I often introduce teams to the notion of ‘inflicting help’, those well-meaning activities which deprive the recipient of an opportunity to learn, or practice. For example, if I always helpfully facilitate retrospectives for a team, they will miss the experience of running their own. If someone helpfully handles all the build work for the team, ‘because they are best at it’ the team will not learn how to deploy for themselves. This notion is of particular importance for agile and DevOps teams, as they cross skill, and share responsibility.
I also believe it is possible to ‘inflict trust’, that is give so much trust that it is detrimental to the recipient. This idea may not be popular, how can it be plausible when the agile and DevOps communities talk so much about building trust?
Consider the following example. It is day one for a new employee in the fictional organisation Great Western Widgets. At Great Western Widgets we deploy a few times each day, and we chase the Continuous Delivery Nirvana of making deployments boring. The new employee makes some code changes and is then is asked to deploy to production, following steps in the build book. “You’ll be fine, I trust you” says the senior engineer. Except things don’t go fine; the load balancer doesn’t route traffic away from the node that’s being deployed to, alerts don’t fire and eventually end users report multiple errors.
The new start suffers a massive dent in their confidence. They are now far less trusting of their mentors, and apprehensive about battling a reputation for being ‘the one who broke production on their first day’.
In this instance the senior engineer was too trusting of the new start, they inflicted trust. In other, more severe situations, you may recognise this lack of support as a form of negligence. As leaders and mentors that’s something we should be wary of. In addition to good intentions, it is often convenient (time wise or politically) to use the mantra of ‘high trust’ to expect others to do things, perhaps even things we wouldn’t risk doing ourselves. Being ready to support, and if necessary rescue, those we are placing trust in is critical to creating an environment of safety, in which people are willing to challenge themselves. It is this feeling of safety that makes teams comfortable taking calculated risks, going fast and innovating. These traits are often seen to lead to high individual and team performance, not to mention a more pleasant work environment.
When encouraging learning and granting more trust, it’s often useful to consider various likely outcomes, if, when and how to step in. Doing the thing for the person is not an option, being ready, and available, to avert to disaster is mandatory.
One example is helping a child learn to carry a tray of drinks to the table, at some point they are going to just have to get on and try it, unless their parents want to follow them to every dining hall, café and pub they visit in their lifetime. So in that moment some steps are taken, almost without thinking; don’t use the best China, don’t over load the tray (you’ve just reduced the consequences of failure) and be ready with a tissue and some wise words if anything does spill (to encourage reflection and restore confidence). The converse, ‘inflicting trust’ would be to load up the tray with boiling hot drinks, fragile, expensive crockery put them into the hands of the wide eyed child and say “Off you go, I trust you”.
The key question to ask yourself is: When you suggest someone tries something for the first time, which style are you using, supporting or inflicting trust?