Employing Differences

Employing Differences, Episode 158: How much do I trust these people?

May 23, 2023 Karen Gimnig & Paul Tevis
Employing Differences
Employing Differences, Episode 158: How much do I trust these people?
Show Notes Transcript

"When we look at both the costs of not trusting and the risks associated with trusting, are we picking the path that gives us the right amount of efficiency?"

Paul & Karen talk about risk, trust, and working together.

Paul: [00:00:06] Welcome to Employing Differences, a conversation about exploring the collaborative space between individuals.

Karen: [00:00:12] I'm Karen Gimnig.

Paul: [00:00:14] And I'm Paul Tevis.

Karen: [00:00:16] Each episode, we start with a question and see where it takes us. This week's question is, "How much do I trust these people?"

Paul: [00:00:24] Karen and I have both been doing some work recently in the land of policy. When we get together as groups, we sometimes find it useful to write down how it is that we intend to work together. The way that the policies and procedures that we're going to use in our interactions. And we have both been reminded of how much that intersects with the idea of trust that oftentimes we've talked about before.

Paul: [00:00:47] Sometimes we try to operate without trust. And so we create policies that don't require us to trust. Sometimes we try to make decisions that without having trust, and yet at the same time, we find ourselves in the space that, you know, oftentimes these policies work a lot better if we actually trust each other. But one of the things we want to explore a little bit here today is the question of how much do we need to have a policy, how much do we need to use a policy, and how much can we simply rely on trust? And how do we know how much do we trust these people that we're working with?

Karen: [00:01:20] Yeah, I think it's a really interesting question and one that we often don't ask. You know, a lot of times I'll be with groups and the concept of, well, could we be sued for that comes up. And the answer is always yes. My lawyer husband says there's always only one answer to that question Could you be sued? Yes, You can be sued for anything.

Karen: [00:01:40] But to me, the more interesting question is, is that the frame of mind I want to be in? Is there a meaningful risk that is, you know, important enough to me that I'm going to pay whatever it costs to avoid the lawsuit? I thought for about two seconds about this one when I got a trampoline for my kids and my friends, kids were going to come play on the trampoline and somebody could get hurt. And if they got hurt, could we get sued? And yes, you could be sued for anything.

Karen: [00:02:07] But was I willing to not let my kids have all the benefits of a trampoline? Or not let their friends have that benefit when they came over? Wasn't worth it to me. Because I trusted my friends enough that if their kid got injured on my trampoline, I didn't think they were going to take my house. And I was willing to play those odds.

Karen: [00:02:25] And so that's a really basic one. But it comes up in business and organisational settings around how much policy do we have, how much procedure do we follow, how strictly do we stick to those policies and procedures over time?

Karen: [00:02:42] From the perspective of if we follow them, then we know who's liable, we know who's responsible, we know who we can hold accountable even in financial or legal kinds of ways. And that can be really useful if we don't trust each other. We have insurance policies for that reason. If we run into each other on the road, we're strangers. We don't have trust. We have laws and policies that take care of who's going to pay for what. But in working relationships, we probably want something different than that, just stranger protection.

Karen: [00:03:16] And so, what do we want to think about as we consider what do we need to write down? What detail do we need to agree to? How much does this wording actually matter and how much do we really want our working relationships to be defined by? We trust each other.

Paul: [00:03:34] A mentor of mine liked to say that trust is a substitute for communication. That when we trust other people, we actually don't have to communicate about things as frequently or as often. And it's really it allows us to work more effectively, more efficiently. We can get things done faster when we trust.

Paul: [00:03:51] That said, I want to come back to something that you mentioned, which is this idea of risk. Because trust is about risk. It is about "Is this a risk that I'm willing to take?" And I think it's useful to think about what are the things that might be at risk. And, and then, as you point out, does having a policy procedure actually mitigate that risk? Because very often it doesn't. And I, I tend to think about when I'm working in that realm of trust, you know, do I trust this person or I don't. Right. That that's a really nuanced subject.

