Why Trust Matters: Increasing Creativity and Innovation at Work

1. Introduction: I'm Nilofer Merchant and I'm the author of the upcoming book Onlyness and also the best-selling author of two other books on collaborative work. Collaborative work is the way in which work gets done today. It's not about someone breaking up work into tiny little bits and for each of us to do our bit, but figuring out how do we actually join together and solve much bigger problems together. The thing that is so important for us to understand is how much the world has changed. Relationships are to this modern work what efficiency was to the last work. So in the social era, what matters are relationships, and what are relationships built on? Trust. So, we need to understand how do we learn to trust ourselves, how do we learn to count on one another, and then why is that so key to creativity and performance for organizations. So, we're going to talk about trust in three pieces. One, just a broad overview of what's going on in the world and why does it matter. Next, how do you think about your role in trust, so how do you become that person that other people can count on and rely on? Then, what does it look like for trust as a leader and why do you need to be able to say the magic words to your team, "I believe in you"? So, I'm super excited about this session and so glad that we can go on this journey together. 2. The Importance of Trust: So, sometimes when I'm trying to explain what trust is to teams, I just think about a really simple example. When my son was young, like when he was three, and four, and five, and they used to play soccer. Although, if you remember, for your own experience you've ever watched kids play soccer, they're not so much playing soccer the way we might as adults. They're mostly doing this thing where they swarm the ball. Then, a couple of weeks later, I happened to be working with some startup entrepreneurs, and I noticed that they were doing effectively the same thing. They were swarming the core idea instead of playing position on the field, and it's what we do when we don't trust each other, because we say,"As long as I'm close to the thing we're all working on, it must be the right thing to do." But when we trust each other, we actually know that we can spread out and we can play the position on the field that we need to because someone's going to know what to expect from us, and we know what we need to do once the ball comes to us. That's how we actually score more wins down the goalpost. When we do distributed work versus centralized work or decentralized work, when we're doing distributed work which is that none of us even need to belong to the same organization to get stuff done, but we can join around a shared action. Then, we need to actually know who is going to do what, can they do what, can I count on them, can I lean on them, and can I share even when I'm feeling what it is that's actually going on so we can figure out how to fix it together. That's why trust is so important today. When I wrote my second book, I was starting to write about how work was fundamentally changing and how the rules of value creation are changing. In that, one of the things I was just trying to draw out is how much we've created management systems that are entirely focused on creating efficiency. So, we want to create the same chip at number one as we do 1,000, as one million. So, what we focus on is how efficiently can we do that that we do the same thing over and over again with the same quality level? Now, what we're actually trying to do is figure out how to allow variety in the system so that we can do the right thing for the right customer at the right time. But that means that we actually are trying to solve for very different things. We're not solving for the sameness, we're solving for onlyness. Each of us stands in a spot in the world only you stand in. It's a function of your history and experience but also your visions and hopes. From that place where only you stand is how each of us create value. The thing that has really changed in modern times is this; a lot of our onlyness used to get cut out. So, we used to show up at work if we were, let's say a person of color, or a woman, or maybe just a young person at a table full of people who are a lot older than us, and we were told, "You know your opinion doesn't count because maybe you're not experienced enough." So, that only got reduced and eliminated. Now, we're actually able to actually do something really different which is instead of trying to figure out how to fit in, we can go, "Oh, I have a distinct point of view and I have an idea for the world and I have a solution I want to create and I have this creativity, this little bit I want to add to the world." Now, I can figure out who cares about the same thing, how do I connect with them? How do we scale that idea? So, scale happens in a really different way in this modern time, and the connective tissue between the onlyness is trust. So, some great research was done at Rice University in 2014, and I'm just going to read from it right now. It says, "If my supervisor tries empowering leadership, but I don't feel that it's genuine, I'm not going to take the risk to be creative." Then, the research went on to say, "Creativity, of course, is the precondition to innovation, creativity is the precondition to outcomes." So, they were saying, "If your boss basically acts the right way just sort of fakes it," and says, "Oh, I believe in you," but doesn't actually act with affirming data behind that, then