GoRuCo 2017
Trust and Teams
Trust and Teams by Rebecca Miller-Webster
Trust is at the core of whether we are happy at work or not. Trust is at the core of whether we like who we work with. Trust is at the core of whether people perceive us to be good at our jobs. But what is trust? How do you know when it's missing? And how do you fix it when it's gone. Let's discuss the elements of trust and the patterns of behavior the make or break trust
GoRuCo 2017
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All right, so I'm Rebecca. I am currently the VP of Engineering at M Mind Software, and I am the founder of Write C Code.
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We mentioned I'm here to talk about trust and teams. So, raise your hand if you've ever said, "I just don't trust that person." Right?
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And if I ask you why, you probably have a good reason. There was an incident that happened, there was dishonesty, or there was gossip. But if I ask you what makes you trust someone, that feels much harder to answer.
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It's super important; it's kind of fundamental to who we are as humans. Trust is essential to every relationship, including our working relationships and the teams we work with. There’s also research that correlates trust with business profitability, so you know, tell your manager.
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But what is trust? It feels like a pretty vague thing. There's a book called "The Thin Book of Trust" by Charles Feltman, and he has a definition that I really like: trust is choosing a risk, making something you value vulnerable to another person's actions.
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There are a couple of pieces to this. First, it’s about choosing the risk, which means that trust is a risk assessment. We think about our past experiences with this person and others and decide if we're going to take this risk. Trust also involves something we value; for example, we care about the quality of our work, our team, our own happiness, and not getting fired.
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The last piece is making our values vulnerable to someone else's actions. Usually, when we talk about vulnerability, we think about security issues, like vulnerabilities in code that need a security patch. However, the good part about vulnerability is that it leads to innovation, growth, and positive outcomes.
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Where do we talk more about vulnerability than in romantic relationships? We can learn something from that. Remember that whether you like someone you work with or not, you're in a relationship with them; you interact with them, and you have to deal with them.
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There’s an institute in Seattle called the Gottman Institute. They videotape couples interacting and can predict whether they will stay together or not. They've found they can accurately make these predictions within about ten minutes because trust isn’t about big things; it’s about all the small moments we have interacting with people.
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This can be easy in some ways because it means I don’t have to make a grand gesture. In other ways, it’s hard because it’s about every single interaction you have with a person. So, how do you build or rebuild trust?
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The first step is to really debug it and identify what's broken. Brené Brown, who's a researcher on shame and vulnerability, has an acronym for the elements of trust which is BRAVING, and I think this is super useful.
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The first element is boundaries. Do you respect my boundaries? When you're not clear about what’s okay and not okay, do you ask, and are you willing to say no? I once led a team where our CTO sometimes would drive by pull requests.
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As a manager, I get it; you want to write code. But as a team lead, I found it annoying. One day, he pulled a story about naming. We had all agreed that a naming convention was bad and needed to be renamed, but we couldn't agree on what to rename it. Here comes the CTO, submitting a pull request and making that decision.
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In many ways, this was a violation of boundaries, as we expected the team to make the decision about naming things. The team was managing their own backlog and it wasn’t that the CTO couldn’t do it; it was about respecting boundaries and getting context.
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Boundaries aren't about rigid rules; they're more like sensors with gates that can be moved. We can cross them, but we need to be clear and explicit about where they are. Being very clear about expectations is essential, including success criteria. How do I know that I met an expectation, and what’s the timeframe?
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The second element of trust is reliability. You do what you say you’ll do at work, which means being aware of your competencies and limitations so you don’t overpromise and can deliver on commitments. It’s also about balancing competing priorities. In the book "Understanding Computers and Cognition," Terry Winograd talks about the promise cycle.
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This is similar to the networking concept of a three-way handshake. Charles Feltman expanded this into a larger cycle of commitment. This might seem obvious, but we often miss these pieces. If I walk into the kitchen and say, "Why can’t people just wash their own dishes?" I’m making a request, but I’m not being clear about what I’m asking.
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Another aspect is waiting for someone to say yes or no, and then being clear about what they are agreeing to. The last piece we often forget is reporting back. If you can’t do something, let people know. Many agile processes handle this well, like stand-ups or planning poker.
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The main thing is clarifying and asking for your requests and your commitments. The third element of trust is accountability. You own your mistakes, apologize, and make amends. My first job as a developer involved deploying files via FTP.
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At some point, I accidentally overwrote the entire database and had no backup. I had to call my boss and say, "I totally messed up," but luckily, there were some server backups. I could have blamed the deploy process, but to take accountability, I had to own my actions and their impact.
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The fourth element involves sharing information and experiences that aren’t yours to share. I need to know my confidences are kept, and you're not sharing information about others that should be confidential. Tools like Slack can often lead to back-channel communications that resemble gossip.
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I once worked with a guy who live-chatted me gossip about someone else. I had to ask if that person knew he was telling me that. Confidentiality is broken if I see you sharing something that I think that other person wouldn't want me to know. This will cause me to trust you less.
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The fifth element of trust is integrity. You choose courage over comfort; you choose what is right over what is fun, fast, or easy. You practice your values rather than just professing them. When we talk about code, we usually do well with this, but we struggle more when it comes to teams and culture.
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How many of you have heard someone say, "We let our developers choose the best tool for the job?" That sounds great, but if your organization uses Ruby on Rails and someone insists on using C#, it may not be received well. The statement about letting developers choose isn’t entirely true, and we need to be explicit about what matters.
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I may have strong opinions about coding styles, but I value consistency and team buy-in more than my personal preferences. Sometimes, you just have to check yourself and ask if this topic matters. If it doesn’t, maybe you should let it go.
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The sixth aspect of trust is non-judgment. I can ask you for what I need, and you can ask for what you need. We can talk about how we feel without judgment. In 2013, when I first organized GoRuCo, I also adopted a dog who turned out to be a puppy mill breeder.
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She was an adorable yet challenging addition to my life. At one point, I had to go to my boss and admit that I had bitten off more than I could chew. Fortunately, conferences have end dates, but I should have asked for help earlier instead of judging myself for it.
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The last aspect of trust is generosity. You extend the most generous interpretation possible to the intentions, words, and actions of others. I think this is hard to do without the other aspects. This is a picture from GoRuCo 2012.
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In that corner is Abel, who’s sitting over there. I've worked with him a bunch of times, and I'm kind of an intense person. We were having a team discussion, and I got frustrated. Abel reached out to me and said, "Hey, Rebecca, that was really harsh. I don’t think you meant it that way."
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This incident shows he extended trust by assuming good intentions: he was saying, "Your intentions are good, but this was the impact I want you to know about." That type of communication builds trust.
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So, how do we think about rebuilding trust on a team? I actually think monitoring is a great way to do this. I had a team with trust issues, and I started making them rate each other on this BRAVING framework.
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It was interesting to see changes and provided people with a shared language to discuss their issues. In general, having checkpoints to identify breaches in trust is important. Using the elements of trust allows us to be specific, so we can give constructive actionable feedback opposed to saying, "People don’t trust you."
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The last thing is modeling good behavior. I'm a believer in subversive, grassroots change in organizations.
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Respond positively when someone asks for help, let them know when you need help, apologize, and take responsibility for your actions.
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People will see that and it will have a cascading effect.
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Trust in teams. Thank you.
