TRUST My Precious!
If you ask me what is my #1 value, I will answer without hesitation: TRUST. Obviously, ten years at Salesforce greatly shaped my view. After all, TRUST is Salesforce's #1 value. We walk the talk...
If you ask me what is my #1 value, I will answer without hesitation: TRUST. Obviously, ten years at Salesforce greatly shaped my view. After all, TRUST is Salesforce's #1 value. And we walk the talk by practicing it every day with our peers and Trailblazers across all our interactions.
Over the years, I reached the conclusion that you cannot be successful at work or in your personal life without a commitment to trust. Trust is also a fundamental trait of highly performant companies. This Harvard research from Paul J. Zach (2017) states that:
Compared with people at low-trust companies, people at high-trust companies report:74% less stress,106% more energy at work,50% higher productivity,13% fewer sick days,76% more engagement, 29% more satisfaction with their lives,40% less burnout.
On the flip side, failing to develop and nurture a trusted culture can be detrimental to your business. In this article, Haiilo, a company in the business of developing trust and great company cultures, mentions interesting statistics:
one in three people doesn’t trust their employer
trust decreases from top positions to the lowest
employees trust their peers more than the CEOs and upper-level executives
a negative working atmosphere leads employees to withhold their talents, creativity, energy and passion
poor employee communication is the reason number one for poor collaboration
Tony Simons wrote an insightful article in the Harvard Business Review on the The High Cost Of Lost Trust. Here's my favorites quotes (emphasis added):
The notion that behavioral integrity is important should be common sense: Align your words and actions in a way employees see. Keep your promises. Don’t “spin”.
The label of “hypocrite” is stickier than its opposite. It takes evidence of only a single lie for a manager to be branded a “liar. In contrast, a person has to tell a whole lot of truth to qualify as a “straight shooter.
While he was rallying the team with “customers first” pronouncements, he was also promising shareholders that he’d cut department budgets by 15%. Is this hypocrisy or astute management of different stakeholders? It depends on whom you ask.
Rather than talking about the concept of Trust, I find it more efficient to explore behaviors that build trust. I came up with a non-exhaustive list of trust behaviors that are common in the day to day life of a product manager or an employee.
As you go through this list, I encourage to take a moment to see if this is relevant to you, if there are other trust behaviors you practice, and more important, if there are new behaviors you would like to include in your daily life.
Trust between ICs/Managers/Peers
We all report to a manager unless you are your own boss -and married men know who is their boss at home, I do 🙂
Typical trust behaviors from a manager:
I trust my manager has my best interest in mind
I trust my manager has my back if needed
I trust my manager is genuinely interested in my health and happiness at work
I trust my manager is not shy about promoting my good work in public
I trust my manager supports my career growth and openly discusses about it
I trust my manager is a private confident even for those hard topics
I trust my manager is not afraid of giving me honest feedback to improve
I trust my manager does not shy away from hard discussions
If like me you are on the other side of the fence, it goes as this:
I trust my report to talk openly in our 1:1
I trust my report to execute on his assignments
I trust my report to bring up difficult topic in our 1:1
I trust my report to deliver on what he promised
I trust my report will not leave our team or company without discussing it with me
The biggest success are built upon high performing team with peers embracing trust behaviors:
I trust my peers are here to win together
I trust my peers are open to new ideas and constructive dialogue
I trust my peers will have my back if needed
I trust my peers are not afraid of having hard discussions and disagreeing with me
I trust my peers welcome hard and honest feedback
I trust my peers understand we work in a trusted setting and that they will not be judged for their opinion
Through those examples, you can see thatTrust is bi-directional between two individuals or a group of individuals. The combination of those positive behaviors fosters trust within your team and company.
Let's do an experiment. Remove a random trust behavior from the list above and think about the anti-behavior. It is painful, right? Then remove another one, and another one. Suddenly what looked to be a perfect workplace is becoming a toxic place to live in.
Company Trust
More than the excitement that comes from the job, most people want to work for a company where they feel good. For me, this translates in a job I am excited to go to every morning and where I take pleasure interacting with colleagues.
