Trust vs. Camaraderie

I was watching the movie Goodfellas a few nights ago, and a scene towards the end got me thinking. In the scene, Ray Liotta's character Henry is on bail after being busted by federal agents. He's having lunch with Robert De Niro's character Jimmy. Henry is trying to figure out if Jimmy's going to have him killed, and Jimmy is wondering if Henry is going to turn him over to the feds. Meanwhile, by all outward appearances, they're having a perfectly normal, friendly conversation.

Obviously this is an extreme example of the difference between camaraderie and trust. In particular, it shows that a relationship can have a high degree of camaraderie and a low degree of trust. Why is this important? Because teams that have camaraderie but not trust often don't realize they have a problem.

Why do we care about trust?

Trust is a wonderful thing. When a team has a high level of trust, they don't waste time with political maneuvering. They don't hold back suggestions that can help the team improve. Team members aren't afraid to ask for help, and are willing to help each other. They spend time collaborating to create solutions rather than arguing over details. When a team has a high level of trust, goals of individuals are aligned with goals of the team. There are no distractions. Productivity can soar.

When a team doesn't have trust, it's not a team at all. It's a group of individuals, each with seperate and often conflicting goals. This wastes time and reduces productivity.

Why do so many teams have camaraderie but not trust?

Building camaraderie is easy. Socializing is easier for some than for others, but if you put a bunch of people in a room together all day, day after day, soon enough they will be comfortable chatting and joking around. Building camaraderie does not require commitment.

Building trust does. It requires commitment both from individuals, and from the organization. Individuals must remember to give their co-workers the benefit of the doubt, always. Beware of these detrimental trains of thought (in yourself, not your co-workers). In particular point number 2:

In a study conducted by Sukhwinder Shergill and colleagues at University College London, pairs of volunteers were connected to a device that allowed each of them to exert pressure on the other volunteer’s fingers. The researcher began by exerting a fixed amount of pressure on the first volunteer’s finger. The first volunteer was then asked to exert the same amount of pressure on the second volunteer’s finger. The second volunteer was then asked to exert the same amount of pressure on the first volunteer’s finger, and so on. Although volunteers tried to respond with equal force, they typically responded with about 40 percent more force than they had just experienced. Each time a volunteer was touched, he touched back harder, which led the other volunteer to touch back even harder. Is this why parties in a conflict invariably think they are both "right"?

Remember, your perception colors everything you experience. If you only give someone as much benefit of the doubt as you think they're giving you, you'll end up in a downward spiral. Trust begets trust; lack of trust begets lack of trust. So trust people more than you think they deserve. Usually you won't be disappointed.

The hard part

As I mentioned, building trust also requires commitment from the organization. A culture of trust cannot co-exist with a culture of blame. People can only trust each other when they are not worried about who is trying to shift future potential blame to them, and who they can shift it to.

Unfortunately, a culture of blame is the standard in most large organizations. When something goes wrong, the first question in such organizations is "Who screwed up?". This is not a useful question, because discovering the answer doesn't help us understand why the problem happened, and how we can prevent it in the future. It doesn't help the organization improve*.

A better question is "What can we learn from this mistake?". This is a useful question, because discovering the answer practically forces the enterprise to improve. It makes us think about the aspects of the system that allowed the problem to occur, and what changes we can make to make it harder for the problem to occur again. It treats a mistake as a learning oppertunity. More importantly, by removing the emphasis on blame, it makes a culture of trust possible.



* Not only that, it's also a trick question, because it implies there is an individual source of the problem. Most problems in a complex enterprise do not have an individual source. Assuming they do is useless at best, and more often downright harmful.