Rule #7- Build Trust
On finding flow, cancelling the trust fall and common goals.
Welcome to the Happy Medium newsletter, this is part seven of a ten part series sharing the Happy Medium 10 Rules for Staying Lean (and Stress Free).
Trust - Today!
Culture
Understand before you act, but do act
Switching costs you
Rule #7: Build Trust
A team you can trust is an efficient team. Trust is built by consistency and competency. Build and earn trust.
As important as all the items on this list are, there is one that delivers the most efficiency, but is impossible to fake; trust.
Not only does it make work life more enjoyable, but trust is the single biggest factor in running an efficient team. When there is trust, you spent less time explaining and more time doing.
Whenever I work with a new studio, I often ask what makes a project great and what makes a project terrible.
The responses often look very similar. The best projects round up to “The client trusted us to deliver our best work, the collaboration resulted in an outcome we are all very proud of”.
The worst projects all look like “So many rounds of feedback, inflexible or unreasonable deadlines and a client that didn’t know what they wanted and didn’t trust us to get them there”.
A lack of trust breeds unnecessary beaucracy as people aim to create a sense of safety through approvals and documentation. Instead of a quick phone call to clear up confusion, you end up in email wars ensuring ‘everything is documented’.
People become defensive on both sides, no longer working towards a common goal but instead protecting their patch. The designer protecting their work from dilution, the client protecting their investment. There are now two goals instead of one.
Trust is important internally too. The quiet knowledge that your team has your back, everyone is doing their part and you’re focused on a common goal is what makes work enjoyable. Knowing that you can trust your manager to act in your best interests with sensitive information, knowing that you won’t be thrown under the bus at a meeting you aren’t attending and knowing that any upstream work that hits your desk will be good quality - this is what trust feels like.
But trust is not built by doing trust falls at a corporate retreat. You can’t just send a client a welcome email demanding they must now trust you.
Trust cannot be faked, it needs to be earned. This happens slowly in the micro interactions we have everyday.
Trust is built by consistency and competency, so what does this look like?
Doing what you say, on time - Having a plan and sticking to it, if things change they should change infrequently and there should be clear communication about why.
Doing a reliably good job each time - this is where our frameworks and processes help, a clear standard of ‘what good looks like’ helps everyone stay on track. This also helps clients recommend you.
Respond well to difficult information - As people gain trust, they will feel comfortable giving their true thoughts. This is ultimately a good thing as it’s honest (and the truth is the best place to start if you want to fix something), but it can be confronting. Reacting defensively in the moment, or worse, talking to others in a non-constructive way about what they have shared, can guarantee that person won’t share anything with you again.
Be good at your job and empower others to be good at theirs too - Trust is not just about good intentions and nice feelings, it’s knowing that you can leave a task with someone and they will do a good job. Set clear standards and give good, direct feedback. Hold yourself to those same standards - you don’t have to know how to do their job, but be just as good at your job as you expect them to be. Aim for right first time.
Things just flow when you’re working with people you trust because you’re united in a common goal - you don’t waste time ruminating on other’s motivations.
It doesn’t happen overnight but it’s well worth building towards, not just for good efficiency, but for having good days.
Further reading:
An open dissection of breaking and re-building trust in an organisation -
For my Org Psych friends - Corporate structure can empower (or disempower) trust, particularly in large or regulated organisations. This is a really fascinating insight into how the Buurtzorg model is designed to empower small teams of healthcare workers to self manage.
The most persistent myth in modern organisational thinking is that self-management somehow reduces the inherent complexity of the work. This is wishful thinking dressed up as philosophy or some mantra “self-management good, hierarchy bad”.
Buurtzorg works not because its work is simple, but because the organisational systems are designed to absorb the complexity without pushing it into a managerial accountability hierarchy.
This is part seven of a ten part series on how to be lean, if you aren’t already subscribed, you know what to do. Missed a week? You can catch up here and get a preview of what’s coming up!
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Trust really is the foundation of a strong team. Reading this made me reflect on how, in my own career, trust had to flow in both directions — trusting the people who reported to me, and also trusting the people I reported to.
In my last role, that upward trust slowly eroded. Over time, I no longer felt confident that leadership had my back or my team’s back. And without that, it became harder for me to support and protect the people I was leading fully. The inconsistency that followed created a real weight — not just for me, but for the entire team.
Eventually, that breakdown of trust played a big role in my decision to step away from a career I once loved. Looking back, it felt meaningful that when I left, my entire team chose to leave as well.
Thank you for naming this so clearly. It shines a light on something often hard to articulate, but deeply felt in workplace environments.