Working in many startups I’ve noticed trends for environments that seem to succeed versus those that don’t. One thing that stands out to me is enabling and keeping high trust.

By this I mean - there exists high trust already within the teams / company and this trust is maintained by the people continually, every day. This means that if trust is at some point broken - then reparations are made; things are acknowledged; and hopefully it doesn’t happen again in the same way or at all.

This really begs the question: What is trust? What does it mean to function in a high trust environment? Particularly in the workplace?

In our personal lives it’s a bit easier to really pinpoint what high trust is. It’s different for everyone and each couple / each relationship. It’s a little bit intangible and yet extraordinarily clear, it’s often implicit… though I think relationships are best when we try to be explicit on wants/needs/requirements. It’s often unspoken rules, values we hold in that relationship and “expectations” that the things we believe in will happen.

For example, take a couple of friends called Sally and Anne. On Saturday mornings, they tend to meet for brunch and they alternate between paying. Nobody specifically said “we should split our brunches” but at some point they internally agreed it between them. Take the same pair but another example - the telling and non-telling of secrets: We all have those friends who are “gossips” or “can’t keep a secret” - Why do we call such behaviour out so much? Well, almost certainly because at some point we shared a secret with the implicit (or sometimes even explicit) agreement that what we talk about is, indeed, “secret” - it’s private to us and nobody else should know about it, yet the friend in question acted contrary to our wants. So Sally and Anne might tell each other secrets, they might confide in each other and they would reasonably expect that what they say isn’t shared or used against them.

Sally and Anne are a good example of a high trust relationship because they agree on and maintain values that they hold in common between them such as “one should share costs of food equally”, “one should keep what’s said private”, “one should respect others privacy and personal space”. The ones I just listed are common but all relationships are different and for Sally and Anne, values they hold might also include things like “one should help friends/family with children and pets”, “one should call once a day to check on others”, “one should reply to others messages asap”. Sometimes we have a clash with friends or family and the cause may be a difference in these values, for example feeling of frustrated that your close friend always lets you pay for her lunch and a more nuanced one being your parents (who may have strong cultural differences) being hurt that you don’t call them every day. When we differ in what we believe should be the modus operandi, it can foster a lack of trust along with unhelpful thoughts like “maybe my friend is mooching off me” or “my son isn’t calling me because he doesn’t care”.

Having values clashing can definitely lower trust and damage relationships and it seems really nuanced as to why this is so. Perhaps because shared values protect us - After all, it’s no good going hunter-gathering if your friend decides 100% of the spoils are theirs when you’ve finished a hard day of labour. Or perhaps because breaking one value / expectation leads us to expect the breaking of more and therefore leads to the idea of not being able to rely on someone just like “I expect my son to call daily” -> “my son doesn’t call” may lead to -> “my son can’t be relied on to take me to my hospital appointment”.

In these personal relationships, mediating a conflict in how two people operate is easy when the parties are good communicators and both open / cognizant of what they expect. We also tend to adapt more to what our friends, family and loved ones believe by changing our own values to correspond to theirs.

In a work environment I don’t think I’ve really seen this happening.

I think we tend to assume many things at the workplace. For myself, I’ve certainly got a long list of values that in the background, I sort of expect people to hold up to. This will be things like “pay attention to how your work influences others”, “reply as soon as you can, even if to say you’ll reply in x hours/days”, “always make reviews easier for others”, “explain from first principles”, “assume people are distracted/tired instead of malicious”, “help others through the organisation when there’s an opportunity to”, “solve the problems with a birds eye view (future proofing) not a badger view (solving the immediate problem in front of you)”, “do your best to create something great”, “treat people equally”, as a few out of many.

Just like a good relationship where you suddenly gel with someone, a good working environment is one where the people there already share the same values as you. The fact that they act in a way that agrees with what you both believe and expect leads to being able to predict their actions, to trust their actions and to work alongside them seamlessly because of that. I don’t think it’s the case that the match needs to be 100% or even 90% - but something either close by OR the malleability to adjust your own values to align with a new company is certainly something that leads to better organisational alignment in my experience. I for one have slowly changed my company values over time, with an increasing belief that every team has their own unique skill set which is amazing and invaluable.

I call out the previous point on “valuing other teams / treating people equally” because it’s one of the typical areas in which companies don’t have this value in place, or at least not successfully. It’s far too common for one team to look down on another (one I’ve seen before is people looking down on Sales teams, or Backend teams looking down on Analysts, or Full Stack teams looking down on anyone who isn’t full stack). The times I have noticed such negative sentiments always end up present in small actions or words which suggest it to be the case and often in turn, this results in delayed communication or bad communication, not learning what the other team does, taking advantage of resources, elevating your own work instead of celebrating others and many more, all of which result in loss of trust. By contrast the organisations which all uphold the same values are more harmonious.

I think it’s easy to suggest that it’s the values itself which are important for high trust environments but I think that might be a red herring. In my examples I’ve looked at small scale / startup companies which often don’t consist of many people to the extent that everyone knows everyone else’s names and to the extent that they may take things personally when something goes south: for these companies it might indeed be the case that particular sets of values lead to higher success. However for large enterprise companies, process can take over the place of many values you might hold: Instead of (truly) believing that every team needs to be treated equally, you may instead prioritise teams with specific Project Managers assessing their relative projects and output rate, and a formal aspect takes over many of the “courtesy” behaviours that exist in a startup. Teams will have SLAs that they’re held to by PMs and organisational resources are divvied up by impartial bodies instead of a quick agreement between the 2-3 teams who want a particular thing.

It seems likely that large organisations don’t in fact function in environments of high trust and I would be immensely interested to hear arguments on this case. My experience of enterprise companies (having worked with them rather than directly in them) is that the sheer volume of people has meant that processes must replace trust-ful behaviour, acting as the replacement oil for lubricating the company gears. This to me also reflects in what can be a slower pace of development and the often slower ability to pivot or re-orientate.