On Positions of Trust - Part II: What About You?

TL;DR: How to know if you’re having the right professional relationships? A few questions to consider.

Your vision vs. your prospects

In the previous post On Positions of Trust - Part I: Reverse Engineering the Rocketman I covered the paradox of Wernher von Braun, whose career seemed to lose only a beat between helping to bomb London at the service of Nazi Germany, and becoming a senior official with the US Government with the end result of the United States reaching space, likely a few years earlier than could have been possible otherwise.

A lot of von Braun’s power was in his consummate, inspired engineering vision - a trait that’s shared by a lot of people, most of whom, however, do not end up being given the resources to fulfill their various visions. I think that the key of how to convert a consummate vision into the kind of career that allows the vision to be realized is through getting into a path of trust-track positions.

And now to the hard part: how can you know if you’re on such a path? How can you direct yourself to get into one?

The relationships you’re establishing

Let us spend a few words to spell out what I’ll focus on.

I’d like to provide you with an analytic tool to analyze a set of assumptions. These assumptions are associated with set of professional interpersonal relationships arising from a certain position/job.

Here I will provide an ego-centric and upwards angle; in other words, what are you giving or getting in the context of specific interpersonal relationships with people who have authority over you. I am not focusing on relationships with your peers, nor on the organization-centric perspective; if you’d like me to chime in on those, drop me a line.

Who is giving you trust?

What is the trust-giver accountable for? Speaking bluntly, if it’s your boss’s job to do X, you’re unlikely to get to do much more than X, even if everybody involved thinks that’s a swell idea.

As organizations scale, the objectives of most middle managers become highly specialized, insular, near-sighted and uninspiring. If your major relationship is with one of those, you’ll be entrusted with the upkeep of somebody’s one-island empire - is that in line with your goals?

What can the trust-giver provide to enable the success of the relationship? Most organizations exhibit major flaws in terms of processes and structure. A very common example is overindulgence in red-tape. Can the trust-giver relax enough of those constraints to enable your success?

Alignment of values: An extremely common value for people to disagree on – should one optimize for advancing major business goals or for personal loyalty?

A senior role is often defined through having direct responsibility for major business goals. However the more senior types an organization attracts, this approach results in anarchy; the major way out would be to select for structure, which is very quickly converted into demanding loyalty and benign optics, at the expense of achievement.

For both sides of a relationship, specializing in personal loyalty is a different skill set from specializing in driving business, requiring different attitudes and often even different people. What do the sides in your case assume?

What is presumed under trust?

Expectations, or having the right answers: A lot of jobs are basically defined in terms of some specific skillsets. SW Engineers? Writing code. Marketing? Deciding on branding. Management? Making roadmap decisions.

A standard critique of the expectations paradigm is that business and success in general does not abide by the arbitrary categories imposed by professional backgrounds; both the marketing person and the SW person have a thing or two about roadmaps, but they will often find themselves marginalized to their respective disciplines.

Agency, or having the right questions: this is the exact dual of expectations – the point at which you’re not “minding your own business”, but rather trying to promote some greater goal. “Allowing agency” is a great thing for a trust-giver to brag about, because talking is easy. However walking the walk is hard - it requires presence of mind to provide a path, attention, resources and willingness to act on feedback, which are always scarce.

Indeed, while performance of specific skills is measurable, the ability to innovate, disrupt or otherwise steer achievement is not measurable - up to the point that multiple managers suffer from the McNamara disease of not even acknowledging its existence.

The above having been said, common wisdom indicates that agency is a highly relevant trait for accomplishment – and therefore - to the extent that one possesses agency – the right hard question to ask would be to ask if that’s genuinely promoting the relationship or just setting one or both of the sides for disappointment.

To Do What - what are the costs involved?

The price of failure: what’s the costliest mistake there’s a tangible chance you’d make? A cloud cost overrun of $1k? A bug that needs 2 people to work for a week? (that’d come up to about $10k)? A million-dollar deal being prevented? A year’s delay in time-to-market?

Expensive failures are obviously something most organizations aggressively hedge against – if they are aware of the possibility for such. Conversely, if such an awareness does not exist, it is a potential setup for rather bad fallout; accordingly, trust implies making sure it’s the former case and not the latter.

The marginal value of the trusted person: consider two worlds - one in which there’s a relationship and another in which there isn’t one - what’s the difference between those worlds?

Parenting comes to mind: a lot of people pinpoint one or both of their parents as role models; heart-breakingly, family dysfunction often arises when parental role models are unavailable. This coincides nicely with upstanding parents typically being the most trusted people in the lives of their children.

Circling back, if your boss does not treat your presence as a major factor on their books, it would be surprising if there is a lot of trust in this situation.

Why you of all people?

Who else can be chosen? If there are multiple similar people out there, a lot of organizations manage risks just by hiring several such people and pooling their work, or to be routinely replacing employees with cheaper/higher performing candidates as soon as there’s even a tiny bit of motivation to do so. Of course, there are also reasons against replacing people rapidly – in particular the cost and the risk required to train a replacement and team spirit, for whatever that’s worth.

There’s inherently more trust required for people who are hard to replace; however, since such people also leave, some managers tend to address the risk of them leaving by all sorts of “bear hugs” or “gilded cages”, which may also end up being deterimental for trust.

Why this person? And most importantly, Why not? You need to remember that there are always pertinent reasons for you not to be trusted. Trusting someone is a choice that is most often made out of necessity. It’s extremely important to articulate that necessity.

For example, “we will trust this person from the outside to lead” is often heard in organizations that failed to produce a leader organically. This means that this person is considered valuable merely by existing, which, while tolerable, might mean that the person is not being set up that well for success.

On the other hand, “we trust this person because the team believes his leadership style” means there’s one growth mechanism: interacting with the team in a mutually reinforcing way. This is an actual positive growth mechanism working in your favor.

Summary

I used to work once for an organization that had a motto of “bringing one’s authentic self”. What transpired is that they assumed a very different kind of a professional persona than what I considered my authentic self; in my case I was trusted to be a product/application engineer with very few expectations on the technical side but a very strong expectation to strap myself into an extremely contrived suit of metrics which nobody bothered to walk me through; I am a systems engineering practitioner and leader who needs a “big picture” and team mentality to succeed. I was happy to put that organization behind me.

Asking the right questions about the trust core of professional relationships provides you with a tool to see if the relationship is progressing - no matter if you’re a high-agency individual whose way of “spread the wings” is through attacking major problems of business and culture, or a hyper focused tinkerer who wants to be trusted with doing one thing exceedingly well.

Applying this framework to corporate environments often indicates that the major trust given to a person is to do good by some underboss, and little more. There’s nothing wrong with that, as long as both sides are into it - to each their own.

Conversely, applying this framework to startups often indicates that even line employees are expected to consider the greater good of the business they’re working with, a situation that’s also not for everybody.

I wanted to conclude this post by a wish of well-being: Regardless of who you are and who you want to be, if you ever need more peace with yourself and the people who trust you - may you find such peace.