I carried a watermelon!

Watermelons all the way down

One of the most critical side effects of a team with a poor atmosphere of trust is what I call “watermelons”.

If you ask an individual, or a team, for a status report, then you want their answer to be accurate. Using the traditional RAYG model of status colours; if the project is delayed or experiencing a blockage, you would want the status report to be red.

If there’s a lot of trust in an organisation, red doesn’t mean “bad” - it means “needs support” or “needs a decision”.

But, when people don’t trust each other, red can mean “bad”. And that drives teams and individuals to do what it takes to hide the red status inside a skin of green, like a watermelon.

An example of a watermelon status might be something like “we only have the tests to finish”. This sounds positive because there’s only one thing left, but in reality if the tests are not finished then there’s no way to know how much of the rest of the work is broken and needs fixing. That’s what the tests are for!

In an atmosphere of trust, this report might look more like “we’ve not got a handle on the tests yet so we can’t give a clear estimate of when this will be done”. When people feel trusted and they trust their leaders, they can afford to be honest because they know they will be spared any consequences like disciplinary action, shame or losing their jobs.

If you are handed a watermelon status by your team, then it doesn’t give you all the information and metrics you need to make accurate business decisions about the work to come. This, in turm, turns your own status report into a watermelon. You’ve put a green thing inside a green skin, but when you cut into it, it’s still soft and red.

A hilarious example of this “chain of watermelons” and its real-world consequences plays out in season 2 of the HBO series Silicon Valley:

Other consequences of missing atmosphere of trust

Watermelons are one of the biggest problems that can be caused by teams being low on trust, but there are many more things to worry about:

• In an untrusting atmosphere, team members are less likely to ask for help when they’re stuck (or have made a mistake), and instead try their hardest to solve their problems without help. Asking for help is a key component of a high-performing team, and teams where people don’t ask for help tend to operate at least an order of magnitude slower than teams where help is given and requested freely. (This is a huge topic and one for a future blog post!)
• When people don’t trust their colleagues, this can lead to a combative workplace, where people are constantly criticising each other’s work or effectiveness, or competing with one another for glory and appreciation. This can lead to people being disengaged from the workplace or not waking up excited to go to work, especially if they don’t trust their leadership. When you think of “combative” workplaces you might think of raised voices and arguments but those are only the most extreme kinds - a workplace can be combative even when everyone is kind and courteous.
• If we don’t trust our teams to do their jobs, then we likely will increase supervision, surveillance or micromanagement. Whilst this might help us get a handle on the actual work being done, it is a massive time-sink and is likely to have a strong negative impact on morale and excitement, which in turn will lead to further distrust in the team.
• When team members fear the consequences of being wrong, they are less likely to take risks. When teams don’t take risks, they tend to fall into stagnant patterns which stifles innovation, both in the team’s outputs and in their ways of working.
• When leaders behave in ways that lower the level of trust, this inevitably leads to rumours and gossip in back channels. When I was a senior leader at a major charity, I had many friends at non-leadership levels and they regularly speculated (usually wrongly) about what was going on when they didn’t hear it or trust it firsthand.
• And, of course, ultimately, low trust is a component of a toxic workplace and if your workplace becomes toxic you will experience high staff turnover, which is usually very expensive.

How to lose someone’s trust

If you’re not actively working at all times to build and maintain an atmosphere of trust, you will lose it.

There are so many things you can do as a leader that will erode trust, but here are a few I’ve witnessed in organisations:

• Lying or hiding information. You’d think this one would be obvious, but you might be surprised how often people feel they need to change the narrative from the truth “for their team’s own good”. Nothing good can ever come of lying to your team!
• Being opaque. If you make a decision that affects a team, they need access to your reasoning. “Show your working”, as exam papers say. If they already trust you, they might not want to read or sit through the detailed explanation, but they still need to know they could if they wanted to. Decisions without transparency foster an atmosphere where staff feel that they and their leaders are on different sides.
• Not following through on commitments. If you say you’ll do something and then you don’t do it, you have broken a verbal agreement. Good thing we have a really useful word in English for when this happens: “sorry”.
• Not taking accountability. Why are leaders usually paid more than the people who report to them? Do you know this? It’s transfer of accountability. You team expects you to back them up and take the flak for them when things go wrong, and if you don’t then you can expect their trust in you to fail. (More on transfer of accountability in a future post!)
• Singling out individuals when mistakes are made. Nothing erodes trust faster than playing the blame game. Remember, when something goes wrong on a team, it’s never the fault of an individual (unless they did it on purpose, I guess) because there are always multiple people involved in everything that gets delivered by a team.
• Acting against someone’s values. This one can be trickier to avoid, because sometimes decisions cannot take into account the personal values of everyone on the team. But being aware of what’s important to each of your team members will go a long way to helping to avoid this one.

And how to gain it

There’s no “one weird trick” to gain people’s trust. Trust is earned through genuine behaviour, openness, honesty and vulnerability. If you cannot be honest with your team, you cannot expect their trust. Or for them to behave in a trustworthy manner.

I do have one pattern I like to follow to get off on the right foot with someone and earn their trust quickly. (Of course, it only works if I am also being genuine, open and honest - it’s not actually a trick and it doesn’t work if you treat it like one.)

The two stages to getting off on the right foot with someone in building trust:

1. Find out something you have in common: Every pair of individuals has something in common. It might be the shared love of a genre of books, or a city you both have happy memories of, or a shared experience of a specific type of marginalisation in the workplace. Talking to someone enough, and in enough depth, that you find the things you have in common is critical to establishing trust with them.
2. Find a problem that specific individual has that you can help with: Once you know something about a person, you will start to hear what challenges they are facing in their work life. Chances are, at least one of them will be something you have relevant skills or experience to assist with. Then do the work to actually assist with that problem. Ideally it would be something that only this person is experiencing, because it helps to make it clear you care about their trust, individually, as a person, not some more nebulous team or division’s trust.

To do this takes work, and it takes being genuinely interested in the people on your team or the stakeholders you are working with as people, not as boxes on an organisation chart with job titles. But I promise you that, if you do it, it will work wonders to increase trust between the two of you.

Is trust the root of all workplace problems?

It’s not. There are plenty of workplace problems that have their roots in other challenges, many of which I plan to explore on this blog and (hint hint hint) in my new email newsletter in the future.

But… is it the root of the most insidious and damaging team problems? I think so. An atmosphere of low trust also - pretty much without exception - makes all the other problems worse.

So, let’s always work together to ensure that the only watermelons in the workplace are in international solidarity or in delicious break-time juice mixes! 🍉