The top performing companies worked hard at building strong trust principles with employees:
My company will do good to me and treat me well
My company does not see me just as an entry in the HR system and a line item in the balance sheet
My company value me as an individual
My company offers me good benefits (salary, bonus, healthcare)
My company promotes equality (equality of pay, equal opportunity for hiring or career promotion)
My company promotes a healthy work environment
My company invest in its people (training, personal development)
My company promotes healthy life/work balance
It is hard for companies to check all those boxes, and when they do, the rewards are instant. Very low attrition, happy and proud employees willing to go the extra mile to make their company successful; positive energy that transpires in customer interactions, and more.
The recent tech layoffs are a stark reminders that, despite the best intentions of the company's leadership, an economic recession can force large employees to layoff their staff. This breaks all the trust behaviors listed above, whether you are directly impacted or not. What is lost is extremely hard to regain because our brain is wired to remember the one negative instance and tend to forget all the good behaviors over time.
Customer Trust
Gaining and keeping your customer is paramount to long-term success. As we build products we want to see adopted by our customers, it is important to put ourself in the shoes of those customers and how they think about this trusted relationship
I trust this company is not just about getting my $$$
I trust this company is genuinely vested into my success
I trust this company to tell me the truth about the benefits of its product in pre-sales cycle
I trust this company to charge me a fair price for the use of their product
I trust this company to run my business critical operations
I trust this company to provide 99.99% uptime
I trust this company with the privacy of my own customers data
I trust this company to promptly fix product issues that impact my business
I trust this company to help me extract the maximum value of their product
I trust this company to listen to my needs and partner towards a solution
I trust this company to be transparent in its communication, with both good and bad news
I trust this company to deliver on what they promised
That's a lot to be accountable for. Though perfection does not exist, living trust is first about recognizing your core values, identifying those key moments when you get put to test, and showing for the job.
Recently, one of our customer reached out to us with a product enhancement critical to their project. The solution had no benefits to our installed base. We engaged, brainstormed internally, and identified a simple API change that would unlock the customer and enhance a bit our core service. While we did not meet the customer's needs 100%, we showed up and took this trusted relationship seriously.
Partner Trust
In B2B software, we work regularly with SIs and ISVs who are critical to our success. Partners often bet their business on software vendors. From the partner point of view, trust has a specific meaning:
I trust this company has a genuine interest to partner with me
I trust this company seeks a win-win that can help grow both our businesses
I trust the company to offer a fair pricing model
I trust the company's leadership words on the opportunity; those are more than mere promises
From the other side, the trust expectations looks like this:
I trust the partner to be interested in developing a genuine partnership with us
I trust the partner to possess the expertise and offering he says he does
I trust the partner to commit to his side of the bargain
I trust the partner to deliver quality solutions
I trust the partner to represent us in competitive deals
Similar to previous relationships, the software vendor/partner relationship can be very uneven at times due to the extreme leverage of one player over the other. It is therefore tempting to use it to your advantage. Unfortunately, those short-term tactics do nothing to build lasting strategic relationship. They also distract you from your business goals.
Family Trust
Interestingly, the trust concept impacts our everyday's life, including our interactions with family, friends, and even strangers; here's some randomly picked trust behaviors in my family:
I trust my kids to do the best at school
I trust teachers to teach my kids
I trust my kids to do their homework
I trust my kids to respect their time limit on PC/tablets/Internet -ok, we do monitor it a bit
I trust my boy to get back from school safely on his bike
I trust my husband to prepare good meals -my wife married well!
I trust PG&E to deliver gas to my house so that I can heat my house and cook
I trust my paycheck will be wired onto my bank account
I trust the postman to deliver mail
I trust the Amazon driver to deliver my goods on time
I trust the Bay Area Bart transportation system to be on time and take me to work without delays (controversial I know)
I trust my local grocery store to be open and have the items I need in stock
I trust my doctor to always provide me the best advice
Funny how a typical family day is full of trusted behaviors; trust is everywhere and therefore fundamental to the way we live our lives.
TRUST My Precious!
In Lord of the Rings, Gollum refers to the ring as "my precious" or "precious". The ring gives special powers to its owner: an extended life beyond natural limits. One can draw a similar analogy with Trust. It gives its owner super powers with lasting effects. Loose it and you life can turn up side down.
Love this post! Stakeholder trust is huge one, too. Gaining that can get us awesome product managers the run way to do the things we want to do in bigger orgs.