How To Create a Culture of Trust
Trust is believing that your colleagues have good intentions and are not looking to cause harm. When teams trust each other, they feel secure and can be open about their mistakes and vulnerabilities. To enhance their development process, teams should exchange feedback in structured environments where they can identify their strengths and weaknesses without any negative consequences. This approach helps them work towards achieving their goals successfully.
To improve and succeed, functional teams should engage in healthy conflict and trust that feedback is meant to enhance, not harm. It’s important to seek out sources of conflict and hold each other accountable to high-performance standards by publishing team goals and standards and conducting regular process reviews. By focusing on team results rather than individual milestones, team members can trust that their peers will hold them accountable for any poor performance that negatively affects the team.
For Agile teams to deliver valuable software, they must trust programmers to make decisions and give them autonomy in their work. Clear communication of project goals and objectives is needed. Agile teams should review the project’s progress, reflect on the decisions made by the programmers, and adjust.
The default assumption is that you can do anything unless a specific policy or agreement prohibits it. We’re starting from a position of trust. More freedom leads to more learning, and more understanding leads to better performance. By focusing on execution, we limit the system’s growth potential. By making ourselves indispensable, we make our teams and organizations less resilient. Once a decision has been made, it should be shared along with the rationale and perspectives that shaped it so that others can learn too. Consensus is impossible at scale and needs to reflect how adaptive systems work. Recognize that freedom and autonomy feed motivation. Create an environment where it is safe to try and fail, and teams will learn and grow in extraordinary ways.
Accept that we operate in a changing world where centralized control is too slow and disconnected from reality. Push authority to the edge of the organization — where the information is — so teams can adapt and steer. Structural mediocrity has an inertia all its own. The team is self-managed. Teams are lean — small enough to move. But they are also multidisciplinary, containing all (or most) of the skills they need to achieve their mission.