you'll actually back up, slow down and stop doing really creative work. If someone says, "I know you have the ball," you're more likely, by the way, to play with that ball and actually take it down the field. But if someone hedges, or holds back, or says check back in, it does two things. One, it tells you that you need to slow down and not actually keep going forward with your natural set of ideas. The second is it says, "Don't take any risks, don't come up with that next thing until you first check in," and yet risk is how we actually get to creativity. Risk is how we figure out whether or not we're willing to try something new. So, until we have trust in the system, we actually don't take the risk necessary to actually learn and grow ourselves, but also create the performance that innovation requires. So, one of the greatest things that I had a chance to witness was the creation of the TED Fellows program. They had this idea that maybe some more fresh voices should be added, bright up in comers. I happen to be in this room when they were first gathered together and presenting. Here's what I noticed. The team of Fellows so, they were 19 of them, stood in a room and presented their best idea. So, here's the way in which I'm going to save the ocean. Here's the way in which I'm going to do space archaeology, whatever it was, and the other people instead of saying, "You know, I'm so excited for you." They actually "woop wooped" the entire time that person was presenting their idea. They were so excited for that other person. Later on, I remember thinking what's that "woop-woop" about? What is it that's going on? What I saw as I got to know the team is that this was a group of people who had learned how to lean on each other. They had learned how to open up their kimono and say, "I actually have no idea how I'm going to do any of this stuff I'm trying to do," and in fact, in the field they typically came from. It was considered a crazy idea, a wild idea, and yet, with these colleagues, they were figuring out how to be open and vulnerable, real and genuine, and to be able to say, "Here's where I could use help," or even just to be able to listen as somebody said, "Hey, here's what you're missing." What they were learning to do was to lean so softly on each other that they became stronger for it. The thing that the fellow showed us right is that, each of us can have our own spark of an idea, but if we're all isolated, we're actually going to be lonely. If you don't have that group of people to count on, we're going to feel like maybe our ideas aren't worth pursuing because if we have to choose between belonging to a tribe and our idea, we will choose belonging every time, just psychologically that's what we have to do. But if we can belong to a group of people who can support us, who can help us be better, then we can do both, we can belong to our idea and one another, and that's what the fellows were doing to one another. The sad and disappointing thing about our society right now is that trust is at an all time low. If you look around at the news that people are consuming today, that's not surprising. What it means though is that we're learning how not to count on new sources or government organizations to take care of things, we're learning how to count on one another in a much more personal way. So, your effectiveness at work, or at home, in your life is to figure out how to be that center of trust because that's what's going to give you a great asset on which to stand. So, sometimes when we're talking about relationships or trust, people will go, "Haven't we been talking about this for a really long time. Isn't this old news, why are we talking about it now? " The reality is relationships are deeply complex even though we know about them, actually doing them is hard. So, let's just think about that for a second. You can be in a room full of people and be deeply alone. We've all been there. You can also be in a room of people and not really bring all of yourself because you feel like, for some reason, they're not going to accept you. So, what we're trying to do is figure out what are the relationships in which you get to be fully you, fully alive, fully creative, and belong to people with whom you're going to actually make that idea stronger and make it into reality. So, trust is going to show up in three ways. One, do I trust myself? Do I know what I can do? Do I know how to count on myself? Do I know how to actually be open to my own nascent novice ideas? The second is, do I know how to find the other people who care about the same thing so that I can actually lean into them and them lean into me? Third, how do I start to do big things with other people without having to sacrifice my own ideas? That means knowing how to actually give and participate in a way that still respects individuality. So, those are the three things we're going to cover today. 