Reflections on Trust and Management

This week, I participated in a series of workshop program provided by Datadog for managers. To be honest, I’ve always viewed management as common sense (mainly). Consequently, I tend to approach books, lessons, and talks with a bit of skepticism. This week served as a reminder that these resources are just there to provide structure and “names” to concepts we most likely understand as well as offering some food for thought.

The focus of the lesson was on feedback/coaching, and specifically on the concept of trust. I have never seen Charles H. Green’s definition:

Trustworthiness = (Credibility + Reliability + Intimacy) / Self-orientation

I won’t delve into the formula, as there are better explanations available elsewhere. Instead, I’d like to share a few reflections:

Should the numerator be a sum or a product? I find it difficult to assign any trustworthiness when someone exhibits zero credibility or reliability 🙅🏻‍♂️, hence a product would be more suitable to reduce the trust to 0.

Is there such a thing as too much trust? A result which could reach infinity raises questions about the ceiling for a healthy level (and more if you just got a “the more the merrier” kind of indicator). There might be a point where trust becomes surreal, prompting a suspicious feeling of “it’s too good to be true.”

Can we truly reduce self-orientation to zero? While self-orientation isn’t synonymous with selfishness, it involves setting aside ego, potentially conflicting with intimacy. The formula encourages minimizing self-orientation, but its connection to the “too much trust” metric raises intriguing considerations. I will risk to assert that self-orientation parameter is humanizing and implying that its removal is the best for this metric, goes a dangerous path 🫥 (which is also a bit surrealistic).

Anyway, I recognize that creating a formula for something like trustworthiness is a challenging one - quantify what should be qualified is challenging. Formulas invite questions about parameters, and navigating this terrain requires careful consideration (specially if you got engineers asking about the parameters around 😅).

Now that I got my thoughts written down, remember to eat your veggies - consume knowledge, reflect, and keep your brain happy (And don’t do drugs, kids)! 🌱🧠