Why don't you trust me?
Why "trust" could be the root cause of the flexible working challenge
Lessons learnt the hard way
A few years ago, when I was still cutting my teeth as a CEO (still am now, but have a few more grey hairs!) I started seeing some issues across the company. We had tripled the size of our team within 3 months and it was chaotic to say the least.
The problems can be summarised as misunderstandings, miscommunication and misplacement of frustration.
These were keeping me up at night. It felt like every time we took one step forward, we went two steps back.
Exasperated, I mentioned the issues to a peer group of founders and one of them mentioned a book called “Five Dysfunctions of a Team” by Patrick Lencioni. She told me she had read it in previous role and it had been a game changer.
After hunting on Amazon, I found they had 2 options - the original and the manga edition…
Cartoons have all the answers
Reading this was a cathartic experience. Pretty much the exact experience I was going through was being played out in a fable about a Midwestern US software company, that was in trouble and had just parachuted in a new CEO.
I would encourage you to read the book yourself. Broadly, the book works on the assumption that teamwork is the ultimate competitive advantage, so businesses should make it a top priority.
Similar to Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, it lays out a pyramid of issues that need to be solved in order to build great, happy, high performing teams.
Trust is the foundation of a functional and successful team. You can’t really do anything without trust, and leaders should act first in showing vulnerability to give others permission to open up.
If people trust each other, they can engage in constructive conflict, which is really the basis for better decision making and the best ideas.
Once a decision has been made, everyone should be committed to the decision to ensure there is no drag and you can execute quickly and effectively. At Hubble, we use the sentence “agree, or disagree, and commit” frequently. We disagree a lot - but it’s fun (most of the time!)
Once everyone has committed, it has to be clear who is responsible for what. Accountability is important in ensuring the right work gets done, by the right people in the right timeframe.
Finally, people have to care. If people care about outcomes, then they will drive harder towards the right result. Solving the first 4, definitely makes number 5 easy.
Really, the key lesson I got from the book was:
“Effective teams focus on collective results rather than individual goals.”
The 5 dysfunctions are illustrated below:
After reading and re-reading the book, I asked my leadership team to read it too. We then set off a series of initiatives in the company to address these issues. Some of which worked, and some of which didn’t - but that’s a blog post for another day.
All in all, we managed to resolve quite a lot of the issues we were facing and certainly improve the position we were in. This is still a work in progress of course, but I was lucky enough to see first hand the impact of deliberately building trust within an organisation.
This got me thinking about some of the stories I’ve been reading recently..
An Orwellian nightmare
George Orwell would be horrified (yet, unsurprised) to read about companies surveilling and monitoring their teams working from home, from secret webcams to keystroke analysis.
This screams lack of trust. The businesses involved previously used the office as a means of surveillance, and now they use software to get the same outcome.
This feels like a vicious and self-fulfilling cycle, where there is no “carrot”, only “stick.”
Employees respond to not being trusted, by not trusting their employers back - becoming demotivated and doing exactly what their employers are trying to stop them doing - slacking off, or quitting altogether.
Compare that to the trust that pores out of the announcement Spotify made a few weeks ago, that their team will be able to choose how and where they work:
“Here’s our thinking:
Work isn’t something our people come to the office for, it’s something they do.
Effectiveness can’t be measured by the number of hours people spend in an office. Instead, giving people the freedom to choose where they work will boost effectiveness.
Giving our people more flexibility will support a better work-life balance and also help tap into new talent pools while keeping our existing band members.
A distributed-first structure will challenge us to improve our communication and collaboration practices, processes, and tools. “
Who would you prefer to work for? Who would you pour your blood, sweat and tears out for? Who would you work for, for 10yrs?
An employer who trusts you or watches you whilst you work? Suuuuper creepy.
The 5 Whys will show you the way
The Hubble team has been working behind the scenes for the past 12 months, on evolving our platform for the new world of work (which will launch soon!).
Throughout that time, we’ve been trying to understand where the future of where we work is heading through constant dialogue with hundreds of business leaders. It’s been a fascinating journey so far, with many businesses on opposite ends of the spectrum of where they see themselves working.
Frequently, it’s been tough to understand the reasons why people believe what they believe, so I have been employing the 5 Whys. I learnt the 5 Whys technique, from my time at Entrepreneur First as a method for root cause analysis.
The method is part of the Toyota Production System, developed by Sakichi Toyoda, a Japanese inventor and industrialist and the technique became an integral part of the Lean Startup philosophy.
“The basis of Toyota’s scientific approach is to ask why five times whenever we find a problem … By repeating why five times, the nature of the problem as well as its solution becomes clear.“ Taiichi Ohno
Example below:
So, now when I come across business leaders with different viewpoints on whether they will go back to the office, I try and employ the same technique - with no judgement.