3. Building Trust as an Individual: So, there is a way that some of us behave wherever we show up, and we do our bit and then we kind of take off, and we think that's enough. Sometimes if we're a high performance star, as it's often called, we can get away with that behavior because it's really the thesis says, "If you're smart enough and you do your bit, that's all you need to be doing." Yet, I call that person a lone wolf, and that person is actually more focused on being right and maybe even being rich, but they're not necessarily focused on whether or not the team's outcomes are being played out. So, the key is, are my interests in alignment with the shared interest? If they are, then that's a good match. Then, if it's out of scale, meaning the group's interests far outweigh my interests, I probably won't keep that up for very long. If I choose my interests over the group interests, that I'm acting like a lone wolf. I'm wandering off the reservation and basically succeeding in spite of the team's success. So, you remember I talked about the TED Fellows program. Well, not all the fellows were booped to free each other. In fact, some people actually didn't appreciate being a member of the group even though they knew what the terms were, they knew they were expected to give up themselves, they ended up literally walking off the reservation, and one person in particular went and did a talk show interview and went to a Lakers game and did a series of things. So, when Tom Rielly, who was the TED Fellows curator, I got him on the phone he said, "I'll come back when I want to come back." So, this is belonging in a way that is more like a gym membership where we show up on our own terms, we show up only when we want to, we show up entirely based on our personal needs. So, if I don't show up and I still pay the gym membership, doesn't really matter. But teams and a group of people that we're talking about in this high-trust relationship requires that you actually give up yourself. It requires that you be present to one another, to help one another maybe, or to challenge one another maybe, but it requires you to actually show up to yourself and be vulnerable enough to actually have someone help you, to actually be changed. So, this kind of construct of onlyness requires not just that you be willing to contribute your bit to the world, but that you're willing to have other people contribute their bit to you. So, there's a lone wolf who wanders off and does their own thing, and then there's the person who actually acts like the super glue of the team. So, one of the fellows is a guy named Taji. Taji was the guy that behind the scenes would sit with people if they were uncomfortable, maybe hear them out so they could hear themselves, kind of get to clarity. He was the one that said, "Maybe you need to take care of yourself and not go to the script session." He was just paying attention to what the people needed, he was paying attention to what the group was actually trying to do, and he was trying to figure out how to support it. I call him the trust bridge because what he was doing was helping the individuals find a way to one another, and this is what happens in any context. Whenever all of us are doing our disparate things and if we don't know all the other players but we know enough people are taking care of our interests, we'll show up really fully alive. So, trust bridges are those people who act as that glue on the team that tend the team, that tend that the outcomes are being met, and they're the people who often are the multiplier effect. Meaning that they one in one on its own matter to two, but because he or she is acting as the trust bridge is able to get to a multiplier effect of two race the power of two. Something bigger actually happens because that person is in the room. Ushahidi is an organization based out of Africa that was initially started with people texting what was going on near them, so they could all signal clearly what was going on in the region and people could get to safety. It was during a election uprising. Since then, the organization has been used all around the world for earthquake crisis and nuclear issues and so on, just a lot of different situations. One of the things that the organization had to build into everything they did was figure out how to get people closest to the work to take the action. So, somebody in Japan didn't have to check in with someone in Africa to say, "Hey, can I do this?" They could just do it. At one point, they got challenged, though, because someone on the Ushahidi team, on the core development team, said, "I want to change entirely how the products built." The CEO at the time remembers staring at the phone going, "Maybe." and didn't quite know how to take it, didn't know what to do. Because he had always had this idea that we should let people have as much control, we should trust our people to take direction and go do what they think is right for the company. But the core product line, I don't know. So, what happened in that process was they actually let the engineer, they basically said, "Sure, Brian, if you want to go ahead and build this new product line, go ahead and try it. If it doesn't work, we'll fix it." In that simple act, what they told their best engineer was, "We want your best ideas." and Brian went off and actually built it. In fact, when they got it rolled out, they actually rolled it out at the same time as the existing product line they said, "Customers can decide what works." Brian will even share that the idea he had didn't take off. But what he learned about himself was that he understood how to actually design a product from the ground up in a brand new way, he learned something new about himself, but he also learned he was working with people who so strongly wanted the very best of him. So that made him more committed to his work, more committed to the team, more committed to the outcomes of the organization. That's what great trust can do. All of us want to be seen, all of us want to thrive, all of us want to show up with our creativity, and if there's no one in the room who actually is watching and tending what the group's interests are and how we fit into that