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Trust

Engineering for the Rest of Us by Sarah Drasner​

Trust is the basis for a few things:

  • Hearing each other out: Sometimes you need to have healty debates to come up with the best plan and outcome.
  • Finding the human in the mistakes: We are at our jobs for a large percentage of our waking hours. There's zero change that you'll make no mistakes with all that time and effort. If a group trusts one another, it recovers from a mistake, acknoledges it, learns, and moves on. People don't belittle or weaponize mistakes. People can show himility about the mistake and learn from it rathen than become defensive or pass the blame.
  • Creativity: It's impossible to be innovating when you feel like every moment you are being judged.
  • Make our jobs more enjoyable: A working environment where we can be ourselves, make jokes and be within a trusted group can help us feel includeded [4]

Some qualities that a trusting team has:

  • They feel comfortable raising issues directly with each other.
  • They share personal details with each other, and admit when they are having a bad day - to other team members, this is not big deal.
  • They can debate with one another to find good outcomes.
  • They are flexible with one another's needs. [5]

The culture of your team is only as strong as the worst behavior it tolerates. It's your job to speak up. [9]

Joy of Agility by Joshua Kerievsky​

  • Delivering value safely, quickly and easily is key. Drive out fear to enable agility for everyone, especially new hires.
  • Avoid saying one thing while doing another; this action sends a mixed message. Humans believe that if someone's actions don't match their words, that behavior will happen again. Mixed messages multiply mistrust.
  • Psychological safety can be essential to high-performing teams.
  • CLEAR acronym for meetings:
    • Curious, caring and open-minded
    • Listen to one another
    • Encourage everyone to contribute
    • Avoid dominating or interrupting
    • Repeat and review people's points
  • Women who are routinely interrupted eventually remain silent, and silence is deadly when it comes to fixing problems, adding value and innovating. A tremendous amount of value is lost when people are constantly interrupted. It leads to churn, as those people eventually seek new employment.
  • Foster a blameless culture that treats people with dignity adn respect. Use failures as opportunities to lean and improve.
  • It's the manager's job to drive out fear. Trust and safety are essential for high performance. Research has found that a high-trust environment produces chemicals in our brains that result in greater engagement and retention, lower stress, and more joy. -High-performing teams operate within a psychologically safe climate that allows people to be comfortable discussing and reporting errors, explore ways to remove errors, and continuously improve.

Creativity, Inc. by Ed Catmul and Wallace​

  • Our people have good intentions. To think you can control or prevent random problems by making an example of someone is naive and wrongheaded. Moreover, if you say it is important to let the people you work with solve their own problems, then you must behave like you mean it. Drill down, certainly, to make sure everyone understands how important it is that we strive to avoid such problems in the future. But always - always - walk your talk.