Beware, asking “why” 5 times, can be super annoying for the other person and you can really kill a conversation if you get your tone wrong. My technique has become softer over the years, after annoying some folks early on in my startup journey.
It’s been pretty illuminating to see that quite often, when I am speaking to other business leaders, the 5 Dysfunctions of a team are being revealed almost in order by the 5 Whys.
Example:
“We’re all going back to the office immediately after lockdown”
“Interesting, how come?”
“Our productivity has been terrible for the past 12 months. People are clearly not working hard enough.”
“What makes you say that"?”
“Lots of our projects have been late, and the quality has been worse than before.”
“What do you think caused that?
“People just not taking responsibility for what they need to do. No-one’s talking to each other.”
“That’s tough. Why do you think that is?
“Our new Marketing Director is not very approachable and I just don’t think people are being vocal when something’s not right. So they just don’t bother.”
“Hmmmm. What makes you say that'?“
“I went for a walk with our sales director and she was saying that some of the marketing team have been Slacking her, complaining about him. So I’m not too sure about him.”
What started off as a bold statement about going back to the office full-time, was really the response to a problem of trust, gossip and poor communication within the team.
Yes, perhaps, going back to the office and being able to literally watch the marketing team’s dynamics will help her diagnose whether her Marketing Director is performing well or not. But, this is a problem of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability and inattention to results. The 5 dysfunctions of a team.
I’m not going to illustrate an example of the opposite conversation I have had because I probably don’t need to. Whilst not many turn around and literally say “because I trust my team” after the fifth why, you can usually hear a similar sentiment to the Spotify statement above.
The data is compelling
Whilst I’m all for sharing personal and professional experiences as a foundation for opinion - I nearly always look to data to calibrate what I’m thinking.
An excellent report by Great Place to Work, summarised that the UK’s Best Workplaces have trust scores of around 85% compared to 55% at the average workplace.
Also, pre-Covid 75% of the Best Workplaces offered working from home as an option, compared to just 22% of average workplaces.
Deloitte, in a report about workplace belonging, summarised that full-trust relationships in organisations could increase job performance by 56%.
I mean it’s obvious when you think about it, right? But trust is hard. We struggle to even trust our friends and family sometimes, let alone people that we work with.
Let’s not learn the wrong lesson here
Look, I’m not saying that businesses only want office space because they don’t trust their teams.
I’m also not saying that all employees are altruistic and faultless, and employers are overbearing and neurotic for no reason.
And I’m definitely not holier than thou, saying my own organisation has no issues at all. Far from it. We’ve had plenty and still have more to sort out. It’s an ongoing challenge.
As someone who cares and thinks a lot about how our environments shape us, I am a true believer that we can increase our impact, productivity and happiness by putting ourselves in the right work environments.
The office is quite frequently the best place for that. In fact, our research indicates that sometimes the office or the workplace is the best place to foster trust, communication, culture and collaboration. All building blocks towards high performing teams, driving towards a collective outcome.
My point is that there are some organisations out there, who live by outdated management techniques such as presenteeism and facetime. They measure hours over output. The root cause of their desire to do this, quite often, appears to be lack of trust.
Their need to go back to the office is driven not by what amazing things they can achieve collectively as an organisation, but to assuage their own anxieties about what everyone else is up to. Places where promotions are won by sucking up to the boss, not by doing great work; where “working from home” is still code for “doing f-all” and office politics run rife.
Using the office to enhance productivity, not destroy it
It’s often assumed that I, like many others in the office industry, would be a huge advocate for “viva la office” vs “the office is dead.”
The truth is, I don’t fall on either side; the debate shouldn’t be binary.
My view is that every organisation, team and individual will have their own unique set of circumstances which determine the best configuration of working from the office, home or anywhere in-between. And this configuration should be able to flex as things change as - whether that’s people, projects or even seasons (why not work on a rooftop in the summer months?!).
Some organisations are looking forward to going back full-time office work, others have felt the benefit of being fully remote and many are looking towards a hybrid approach.
Whichever configuration organisations choose, I would compel them to ask themselves whether they are choosing that configuration to enhance productivity or destroy it? If their teams feel that the return to the office is for surveillance and presenteeism, then the initiative will be counterproductive and leaders will get less out of their teams than before.
If the trust is already there, and going back to the office (however many days a week) is used to do better work and build better bonds then it will be a net positive for everyone.
As more and more businesses follow the example of Spotify, the war for talent will be won by those companies that have put in the work to create trust within their organisations.
This was true before Covid.
Post-Covid, after a year long WFH experiment, employees will feel even more empowered to ask “why don’t you trust me?”