group, then what's going to happen is we're going to hold back just a little more. So, trust bridges are the opposite of the asshole as Bob Sutton called them. They're the ones who actually figure out how to let us all feel safe enough so that we can show up. The thing I want to step into right now is, what does this look like if you're someone working inside a corporation? So, if you're there and you work for a large conglomerate organization, what you want to do is think about how do I allow myself to bring more of me to work? How do I bring that idea I'm thinking about, maybe that concern I have or that thing that might make something better? If I trust myself enough to raise my hand, even if it doesn't affect the actual outcome, what I'm doing is showing up so people can figure out what it is I care about, maybe help add me to a team because they know that's what my passion is, maybe help connect me to other people in that organization who care about the same things. It's going to help you be more effective and it's going to help the team know how to best use your passion. If you're doing independent work, the key is this. Most of us try to figure out how to package ourselves up so, let's say if we do graphic design, we look good compared to other people's graphic design work. I want to suggest that you stop figuring out how to look like everyone else and actually figure out how to be so distinctly yourself. I remember I was talking to an entrepreneur recently who is doing independent work and she said, "Well, I don't really want to tell people I'm a yogi in addition to doing this other work." I said, "Well, why not? Why wouldn't you signal that that was part of who you were?" She goes, "I don't know, it might offend people." There was this real hesitation, and all I want to say is, "Listen, it's going to help you find a better match between the people you want to work with and what it is you want to offer. If that's a passion of yours, then show up with it. Who knows, you might find a client whose emphasis is that and that might end up leading to more business." But hiding ourselves is not the answer. It doesn't let us show up, it doesn't let our ideas come to bear, and it doesn't help the ultimate work that we produce. Sometimes I get asked by corporate clients, people I've worked with who work inside a large organization, "Well, what do I do if my boss really doesn't want to hear my opinion, if that boss really doesn't trust me?" What I always ask first is, "Have you tried? Have you raised your hand in that meeting? Have you documented the questions that you have? Have you chased down the research?" A lot of us are waiting for someone else to tell us that it's okay to do those things, and first what we need to do is just start doing those things. Then, I always feel like, "Well, that may not still work out, but at least I've done my bit." Back when I was working inside corporations, one of the things I used to notice is organizations used to say, "We're never going to get that done." I said, "Has someone put together a proposal for how that could get done?" People would be like, "No. Because it's never going to get that done." I'm really like, "Why don't we give people a chance to say no because that also means we give them a chance to say yes?" I put together the business case and go and lobby for it, and 5 times out of 10, it actually became real and people were shocked, and I'm like, "Yeah, because you never gave them a chance to say yes. You were just expecting them to say no." So, figuring out how to raise your hand, say the thing that you're thinking, advocate for what it is you believe that's right, that's part of just you developing a muscle to say, "I trust myself enough to try that no matter what ends up happening, I can recover from it, I can learn from it, and take it from here." 4. Trust Within a Team: So, one of the things we ought just do for a second is to slow down and say, "Okay, what is it that we mean by trust?" Trust can be so ephemeral, but it's also really specific, and so there's actually an equation that Charles Greene did that I really liked because it kind of breaks it down. Can this person do what we've asked him to do? Will they do what we've asked them to do? Why are they doing it? So, are their motivations clear to me and therefore, their ability to do it is tied to their capacity. Then, there is a denominator which makes that whole equation change. Are your interests kind of supersede our interests? So, this whole process of will you, can you, why are you doing it. Then, we basically cut all that down to size. If we see the leader taking care of his or her own interests versus the larger interests that we all share. So, let's talk about why people will actually do something that is outside of their interests, and for that, let's turn to an organization called Patients Like Me. Steven Haywood got sick with ALS, which is essentially a degenerative disease with 100 percent fatality. His brother Jamie, in trying to save Steven's life started figuring out all sorts of things from gene therapy, investment in future drugs, as well as figuring out how to gather a community of people together, so they could do research more effectively. It turned out all the other stuff didn't work, but the community turned out to be really key, and it turned into this organization called Patients Like Me. One of the things that they ask the patients to do is to share all their personal information for free, and the organization then sells that to pharmaceutical companies. So, just think