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In the first chapter of her book, Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building, Claire Hughes Johnson (of Stripe and Google) gives us the Cliffs Notes: It’s all about building trust. 

“If you’re not self-aware, how can others trust your feedback about their own abilities and behaviors? If you’re not direct with your opinions and judgments, how will people know where they stand and trust that you have their interests in mind? If you’re not clear on whether you’re managing to a defined goal or charting an entirely new vision as you build a company, how will your team trust that you’re leading them to success? And if you don’t maintain a foundation of consistency and stability, how will those around you know what to expect?” (28)

But as we’ve said before, simple doesn’t necessarily equate to easy – there’s nuance to what it takes to build relationships based on trust (which requires knowing yourself and knowing the people around you), how to navigate vulnerability (which requires risk), how to translate that trust into an effective workplace (which requires systems), and how to lead with and through trust (which requires instilling trust into the DNA of an organization).

Brent Beshore and David Cover talked with Claire for a recent episode of Outside Insights. Their conversation covered topics from the power and pitfalls of transparency to the balance between empathy and getting things done to truly understanding and knowing how to leverage your own skills and abilities and those of the people around you. Underlying all of these topics is the idea of trust. The following are excerpts from their conversation on how to grow as a manager from a foundation of trust – and there are no shortcuts to trust-based relationships. 

The Value of Vulnerability

Vulnerability is the basis of and catalyst for meaningful relationships. But it takes time and tremendous care. 

Vulnerability is not a thing that feels like you really scale easily. One of my own personal leadership principles… is ‘Say the thing you think you cannot say.’ That’s a form of vulnerability, which is taking some risks with sharing the thing that's truly happening, truly on your mind. Sometimes that's business related, sometimes it's personal. But I think it's about risk taking. And you do have to do work. You can't just insert, ‘Hey, tell me something scary that you faced yesterday’... into a conversation. You have to build the relationship.

And, ultimately, building the relationship, saying what you think, and prioritizing open, caring communication can feel like a risk. That’s because it is. But taking that risk (sharing vulnerabilities) is the only way to build the trust necessary to strengthen the team.

The Transparency Trap

Transparency sounds great. In theory.

In tech companies, [transparency] is a hallowed value because it does build trust and it shows respect… I really confronted that at Stripe… [which] had a really strong belief in transparency… All of the emails that were sent in the company were copied to email lists so that every employee could read everything that was being communicated.

Take a minute and process that. It was still a small company… When I joined it was at 160 people, and so anytime I sent a note to a customer, for example, I was either direct copying or blind copying a list of all customer emails from this team. Then anyone in the company, any engineer could go and subscribe to that Google group and read all the emails. And many did by the way.

There was this sort of interesting feedback culture where you'd get this random email from someone you'd never met in the company, especially if you were new and they would say, “Hey, by the way, you told the customer this thing about the product and you're slightly wrong.

Let me tell you how it actually works.” On the one hand, it was great for very rapid learning; it was like a group learning and feedback culture. But sometimes [it could be] scary and intimidating and created some real fear in the sales team in particular…

I clarified with the founders, “Hey, is this actually a cultural underpinning? That everything must be transparent?” [It turns out that their commitment to] transparency was in the interest of people having the knowledge they need to do the best work. And I said, “Okay, well that's a little different than saying we're gonna tell everyone everything all the time.”

Openness is negotiable, honesty is not. Telling everyone everything all the time can seem like a cheat code for building trust throughout an organization, but it’s actually a recipe for confusion, resentment, anxiety, and information overload.

Determining the level of transparency that’s appropriate in your organization is highly personal and contextual – there’s no magic formula for who needs to know what, when, and to what level of detail. The key is to set expectations about what information is communicated and how – and to have a process for determining how to balance the benefits of transparency with the responsibilities you have to the organization and your colleagues.

The System Keeps the Score

We don’t often think of it this way, but trust and systems also go hand in hand. Systems – done correctly – set expectations and constitute a foundation of trust. Systems give you stability and a consistent frame of reference. They align people in the same direction and allow them to execute and innovate from a known place. And, systems and processes, where appropriate, mean that everyone has a shared basis for what constitutes success.

You know what winning looks like overall. You know the rules of the game. You wouldn't put people on a playing field without the right equipment and without a sense of the rules or how to keep score. People will get hurt. 

So you want to get yourself in a frame where people understand, these are the constraints we're in, this is what the score should look like at the end. Then, when you adapt, when your plan is wrong, keeping those things at the front and center is really important.

The thing is that, if you have great systems that do this work in building trust and setting the table right, you probably don’t notice them. But consider your experiences with bad, clunky, or overly complex systems. Confusion and anxiety reign, there’s no real accountability or understanding of how to get to the goal (or even who’s holding the measuring stick). 

Systems build trust and further relationships by making sure everyone knows the rules and objectives, and that they’re equipped with the right resources. With these basic structures in place, everyone has the opportunity to meet on equal terms and as their best selves. 

Leading with Trust

There’s no silver bullet for trust building. Demanding vulnerability without laying the foundations of a relationship and showing vulnerability yourself is more likely to get people to shut down than to open up. Instituting transparency as a blanket policy falls far short of thinking deeply about what honesty means and how communications affect the well-being of the organization and the people around you. And relying on a case-by-case mentality as you grow undercuts the expectations and order that come from systems and processes. 

Building trust is a question of patience and of empathy. Taking the time to bring people with you takes time. But intentionally investing time in trust and relationships is the springboard to building strong and resilient teams – not just collections of individuals. 

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