Paul: [00:04:22] That trust, first of all, isn't binary, and it's very contextual. A friend of mine likes to say that she trusts her husband with her life, but not her laundry. Because she knows his character. She knows that he means the best, but he might not necessarily have the right skill, you know, to do the things that need to be done.

Paul: [00:04:40] And so I think that when we're thinking about how much do I trust these people, I think it's like, what's the relevant thing that we're worried about happening? And given what we know about these people, how much of a risk is there and is that a risk that we have tolerance for? So I think that's really the question for me behind that.

Karen: [00:05:01] It shows up a lot as groups are forming. Are we going to write down our mission statement and our vision with just perfect language and write down policies and record everything and have really good minutes and follow Robert's rules and approve the minutes. I mean, there's a lot of time that goes into those things.

Karen: [00:05:20] And the thinking being, "Well, we're just getting started and we want to do it right and we want to contract clearly and cleanly." And if doing that is the thing that means you contract clearly and cleanly. Yeah, that's probably a good idea.

Karen: [00:05:33] On the other hand, if you're a fairly small group and the initial investment is relatively small, so the risk is fairly small. Or you've known each other for 20 or 30 years, and you have a great deal of trust in each other, it may be that a verbal contract, which is way faster and easier, is plenty. And we just say, you know, "Hey, this is how we're going to do it and we get started" and we don't really need to formalise it.

Karen: [00:05:58] And in fact, that we keep that sense of trust and camaraderie and flow and all of that going better because we didn't stop and try to make something formal that was flowing along really just great in a less formal way.

Paul: [00:06:16] Mm hmm. Yeah, because there's always a cost, to not trusting. There is that you pay the tax for going "Well, we need to actually write this down and make a procedure and wordsmith it and craft it" and things like that. And it's like, again, it is a sort of risk mitigation technique. But I'm in an interesting case with that right now.

Paul: [00:06:32] In my company, basically three years ago, my business partner and I started our company together largely on a handshake. Like, we had some few basic agreements about things, but we largely, we'd known each other for more than a decade. If we looked at like what we were actually putting on the line, it was a relative- like, we weren't actually putting that much at risk. That we were really assured ourselves by, by creating more policies and procedures around. And we just kind of proceeded with that.

Paul: [00:06:59] And now fast forward, like we understand how we work together a lot better. And we've actually brought on another business partner and we kind of said, you know, now's probably the right time to actually write some of this down, to create some policies and some procedures around this.

Paul: [00:07:13] But all we've really done is documented what we'd already been doing. And what we're finding the value of doing that is actually that we can trust each other a little more because we're actually being explicit about what's been implicit before. We're actually- we know that this has been working, but now we're actually laying out what we've actually been doing.

Paul: [00:07:34] And that's the piece where I actually think that there's a degree to which the stopping and working things out can increase trust because it ensures that we're actually talking about the same thing. It doesn't protect us from a liability standpoint necessarily, or things like that. Like, 'Can we be sued? Absolutely.' But it's like, but we now actually have greater confidence that we agree on this thing. So we actually can trust each other a bit more.

Paul: [00:07:58] And so I think there's a sweet spot there in the articulation of how we're going to work together where you don't want to do none because you can get surprised by it. And you know, even if you trust each other, you can still have things that happen and blow up because you thought you agreed, but you didn't. But obviously there's a point where if you do too much, now you're not getting value out of doing it.

Karen: [00:08:20] Yeah, I think a lot of times I see groups get tangled up in the wording of a document. Or the one of the things that I see happen a lot in the community groups that I work with is that there are people who want absolute transparency. And what that means to them is that any time any team meets that, that team will publish the minutes and so that everybody in the community can see them and that they'll have minutes that describe everything that they've done.

Karen: [00:08:47] And I like to point out to them that the more that they require in terms of administrative tasks, the less certain members of the community are going to be willing to participate in teams and not wishing to make undue generalizations.

