Why low levels of trust leads to low levels of performance.

A theme I find myself coming back to over and over again is the three-way relationship between Autonomy, Accountability, and Alignment and how those interact to produce high-performing teams. In case I need to define the terms:

• Autonomy: The team or individual has some agency over how they accomplish their goals. They are not micro-managed and are given some decision-making authority.
• Accountability: The team or individual takes responsibility for the outcomes. They celebrate their wins and learn from their mistakes when they miss the mark without pointing fingers or scapegoating their own team members or other people in the organization.
• Alignment: The team or individual understands the goals clearly and shares this understanding with their peers and stakeholders.

These three aspects form a Triangle of success, and the thing that provides it structural integrity; its load bearing element; is: trust.

The failure mode: Learned Helplessness

Before getting into each leg of the triangle, it's worth looking into what happens when one or more sides weaken.

When teams don't have healthy levels of all three aspects of this Triangle, they stop thinking for themselves and wait to be told what to do because that's the safest course of action. This presents as rigidity and unresponsiveness. They become unwilling or unable to adapt or compromise because there is too much inherent risk. They will seek permission before taking any steps and will resist beneficial changes that have any aspect of uncertainty in them for fear of being punished if things don't work out.

If people don't believe they'll be supported, even in failure, they'll stop trying. They'll outsource the risk to the higher-ups by letting them make all the decisions and hand them out in the form of dictums. This is a mode that doesn't scale up well and one that is all but guaranteed to result in a slower team producing suboptimal results.

Once a team is in this state, it's hard to get them out. This is learned behaviour that came from many interactions over time. The way to turn it around is to reverse the process. Give the team some agency over something that should be in their control, celebrate wins, learn from failures, and repeat this as many times as you can while trying to increase the impact potential of each iteration. When you have good outcomes, share them with other leaders in the org.

Autonomy provides velocity and momentum

Removing nitpicky oversight and second-guessing reduces escalations and creates focus and efficiency. An individual or team empowered to make decisions that further their goals without having to constantly convince the bosses that they're making the right decisions is going to be faster than one who is constantly being second-guessed or overruled. Additionally, people will work harder on a solution of their own devising than one that was imposed upon them that they don't necessarily agree with or believe in, so you typically will get better results as well as faster results if you give people freedom to run.

To put it another way, if the job is cleaning the dishes, I don't care if you use a sponge, a brush, or a cloth as long as the dishes are clean. Use whatever works. In software terms, I've worked with people who like a fully-tricked-out IDE with all kinds of autocomplete and magic refactoring tools (and now AI code generation) and people who use minimal Vim setups. This is something where I would never dictate a choice, even though I might have a strong opinion about what I would use. Whatever gets the job done!

When trust is low, people stop using the autonomy they have for the good of the project and instead use it to make sure they're not the ones who will get the blame if things go wrong. In low-trust, highly regimented environments people will use their agency and initiative not for the good of the project, but to manipulate the system in their favour.

When trust is high, people don't have to dedicate brain cycles to staying out of trouble or appeasing the bosses and can devote their energies to the team's goals instead. Your job is to give them the room to innovate on the work the business expects from them, not to innovate on ways to work around you.

Alignment provides direction without micromanagement

I used to dislike the term 'alignment', thinking it was an unnecessary business-speak substitute for 'agreement'. Now I think there's a subtle but important difference that becomes clear when you realize that alignment is what supports and enables autonomy. It really is about direction; everyone pointing their efforts at a common target. It's the shared understanding of why you're doing what you're doing. Too little of it and you get entropy. People can be working hard and doing great work but if it's not directed it quickly becomes chaotic. It's broader and less specific than simple agreement and takes more effort to create and sustain.

Alignment is more of a process than an event. You have to treat it as a living conversation and make tweaks and corrections as you go. At the same time, focusing on it too much as a manager can make it indistinguishable from 'control'. I like to think of myself as a participant in the alignment process first and foremost. Yes, you do have a responsibility to create and maintain that alignment, but don't force it. When done right there should be push and pull from all participants with the general feeling that everyone is seeking both to be understood and to understand.

Alignment is what turns autonomy into progress and ensures it aimed at the right target.

Accountability provides mass and stability

Without accountability, things can drift. The 'mass' of accountability provides stability to the team and keeps them focused on the results. If they know they will have to stand up in front of their stakeholders and peers and report out the results of their efforts, they're going to do their best to achieve those results in a way they can be proud of.

Of the three aspects of the Triangle, this one is the hardest for people who tend to default to low-trust to get right. It does not mean that "successes are rewarded and failures are punished". Good, healthy accountability is self-imposed. People want to uphold the standards, they want to achieve the objectives, and when they miss the mark they are forthcoming about that fact and take steps to learn from their mistakes. They are not sent to the Gulag or ordered to "commit seppuku by sunset tomorrow" but neither should they simply shrug their shoulders and move on after something goes wrong.

If one of your SaaS vendors has a production incident that impacts you, think about the kind of accountability you'd want to see in from them in a post-incident report. A good one probably has:

• A reasonably detailed description of what went wrong.
• What the contributing factors were.
• What the remediation steps were.
• What is being done to prevent it happening again.

What you would probably not want to see is something like "Ricky the intern pushed the wrong button so we fired him. Problem solved." That's blame, not accountability and it would harm rather than increase my trust of that vendor. Even a less extreme example that feels evasive or tries to deflect responsibility onto the vendor's vendors or something can erode trust.

It should be the same for teams. Nothing goes right 100% of the time and no strictures or processes you put in place can guarantee good outcomes. With that in mind it becomes super important to have a clear understanding of how you'll behave when things miss the mark.

Admittedly, this is tricky if you aren't wired to be trusting by default. Not everyone is and our human cognitive biases tend to steer us towards wanting to place blame. But, it's worth trying to build that muscle because the payoffs can be enormous. Plenty has been written on how to build a blameless culture and modern adaptations of the idea do take into account our natural tendencies and reframe the idea of blameless culture as 'blame-aware'.

Building the Triangle

A few practical ideas for building your team's Triangle of Trust.

Default to trust - adjust when proven wrong

I try to go into every new team situation with the following axioms:

• The people I'm working with are skilled adults.
• They are intrinsically motivated to do their best work.
• When we don't get the outcomes we want, look at the system first, individuals second.

Occasionally I'm wrong about some aspect of that and I need to make adjustments, but as a starting point it's worked really well for me. When I do need to make adjustments I also try to work back to a state where those things are true again. If someone needs upskilling or they're maybe in the wrong role, make the necessary moves and revisit your assessment after a little while. Be careful about over-correcting so that you don't get into learned helplessness territory.

Regularly assess your Triangle

• Are people getting aligned and staying aligned?
• Are they accepting the autonomy you're trying to give them or do you need to give it in smaller doses?
• Are they holding each other accountable in healthy ways or pointing fingers?
  And most importantly:
• Are we getting the outcomes we want?

If your team does a retrospective process, this is a good opportunity to work some of these assessments into your schedule and have the team participate. You don't have to keep this your secret rubric, you can be straight up with your team and tell them you're trying to build this Triangle and get them involved in helping.

If you don't have a retrospective process, this is a good reason to introduce one!

If you don't invest in building it in both directions, your team will become an inefficient sclerotic mass that requires constant input and energy from you to move.

Projects run on plans, and teams run on trust.

"Old railway bridges" by radkuch.13 is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .