The No Trust Environment

Team,

Lately I’ve been publishing on trust.

• How to build it by giving agency and autonomy.
• How to deal with a micromanager, because people micromanage because of low trust.
• How to increase transparency on your team.

In this passage, I want to take a step back and explore what a no-trust environment looks like and provide some starter ideas on how we can fix the situation both as an employee and as a manager. Let’s dig in.

Briefly, What is Trust?

Trust is the decision to make yourself vulnerable to another’s free will. It’s a wager that, based on how one has acted in the past, another can expect an outcome of them. Trust is a moral recognition. It invites responsibility.

“I see you as capable of honoring this.”

Some examples that come to mind from fiction I’ve been reading…

• Red Rising with Cassius and Darrow.
• Stormlight Archive with Adolin and Kaladin (Bridge Boy).

Trust is a release of control. Trust is the foundation of our shared reality. Money works because we trust it. Language works because we trust meaning is shared and aligned. Jason Lauritsen and Joe Gerstandt beautifully described trust as social gravity (Lauritsen and Gerstandt, 2012). We can’t see it, but all relationships are under its influence.

Symptomatology of Low Trust

A no- or low-trust environment isn’t hot, per se, it’s cold.

Communication Quiets

• People are filtered and say what is safe, not necessarily true.
• Real feedback becomes rare.
• Concerns are kept to oneself.
• Meetings are performatively productive.
• The topics are surface level and do not dig into the important material.

Blame Replaces Ownership

• Events happen and people ask, “Whose fault is this?”
• Mistakes are met with training and scrutiny.
• In the Blame Cycle, MISTAKES lead to BLAME leads to FEAR leads to COVER-UPS leads to MORE BLAME.

Coordination, Not Collaboration

• “I did my part,” instead of, “Let’s finish this together.”
• Knowledge is hoarded and gate-kept like a finite and competitive resource.
• Cross-functional work is laboriously slow and lacks momentum.

No Risks Are Taken

• Remember the blame cycle?
• When mistakes and failures are codified into the organizational memory, people become resistant to try anything new.
• Experimentation and iteration dry up.
• Without a psychological safety basis to make mistakes, innovation halts.

Decisions Become Political

• Instead of conversations happening in the open, they happen behind closed doors.
• They happen before “the decision meeting.”
• Side conversations and maneuvering become the norm for pushing an agenda.
• Trying to do the right thing, or anything, feels like 3-D chess.

Burnout Develops

• Operating in a low-trust environment requires paying a high cognitive price.
• Instead of thinking about work, one has to decode subtext, guard themselves, and double-check motives.
• I liken the cognitive load to when Google Chrome came out and took up so much RAM that your computer couldn’t do anything else.

Personal Clues

What does it look like on a more personal level?

Defensiveness

• When there are active blame cycles in the workplace and the question is “Who done it?” not “How do we fix it?” defensiveness is preemptive.
• People keep receipts.

Hypervigilance

• You are on the lookout for who’s around and saying what, when.
• You are constantly editing, trimming, and withholding your words and ideas.
• Hands and feet are fidgety.

Tightness

• Shoulders and neck are raised and tight.
• Your jaw could be set.
• Your stomach is unsettled.
• You are present, sure, but not relaxed.

Loneliness

• You are in a meeting with your entire department and you feel alone.
• You feel unseen.
• There may be small rituals, handshakes, or nods, but it feels like you have gloves on.

Dissociative

• You are numb at work.
• The work isn’t exciting and the vision isn’t inspiring.
• When people ask about your work, you change the topic or else get sucked back into the melancholy.
• You care that your job is done, not that it’s good.
• Your bar is “good enough I won’t get asked about it.”

Fatigued

• You feel more tired from work than you should.
• Your evenings become a dissociative blur as you try to recoup enough energy to make it to the next day of work.
• The mornings feel like sleepwalking and you’re being tractor-beamed to work by the anxiety of being noticed for being late.

These are also feelings of a toxic work environment, which is almost always a work environment with no trust.

The Secondary Effects Matter

Lack of trust doesn’t game-over a team on its own, but the secondary effects will. A sunburn only hurts after the fact. Sugar gives quick bursts but imparts metabolic strain. Overwatering plants silently suffocates them. Not bringing up problems for fear of blame will stunt growth. Burnout and lack of innovation will halt progress. Let’s explore the facts.

Organizational Silence

Morrison and Milliken describe organizational silence as a barrier to change and development (Morrison and Milliken, 2000). Widespread withholding of issues and potential problems cripples teams.

Learning Stops

Failure is the best teacher. Period. In a psychologically unsafe environment, learning cycles are absent. A study of 51 work teams in the manufacturing sector showed how learning comes from psychological safety, or trust, not efficacy (Edmondson, 1999). Therefore, just because a team is good at executing work, it doesn’t mean you have trust or that you’re learning.

