Growing trust - even in hard times

As I continue to share my learnings over the past 20 years at Microsoft with you, in today’s blog I want to shift to trust – the invisible current that runs through any group that feels good to be part of - whether a family, organization, or daily working group. For me, trust comes from the combination of transparency, authenticity, safety, care, and doing what you say you’re going to do.   

Being real and authentic is the foundation 

Truth starts with each one of us, and from talking with team members, I believe authenticity can be contagious. In my blog, Bringing my full, authentic self to work, I share the power and value of authenticity to one’s presence and productivity, and the impact of authenticity on others on the team that learn from you. 

Trust grows through transparency 

As I described in my blog, Leading well-informed teams, as team members know more, they can interact with other teams with the most amount of information, resulting in: 

• Efficiency: I don’t spend a lot of time filtering information for my team.   
• Better results: My employees are more prepared to collaborate with other teams, and don’t need layers of management to join their meetings and guide their decisions. They also don’t need the “head” (me) to weigh in on their core work.   
• Equity: Information can be a great equalizer. By sharing information openly, new employees, employees with multiple levels of managers, or perhaps a heads-down introvert are just as equipped to succeed as a highly connected, long-time employee with access to relevant data and information.  

Trust expands through commitments to family, employees, and customers 

Trust transcends personal and work life, whether you promise to show up on time for a kid’s school event or send out a monthly newsletter – and make sure that it really goes out every month vs letting distractions get in the way. When we set expectations, people are watching and dependent on us to follow through. Following through re-affirms and communicates our commitments to our priorities. When you’re predictable, your family, friends, and work colleagues can trust that you’ll do what you’ll say you’ll do. That, in turn, grows their feeling of security and wellbeing.   

Not too long ago, I wrote about the Rhythm of the Business, a published commitment to communicate and connect on a regular basis within your team, or another team or company. My group’s internal Rhythm of the Business includes regularly scheduled management meetings with my top leaders, a monthly newsletter, a weekly personal update, group-level Town Halls, and Ask Me Anything sessions. My team knows that these scheduled commitments will happen no matter what, and if necessary, we deprioritize other activities. If I cannot deliver on the Rhythm of the Business, that means I am over-committed.  

Customer trust is high stakes. We’ve seen companies and brands grow with trust, and crash when they lose it. My CTO team and I work with engineering teams to create trustworthy solutions that customers can use. We use truth as the exit criteria to evaluate and verify project readiness for the next stage. Customer truth, arguably the most important, means we listen to our customers and deeply understand their challenges and needs, so that our solutions reflect customers’ stated needs and business value expectations. Product truth, validating that our products work exactly as intended. Those two are necessary, but not sufficient because we could meet customer needs using a solid product foundation, by working all-nighters and making calls to special engineering teams. A solution’s Delivery truth rounds out the solution truth equation by ensuring solutions are tested and retested to make sure they can be delivered to our customers on time and at quality.  

What I’m learning about keeping trust in tough times 

I think I'll find that many of these career blogs I'm writing to reflect on my 20th anniversary will relate to each other. For example, we earn sponsors by being a trusted employee, team member, contributor. We build a network based on trust. I'm also learning that durable relationships based on trust are built because people trust how you will behave in a variety of circumstances. We are all faced with exciting career periods of growth and increasing resources, and we are also all faced with more tense, uncertain times of caution and constricting resources. It is important that everyone trusts that I will behave the same regardless of the surrounding circumstances. Trusted leaders see their behavior as entirely under their control and behave according to a set of values that persists in good times and hard times. As I continue to grow as a leader, and currently face many factors out of my control from the pandemic to economic uncertainty, my challenge to myself is to be completely consistent and trustworthy in my behaviors while staying flexible, agile, and open to rapidly changing context, challenges, and opportunities.  

20 things I learned in 20 years  

1. Power of the network  
2. Getting sponsors 
3. Growing trust – this one