and untruth, when you sell your vision to the team take them on the journey but back it up with facts and checks along the way.
How to fix it when it goes wrong: work out why you fooled yourself into believing the wrong vision, ask your team for forgivness and lay out how you’ll treat it differently in the future “we won’t go down this path again because we’ll keep an eye on revenue/contracts/metric x and we will follow data not gut feel”
Delegation paralysis
What is it: Another pattern that often plays out and I’ve seen a lot comes from an inability to delegate. Startup founders and leaders start off wearing a lot of hats and fulfilling a lot of roles. As the company grows and starts to gain traction the workload becomes beyond breaking point and you end up having to hire those first key hires.
But alas the first engineer isn’t as quick as the founder used to be, the marketer doesn’t make decisions as quickly, so there ends up being questions about their dedication, skill or commitment, even if not externally, even if it’s only thought about, it’s still a break down in trust.
The truth is often that there are more things to do, there are more communication lines, there’s inertia in things that as a very small team no one realised would be there.
How it plays out: The most obvious time this is in play is if you’re being accused of micromanagement. But team trust breaks down because the founder/leader says:
- I can’t trust them to be working on the right things
This is often a failure of communicating outcomes of the work and start asking yourself why the other party doesn’t have the same understanding - It’s faster if I do it myself
ask yourself what are you not doing in order to do this task that you hired someone else for!
How to fix it if it goes wrong: Try and work out why you didn’t trust your team/don’t trust your team. Why did you hire people you’re not willing to trust to do the job?! Ask yourself what checks and balances you need and ask your team for input into how to get them implemented, if it means they’re free to do their work without you micromanaging and with a safety net so they won’t go too far wrong you’ll often find they’ll come to the party. If you have specific concerns bring them to the team, or ask for external input. A neutral party can help immensely.
Trust within small startups
Startups are blessed and cursed in equal measure when it comes to building trust:
The blessing is you have a small team, each member of which usually has a pretty specific domain and usually everyones talking a lot. As opposed to an enterprise where you end up with massive silos of information where trust and understanding can be impossible to forge.
The curse comes from the heightened uncertainty of startups, you’re all riding on a bet and looking for signal within the noise of the market, working out where to put effort and time. This means a pivot or change can be only a few days away as new information comes to hand, which can be difficult for some teams to digest and understand, especially if the team doesn’t see the sources of the new information.
Trust relies on understanding, empathy and comes from confidence and competence. It’s not something you can ever fake and yet sometimes leaders will destroy the trust in and of their team without meaning to.
Work on it conciously
Trust, once is lost is really hard to build back up so it’s important to be aware of the pitfalls and try and avoid. But if you do end up breaking down trust leaders have a responsibility to build it back up.
There are a few things as a leader you can do, but notice that none of them involve “forcing my team to trust me” or forcing the team to change, the solution usually lies with leaders and it’s worth focusing on the things you can change.
Start off by getting curious about how the initial conditions for a break down in trust appeared, and played out, what baggage are you going to have to work through now.
Work on being transparent, authentic and vulnerable as a leader can help people to join in the work of building back trust. Self awareness and coaching can help strongly here.
Trust comes and can be rebuilt over time, but it always requires some key foundations
Transparency: I know why they made this decision and I can see their reasoning
Autonomy: I’m trusted to do my job, and I know the outcomes and expectations, I know what outcomes other people are pushing to as well.
Safety: I know if I make a mistake we’ll work out why and fix it together, we’ll work out how to avoid it in future or admit it was a mistake worth making for the short term gain or lessons it taught.
Break any of these aspects of a trusted team and it’ll be so much harder for everyone to operate, get them right and you’ll have some easier nights sleep.
How have you seen trust break down at an organisation or in a team? Would love you to share some stories with me.