Transaction Cost

Low trust makes every single relationship-based transaction more contract-like. This results in more checking, more rework, more escalation, and friction. Zaheer wrote about the transaction cost of trust and specifically how trust affects the performance of inter-organizational exchange (Zaheer, 1998). Low trust is an asteroid field.

High Turnover

Talent exodus cripples teams. Replacing employees costs 50% to 200% of their annual salary. We’ve also seen the viral posts about how people don’t quit jobs, they quit bosses. When good people leave, they take their knowledge, their network, and their impact on the culture with them. Turn-over is multicausal, but lack of trust is the most proven and cited reason in the scientific literature.

Health Cost

Burnout, absenteeism, healthcare costs, lowered productivity, and tense exchanges create a “walking while wounded” workforce. No-trust environments are toxic environments. Jeffery Pfeffer wrote a short and powerful article in 2018 called “Dying for a Paycheck” (Pfeffer, 2018). We sacrifice our health to work in these environments.

What do you do as an employee?

Prioritize safety.

You don’t need to speak up all the time, but make sure people are working safely. You don’t need permission to ensure safety. OSHA and NIOSH are full of support for you. If you can summon the courage to stand up for one thing, stand up for everyone making it home alive and in the same number of pieces they showed up in.

Start Finding Alternatives

• Put less energy into your toxic workplace and pick up a side hustle if you can.
• Sharpen your resume and start looking for jobs.
• Calculate your monthly spend so you know your cost to live.
• Don’t be ashamed to take less in a job to ensure your health and survival.
• Activate your network and ask if people know about openings or have referrals.

Find Identity Outside of Work

Low-trust environments tell us the two lies that eat at our souls: “I am not enough” and “I do not belong.” The truth is that you are enough, and you do belong.

• Write down a list of the things that make you happy and you enjoy doing.
• Fight tooth and nail to do the things you love.
• Read books, listen to music, and touch grass.
• Call your mom and your friends from years ago.

For what it’s worth, seeing a psychiatrist or licensed therapist is one of the best things you can do for yourself to survive and overcome these situations. Sobriety, therapy, and going outside have given me the strength to be there for myself in ways I couldn’t years ago.

If you are a manager in a low-trust environment…

Good news! You can change things.

Create a Microcosm of Trust

Within your team or project, change the paradigm. You can shield your team from the worst of it and create a job for them where they can show up and enjoy working with you, a trusting manager.

TLDR: Give your team autonomy and agency to do things they are both good at and enjoy.

Back them up with resources and support. Be transparent and lead with values of integrity, ownership, and conscientiousness.

Be the Voice of Reason

As a manager, you’ve been put in that position to serve those around you. You’re at the decision table. You can manage up. You can initiate projects and control resources. You can express openly to your leadership what’s going on and ask for accountability.

Help Your Team Leave

If someone is having a hard time in the environment, don’t make it worse for them by making it harder to leave. Leverage your network and take what you know about their strengths to find a better spot for them. If you have a plant in your house that needs more sunlight, move it.

Pause Work

Safety pauses are a wonderful tool. Let everyone know they have the right to pause work at any time if things smell weird or aren’t adding up. Encourage your team to pause and make sure people go home safe.

Set Boundaries and Swim Lanes

You can create a boundary with your boss about what is in your agency and what is in theirs. Power and boundaries are invisible things that people will respect if you, yourself, believe that they should be respected.

• Create a boundary with your boss that your team is allowed to innovate as long as key deadlines are met.
• Create a boundary that communication to your team goes through you.
• Create a boundary that other teams should respect the working autonomy of your team.

In Summary

When trust is abundant, it’s smooth sailing, but when trust is gone, there is an abrading quiet in an organization. If you are an employee in a low-trust environment, you have options. If you are a manager in a low-trust environment, you have even more options on how you can begin to build the trust your team will need to succeed.

The most important step is always the next one. -Dan

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p.s. – Photos shown are all scenes from some of my favorite runs this year. Enjoy!

p.s.p.s. – If you need EQ training and cultural assessments we’ve got you covered. http://www.kestryledge.com

References

Edmondson, Amy. “Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams.” Administrative Science Quarterly 44, no. 2 (1999): 350-83.

Lauritsen, Jason, and Joe Gerstandt. Social Gravity: Harnessing the Natural Laws of Relationships. New York: Talent Anarchy Productions, 2012.

Morrison, Elizabeth Wolfe, and Frances J. Milliken. “Organizational Silence: A Barrier to Change and Development in a Pluralistic World.” Academy of Management Review 25, no. 4 (2000): 706-25.

Pfeffer, Jeffrey. Dying for a Paycheck: How Modern Management Harms Employee Health and Company Performance—and What We Can Do After It. New York: HarperBusiness, 2018.

Zaheer, Akbar, Bill McEvily, and Vincenzo Perrone. “Does Trust Matter? Exploring the Effects of Interorganizational and Interpersonal Trust on Performance.” Organization Science 9, no. 2 (1998): 141-59.