about that for a minute. You're going to give away all your own information, checking in about your weight, what drugs you are using, how well you're sleeping, your sexual activity, all sorts of things about yourself that you may not want to share, and you're gonna do it to an organization that's going to make money off you. The reason that it works is because as Ed Slava told me, "I'm willing to give away something of me if it will help the next person, the next guy." In the case of most the diseases that are on Patients Like Me, they really don't have a chance to be solved. Some of them are orphan diseases that are essentially incurable, and what these people have banded together and done is figure out how to have a pool of data that wasn't present before. In doing so, they're actually changing the ratio of how fast research can happen because now, they actually have enough people who have the same disease in one spot. They've lowered the cost of drug research. So, what's going on in the Patients Like Me example? If you're a patient and you're trying to think about should I give to this organization, should I give them my data, they're going through that mental math of, "Will they do what they say they're going to do? Can they do what they say they're going to do? What is their motivation, and where are interests aligned?" That trust equation is being put at play. Patients Like Me is saying, Here's how we're going to use the information, they're adding transparency. They're showing with visibility what they've already done, so they'll show research that's been done as a result of the data they've gathered." Then, they're actually showing why it still matters, and why they're motivated because since Stephen was the original genesis source of someone's life they were trying to save, they're basically trying to instill that same mission into everything else they're doing. That mental math is what allows all those people to keep contributing what they want to do, keep contributing their data because they understand what the tradeoff is. That's what leaders have to do too, is by adding that transparency into here's why I'm doing what I'm doing. It helps other people get committed behind them and the same thing for each of us as individuals. If I don't actually share with you why I care and why I'm committed to something, you're less likely to trust me because you won't know what it is that I'm motivated by. So, there's also ways in which all this stuff doesn't work, and so I thought sometimes it's helpful to have an opposite example, a "what not to do" to see what trust looks like in the wrong form. So, in Boston Massachusetts, a couple of years ago, there was a bombing situation that happened, and it was this terrible thing that happened as people were running across the marathon finish line. What should have been a great day of accomplishment turned into a day of terror. People were killed right at that moment. Some people on Reddit started thinking how could they contribute to solving that problem. So, somebody posted actually asking, "Hey, if any of you have pictures of the scene, maybe we can trace down who the people were that did this awful thing." They didn't specify that we needed to make sure that it was actually that person. They didn't specify that they would work with the police. They simply asked people to start uploading pictures. Slowly but surely, a lot of people got involved, thousands of people in fact got involved and started sharing pictures and doing commentary. One of the things that happened as a result of that is, it became an exercise in trying to tag brown people because the assumption was that, the terrorists had to be a brown person. So, it became a "Where is Waldo" for a very racial sort of profiling. While people had great intent of trying to help, they actually lacked the capacity to do it well. So, in the trust equation, they had good motivation, but their ability to do this in such a way that actually let trust be built in the system was missing. They didn't have experts involved. So, what started off as good intention, actually got really messed up. So, all these people are motivated entirely by the right things, wanting to help protect our community, ended up doing absolutely the wrong thing. But, that's because their ability to actually do something the way it should and could be done, their ability to actually make sure it's vetted so that the right person was identified wasn't built into the system. So, the one thing that leaders can do in thinking about how do I make sure a team can actually do great things is to make sure you're clear what the constraint is. So, if the constraint is we have to identify people but it has to be the right people, then that would have set up a very different process mechanic behind what Reddit did. One of the things that happens when I work with teams is people will say, "I really want to let everyone do their own thing, but what happens if it all goes wrong?" So, I wrote a several thousand word piece for a Harvard Business review that I'm going to draw on for this next vignette. TED, when it started off was just a conference, and at some point they decided to start posting videos online, so ideas could be shared more broadly. Then, at one point, they started saying, "Hey, a couple of us in the community itself would like to start hosting our own local events." Since then, over 7000 TEDx events have actually been held around the world, and they've offered really innovative ways for ideas to come out. But along the way, some things have