Organizational Trust
Welcome to another week of thoughts! I hope you had a good time during your weekend and can take time for the Holidays.
I'm a Grinch, so I don't have days off during the end-of-year season.
Sometimes, the last 2-3 weeks of the year are very mellow and slow in work.
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Trust (noun): firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of someone or something.
Trust is hard to understand or define, but we notice it very palpably when lost.
When I set out to write my thoughts around trust, I wanted to discuss why some people got that advantage in organizations vs. those who didn't. Rebuilding trust after it's been lost in a work setting is a separate discussion! I'll only talk about building trust across the organization.
At all levels
One disclaimer is that you should always show authenticity, openness, and vulnerability at all organizational levels. There are some caveats to this, as biases run deep.
Being able to trust and be trusted doesn't come from never making mistakes but rather from being transparent when they occur and committing to doing better.
But please, always protect yourself first!
Manager Trust
One of the first times I came around to think about trust was with my manager. Through my peers, some teammates asked me how to get chosen for some new projects.
At that point, I felt my manager trusted me, so I got picked up. I told my peers that it boiled down to being a reliable contributor.
Team's Trust
Once you're past working within the scope of a single team, you need to come to a new team and build trust with their manager and teammates. This will require more than being reliable. You also need to be competent in the work you do!
Once you've built trust, you can keep the conversation going whenever either side needs help.
Cross-team Trust
At this level, you need to build trust with engineering and beyond into Product, Marketing, UX, etc. You might be trying to get a large-scale project through the finish line or kickstarting a green field project. In this case, being transparent and showing fairness will help a lot!
Leverage
When you've built trust across multiple dimensions, you will notice that you might be invited to be "in the room" where decisions happen. Or that your ideas are more openly received or you're allowed to experiment more.
Be careful!
Always be careful of the other side! I've seen some people amass trust from multiple leaders, only to see it disappear after one big bet. I've also wondered about people who, on the surface, are making mistakes but never lose trust.
One of the other major sources of issues I've seen is when people lose trust in the process!
I've seen this happen with action items from Retrospectives or Root Cause Analyses (RCAs) after incidents. When there's no trust that the corrective actions will be taken, people put whatever they want. They think it won't get done, so it's another checkbox to cross.
Your turn!
Have you thought about who and by whom you're trusted? Have you built trust with your leaders? Or your skip-level manager?
Let me know your thoughts by replying to this email!
Happy coding!
Things I discovered in the past week
- Why should you (or anyone) become an engineer manager? makes some good points about becoming a manager in this "new era" of engineering management. Recommended if you've read all other management posts from Charity!
- Why Aren't We SIEVE-ing? talks about a new cache-eviction algorithm, found it interesting after a few weeks of talking of cache eviction in CDNs.
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