The Beautiful Mess 265: Rebuilding Trust and Breaking Free From Trust Proxies and The Swirl
They look to processes or systems as a quick fix for the lack of trust.
They single out individuals to blame for the situation.
The proxying gets worse when people who distrust each other ALSO lack details about what’s happening (or when the people who work for them lack trust or when things happen that routinely cause flare-ups and disagreements they have to deal with)…
Leaders and managers in this situation are prone to maintaining a politicized (and cordial) stand-off with their peers. Instead of addressing the deeper issues, they too fall into the trap of quick fixes concessions. But they do so with even less information and command of the details, which invariably produces fragile agreements. Worse still, in some cases, they conveniently blame their reports and teams…
Catch yourself when you are looking to proxy a lack of trust. How do you reassess that part of your identity if you self-identify with one side of a debate, a quick-fix process, or singling out an individual?
Some of the content of this piece reminded me of something I wrote in the past here, so I just did a quick search for the word “trust” in the archives and found 114 results.
The post I was looking for is: The Three Paths:
In my experience, I have seen three methods for developing software products: trust, process or misery.
There is also: Henry Gantt (which quotes three other John Cutler (The Beautiful Mess) posts).
Gantt charts are a lagging indicator of dysfunction, specifically a lack of trust within an organization. When used as a planning tool, they’re fine. When used as a tool for “accountability”, they become the proverbial canary in your software coalmine.