## On Trust
### Building a machine that needs tuning, not driving

Trust is tricky. Whether it's an organization, an individual, or an abstract system,
trust is usually seen as something that's valuable, but difficult to measure.
As individuals, we often say we want to be trusted, but tend to shirk the responsibilities
required by trust. So we want to be trusted, without any of the baggage associated with that trust.
I usually talk about trust in an organization as a kind of distributed leadership,
where every leader is a subject-matter expert responsible for those systems under their control.
This kind of trust is fairly measurable; if leaders are accomplishing the tasks to which
they've been entrusted, then everything is on the right track.
The trustworthiness of these leaders is measurable as a percentage of the assigned tasks that
they complete themselves or successfully delegate. No sweat.

There's another kind of trust that's a bit more insidious, though, especially in young,
tight-knit-by-necessity organizations. This kind of trust is more than simply
distributed leadership. It's more than a checklist of responsibilities.
And I submit that it's the more important of the two types of trust.
This kind of trust is the certainty that **the goals of everyone involved end up at the same place.**

This is an extremely difficult kind of trust to enforce.
Instead, it must be found, fostered, and focused by those in positions of leadership.
Further, it must be an absolutely conscious choice on the part of every individual in an organization
to ascribe to this kind of trust. Invariably, this kind of trust breaks down in all but the most
tightly-run organizations (which might be the opposite of what you expect),
but it's worth the effort.

When this kind of trust permeates an organization's culture,
the cost of maintaining oversight over individual employees becomes negligible.
The output from employees (if you've hired the right kind of employees) increases.
Team members are more comfortable trying new things and spending more time on projects.
And, if maintained correctly, team members know that they are valuable to the company,
and feel like the company maintains their best interests at all times.
It's a beautiful thing when it works. So how do you foster this kind of culture?

*1) You need a plan*

I won't call it a "vision" like many people like to. Visions are like ideas and bellybuttons:
everyone has one, and they aren't particularly useful. As a reader of this blog,
you probably already know that. There's a big difference between the guy with an
idea for product or a vision of a company and the guy with a prototype or a plan.
If you want people to adjust their goals towards yours,
you need to have a plan (with measurable results) that's worth following.

*2) You need to find people that are excited in your plan*

The most important part of the hiring or team-building process is figuring out the kind of person
that truly **gets it**. This is much easier said than done, of course.
The art of feigning interest in an idea is an important step of the interview process
for many people looking for employment or a job (rather than a project or a passion).
You want the former, not the latter, 100% of the time. There's no perfect way to assess this,
and only shrewdness honed by experience will give you an eye and an ear for the fakers,
but there are a couple of signs that someone cares about what you're doing rather than
the paycheck associated with what you're doing. If they really care, they'll:

+ Ask lots of questions about what pain points your organization stuggles with.
+ Listen to the answers to the above questions.
+ Offer their own solutions to the pain points above.
+ Synthesize your organizations objectives with past experience (bonus points if you hadn't thought of those intersections before)
+ Never mention their own life sitution in the context of "needing" a job.

These are the big ones that I look for. Folks that focus on the successes of an organization
are usually just sucking up. Folks that talk over your responses are usually trying to sell you
on their enthusiasm, when you should be looking for individuals that focus their energies
on productive solutions to the obstacles to your master plan.
And folks looking for a "job" aren't the ones interested in executing any more of your plan
than is required to avoid being fired (assuming you're offering them a traditional job at all).
Find the person that's as big an advocate for your plan as you are,
and never let them go!

*3) You need to maintain clear expectations at a high level*

The truly worthwhile plan doesn't work if you can't delegate it.
And you can't delegate if you're involved in the daily minutiae.
If you've hired the right people and built the right kind of plan,
you should be able to rest easy in the idea that if you were to leave tomorrow without prior notice,
everyone would be ready to fill in whatever gaps are left in the line rather than
metaphorically about-face and head for the hills.
The machine shouldn't need weekly status meetings to maintain the right general direction.
This is not to say that you shouldn't check for task completion.
Rather, this is the trust that if you gave no tasks at all, or no specific instructions
on a given day, your team mates would still come up with something to do that furthered your
plan in a general sense. This doesn't mean that you should rely on this all of the time,
as your contribution to the plan is, most likely, specific feedback and direction on many
of the daily activities that team members undergo. But your role should always be one
of assistance and cultivation rather than enforcement or draconian oversight.
If you don't think that's possible, you're either a micromanager,
you haven't properly communicated your high-level plan, or you've hired the wrong people.

*4) Fire quickly*

When dealing with people, it's always best to assume that you're on the same team.
That their failures are lapses or misunderstandings rather than a deep
character flaw or fundamental inability to comprehend. In some large companies
or toxic organizations, you might have to step around those whose behavior
are at odds with the plan, or who might be fundamentally incapable of certain things.
The starter doesn't have that luxury. The instant you find yourself not trusting
that someone has the best interest of the company at heart, it's best to get rid of that person.
The instant you begin to think that someone wasn't really sick on their sick day,
or that their lunch break might have been an interview with another company,
rather than a legitimate request or needed downtime, you're wasting your energy on things
that should be left to trust. Either you're micromanaging, and you should let it go,
or your team mate isn't worthy of trust, and you should let them go.
There are no other options that are viable in the long term.

It's not an easy thing to do, and I've made this mistake (as both the hired and the hiring manager)
more times than I would like to admit. Like a frog in boiling water,
this kind of mistrust builds up to pervade a culture in such insidious ways,
and can ruin the sort of atmosphere of excellence that has to be cultivated in
a high-performance team. Hire slowly, fire quickly, and do it all with a fair dose of humility.

----

Do these four things, and you'll be well on your way to having a team that trusts each other.
Don't waste your time with teams that aren't built around these principles,
and fight tooth and nail to protect those that are, and you'll suddenly find
that more and more of your ventures become something lasting (instead of something implosive).