Karen: [00:09:03] I find it's very often the case that the people who are interested, for example, in working on the maintenance team that are going to go out with a screwdrivers and hammers and fix everything, they aren't very interested in taking detailed minutes. And so if you tell them that in order to be on the maintenance team, you have to make sure that the minutes are taken and, you know, they get approved and you follow Robert's rules and things like that. And pretty soon you're not going to have a maintenance team because they just want to work on a place of trust; that the community thinks they're doing their best, and they're doing a good job, and they're keeping things working well from a physical plant kind of perspective. And the folks who are inclined to trust less and are fearful for whatever reason of not having enough transparency, kind of have to work with that a little bit and figure out what makes sense.

Karen: [00:09:50] And so there's a lot and I think there's a lot that comes from business backgrounds or academic backgrounds that people come in with where those routines are just usual. And it's of course that's how we do it.

Karen: [00:10:02] And I ask people to slow down and think about what is the actual impact of making that as a policy, particularly if you actually tried to enforce the policy, by the way. Which could be a different thing, But what's the actual impact of that sort of thing? And what's actually useful? Because, you know, you want the maintenance team probably out of some kind of log of what they're doing because they want to be organized about it. They probably need something to do the work well. 

Karen: [00:10:30] But is, you know, minutes of a meeting the thing that's actually useful in that case, I wouldn't want to specify that for them. So that piece about if I can relax and trust that people are in good grace and good intention, and are both, for the most part, I'm surrounded by smart, intelligent, caring people.

Karen: [00:10:50] And if they do something differently than I would have, or even that I wouldn't have liked, it's probably not disastrous. The odds that by trusting something absolutely terrible is going to happen to me pretty small because I'm surrounded by people who are good people.

Paul: [00:11:09] And if you're not, no amount of policy and procedure is going to protect you. That's the other thing, right? I think it's whenever we have that choice of saying, you know, I'm going to trust these people or not.

Paul: [00:11:21] I think it's important to think about what's the cost of not trusting them and what are my alternatives. Like, "Is there anything better?" Like, I might have some concerns about what might happen by trusting somebody to go, "Oh, yeah, no problem. I can just rewire that for you." Right? And I know nothing about that. And so I might go, "Yeah, sounds great." Or I might go, "I don't know anything about that. And I don't know that you know anything about it either." So ahh! Like, I really need to think about 'What is it that's making me nervous about this'? 'Why do I not want to trust you?' And then can we put that on the table? All right.

Paul: [00:11:54] Trust is absolutely one of those things that lives in the space between. And so recognising in ourselves, when we're feeling like we don't want to trust folks or we can't trust them. Being able to get in touch with where that's coming from, but also looking at what can we do about that? The, the no-trust situation presented the policies and procedures as an alternative. But like, does that actually help? Does that move things forward at all? And just looking at the cost of not trusting and what what we might do instead.

Karen: [00:12:27] Yeah. So I think where we're going here today is really this thought about how does trust interplay with policies, procedures, administrative structures, those kinds of things. And to just be thoughtful about how much trust do we have and what does that tell us about the relative risk that we might be able to tolerate within a group?

Karen: [00:12:51] And what does it cost us to behave as though we don't trust; whether we do or not, to insist on writing things down to make sure the wording on a policy is just right. To ask for transparency in a particular way that's comfortable, those kinds of things. What are the costs of those?

Karen: [00:13:11] And when we look at both the costs of not trusting and the risks associated with trusting, are we picking the path that gives us the right amount of efficiency? The right amount of relationship depth, frankly. And the right amount of safety and risk minimization, whatever we need to do with that. So that we land in the place that really works well for us and for our groups.

Paul: [00:13:37] That's going to do it for us today. Until next time, I'm Paul Tevis.

Karen: [00:13:41] And I'm Karen Gimnig. And this has been Employing Differences.