happened that weren't so great. When TEDx Valencia did a TEDx, they said it was going to be about science, but it turned out to be anything but. In fact, one of the events and one of the actual talks was on the healing power of crystals. I'm nothing against crystals, but that's not the most scientific thing. So, the online world started seeing the news of this TEDx come out and said, "Oh my gosh, TED has lost control of its brand." Now, if you were the leader at TED seeing this happen online, what would you have thought? More importantly, what would you have done? Well, what happened was that, a bunch of people started having commentary about, "Oh my gosh, they've lost control," and instead of taking that one person who maybe led TEDx Valencia behind the woodshed and kind of going, "What they actually said is what does this mean? What could it mean for us as an organization? What can we learn from it, and how do we continue letting people have trust and charter in what they do and not suddenly take back all the control at the last minute? How they did that is super instructive?" First, they actually started having a conversation in the broader larger community online to say, "What is it we need to learn?" One person said, "Maybe people don't know the difference between science and non-science." Another person on another website said, "Here's a really good guideline resource," and another person said, "Maybe we could adapt that for the TEDx community," and so on, and so on. Until ultimately, the TEDx community as a whole, the organizers came together and said, "This is what we want to do differently. This is how we'll learn, and more importantly, this is how we'll help each other do it better. " The leader at TED could've come in and just been directive. He could have said, "We let it go too far. It's on me to come fix it," and instead he actually let the thing run its course, which is, "If I trust you to do all this great work without direction, why don't I also trust you to figure out how to fix it when it goes wrong?" Now, I think leaders kind of hesitate because there's this panic moment going on of, "Oh my gosh, everything just went wrong that I fear will go wrong." But, if you give people time and guidance, they can actually find their way back to why they originally started doing it, and then you can improve their capacity to do it better. By doing so, what you've actually said is, "I trust in you to do it great." 5. Taking Action: So, let's just bring this home and think about how you might apply it tomorrow, today, in the next meeting you're in. What if the next time you had a little inkling of something that you thought, "Oh, this group really needs to know this" or "They're missing this key point.", how might you be the person that raises your hand and says, "Have you considered this?" or "I have one more thing to add" or "I think something's been overlooked." Give yourself that permission to raise your voice, to hear your own ideas come through. Do it in a really constructive way by asking a question and not positing the answer and find a way to contribute it. But also, don't just be that person, don't just be the person who comes in and says, "I have something to add." Figure out a way to build on the ideas that you're hearing other people contribute. Might be amplify an idea that you thought was important but just kind of got passed by. Saying, "You know, that idea that Susie had and Becca had actually seen more of the same." Let's figure out how to play on that and pull those ideas forward. By doing that, you're going to act like a trust builder and that will help the whole team outperform. One of the greatest things that we can do as leaders is to help other people to learn. Yet, most of us got really successful in our careers by being experts. I know for myself, I'm an expert and go- to-market strategy, and market growth stuff, and so sometimes people will come to me and say, "Hey, what do you think about X, Y, and Z?", and they kind of want just an answer. What I usually ask them is, "What do you think?" Nine times out of 10, they actually have an idea that is so close to what they actually need to know. It's far more important for me to figure out how to use their language and maybe help extend it or build it than for me to pass on something new. We, as leaders, need to do that more with our people. What do you think? Where are you already going with it? What are questions have you already asked and answered? These are all ways in which we can create this magic moment on the team. The moment where you're instilling to your team that you believe in them. Because the more they feel that you believe in them, the more risk they're going to take, the more creativity they're going to show up with, the more passion they're going to bring to their work, and the more your team is going to perform. For 25 years or so, I figured out how to take ideas and move them into realities. When I was working as an operator inside a company, that's what I did. Then, when I'd been writing books, that's what I like to do. One of the interesting things for me now is, what you will do with all this? How will you take your ideas even if someone else has called them wild or weird and turn them into new realities? I hope you will do that by learning to listen to yourself, and that narrative of what matters to you. Then, finding the other people with whom you can grow that idea to be bigger, and ultimately moving that into action. Because that's why I came to do this with you, and I hope that it's useful in that.