Tech Leadership

Move at the speed of trust

"Move at the speed of trust. Focus on critical connections more than critical mass—build the resilience by building the relationships." - Adrienne Maree Brown

What is trust?

Trust, according to my go-to source of truth, The Thin Book of Trust by Charles Feltman, is built on four elements:

sincerity (you're honest)
reliability (you're dependable)
competent (you can get the job done)
caring (you have other's interests in mind)

Trust in Engineering

Imagine a world of engineering work where we moved at the speed of trust. To do that, we would have to understand and be guided by:

the trust we have with our customers
the trust we had within our teams
the trust senior leadership had in their teams
the trust our investors have in our senior leadership

What would the behaviours with our tribes, customer support and product teams look like? Would we interact any differently? How would we coach and share knowledge?

Focus on critical connections

Who are your critical connections? What is critical for you? For them? Might they be:

Those who have the power to make decisions
Those who unofficially are the decision-makers
Those who decide your performance rating?
Those who dictate time and effort?
Those who hold the purse strings?
Those who listen to you at night when your work has been shit?
Those you hug you when you feel you don't deserve it?

Build the resilience...

Resilience. It's not being super strong. It's having the courage to acknowledge where you are and support yourself as you pick up the pieces.

And having people to support you helps you build that resilience. Those who pair with you and explain the numerous times they screwed up after you deleted a critical container. Or when you screw up a config and have a whole network fail. The people who build you up, tell you to be kind to yourself and support you through their acts of kindness are integral to the delivery of our software.

Move at the speed of trust....