What makes a great relationship?
I have been reflecting a lot about this. If companies spent more time helping their employees improve their work relationships, business would be much better. Instead, most obsess with the end results and forget everything else.
One perspective that resonates a lot with me is that great relationships depend on two essential ingredients: respect and trust.
Respect comes from shared values, like seeing the world in a similar light. It usually comes with a strong sense of admiration, of holding one another in high regard. If I respect you, we can disagree, but I will always take you seriously.
Trust comes out of respect and you earn it over time. Trust means you believe I mean what I say. Trust means I'm dependable. There's a great quote from Jeff Weiner that says "Consistency over time is trust." That's a great way to put it.
When I joined my last company to lead their Engineering team, I knew that the quality of my performance would depend on the quality of my relationships. I passed the interviews and got the job, so I hoped the respect was there. But trust was a different story. No one knew me. And to all the engineers, I was coming in to be their boss. I didn't assume trust by default. I would have to to earn it.
The first thing I did was put together a Manager README and send it out a couple of weeks in advance. This was like my instructions manual, how to "operate me". The team could know what to expect from me, and what I expected from them, how best to communicate with me, my principles and known biases.
In my first talk in front of them, I wanted to make sure they felt I was to be one of them and that I would have their back. From day one, I did my best to always make it clear why I was doing something, what my intentions were and then following through. Every time I did that on something meaningful to a team member, I gained trust. And every time I failed the team in some way (and fail I did sometimes), I knew I was eroding some of the trust I had.
Yet, I knew that to build trust I had to give trust. As human beings we have an incredible automatic capacity to resonate. The best way I could ever get the team's trust was to trust them in the first place. I spent time understanding each individual's capacity and potential to empower them in taking responsibilities at the edges. As Tom DeMarco writes in Slack, "always give trust slightly in advance of demonstrated trustworthiness".
Trust doesn’t get built in a day, it gets built daily. One important way is through the act of giving and receiving feedback. This is rarely leveraged and often underestimated. Matt Mochary, one of the best CEO coaches in Silicon Valley, says of feedback:
"Take it, acknowledge it, and then if you accept it, declare what action you'll take. It makes others feel they can actually change the way you interact with them. Trust gets created when real discomfort initially gets shared and then resolved."
It doesn’t matter what role you're playing at work. Seek that real discomfort, share it openly and kindly. And then work together to resolve it. The best time to do that is in the beginning of a relationship. The second best time is now.
3 Articles
✍️ Thriving on the Technical Leadership Path
Although I wish more companies would take technical career tracks more seriously, it also takes individuals carving out their own path and showing the value of these roles. Keavy McMinn's clear-eyed, first-person perspective is a practical example of what excellent technical leadership looks like.
✍️ We Don’t Sell Saddles Here
Slack's co-founder Stewart Butterfield wrote this memo to the Slack team almost 7 years ago. He understood early that to achieve the so-called "product-market fit", you must define not the product, but the market itself. Hence, success for his company was about selling a chat app, but the extent to which they helped create better teams. This should be required reading for any leader attempting to set a vision for their team.
✍️ Lazy Leadership
I love this deceptively titled piece. It has inspired me to not be apologetic about the things I'm not that good at. Instead, I do all I can to surround myself with people that are better than I am at it. Andrew Wilkinson also shows us that there's a world of a difference between working on your business (or team) instead of in it.
2 Podcasts
🎧 The Trust Battery: My Interview with Shopify Founder Tobi Lütke
Some podcast episodes I listen to multiple times. This is one of them. Tobi Lütke is one of those public figures I have learnt the most from. In this wide-ranging conversation, he dispenses great insight about hiring great talent outside the main tech hubs, processes, trust, decision-making, learning, and having the right kind of mindset.
🎧 Sheila Heen: Decoding Difficult Conversations
We are hard-wired to avoid conflict, yet that's often how strong and enduring relationships get forged. Conflict, however, creates difficult conversations that most of us aren't yet equipped to handle well. In this podcast, Sheila Heen deconstructs the three layers of every difficult conversation, and it was particularly mind-blowing to me the role that identity plays in them.
1 Book 📚
If there's one certainty about startups is that they're uncertain. Yet we go about our days pretending things are a lot simpler than they are. This gets us in all kinds of trouble.
We love saying platitudes like "change is the only constant" and "have a growth mindset". We use these as ways to rally and inspire the troops. I have definitely uttered my fair share of those. I mean, my Twitter account is little more than a stream of pithy (some would say vapid) statements I write as reminders to myself. But, to our own detriment, we forget how reality is actually complex and nuanced.
In Unlocking Leadership Mindtraps: How to Thrive in Complexity, Jennifer Garvey Berger illuminates what she calls "mindtraps" — cognitive biases, neurological quirks, and adaptive responses to a simple world that doesn't exist anymore. There are five of these traps: we crave simple stories, we have a need to be right, we long for agreement, we desire control and we get shackled by our egos. All this goes way back in our past as a species.
My biggest realisation from reading this book is that we, human beings, are not to blame for falling into these traps. We cannot rewire our ancient brain circuitry. The irony is that these same brains created incredible technological advance, and infinite possibility. We kind of made our own beds. We made the world complex, but we didn't figure out how to upgrade the wetware sloshing around inside our skulls.
We are, however, to blame if we don't act on this knowledge. As I wrote in the introduction, companies should spend a lot more time helping people work well together. The answer, unfortunately, is almost always "process". But that's another manifestation of our desire to control and our inability to sit with what’s uncomfortable. Helping people understand their own quirks, and what to do about them, has real leverage. It’s like a little brain firmware update. I have no problem imagining a world where teams are twice more productive (and fulfilled) by having better relationships, being better listeners, and being able to discuss more ideas.
I am a firm believer that avoiding doing stupid things is way more helpful than trying to be really smart. Falling into these mindtraps is in the category of things we should avoid for our own good — and that of our teams and businesses. Otherwise, we will keep obsessively trying to accelerate while the handbrake is on.
🙌🏽 Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed it, and until next week.
👉 You can follow me on Twitter @prla