Repairing broken trust

We have two options in life. 

Never make a mistake or do anything to break trust with anyone, ever. 

or

Learn how to repair broken trust. 

The illusion of reaching perfection is tempting, but it’s just not realistic. Humans make mistakes. Our strength lies in our ability to notice our mistakes, own them, learn from them and repair harm that was caused. 

It is vital to learn to account for human error and have a plan for how to course correct when situations that put trust in jeopardy arise. Failure to address these issues results in work coming to a halt, anxiety to spiral and morale to drop. Rather than hope we never encounter these situations, it is an intelligent strategy to know exactly how to navigate them and rebuild trust. 

Repair basics

There are four components necessary to rebuilding trust. Neglecting even just one will leave the repair incomplete. 

1. Acknowledge the impact

2. Understand the problem

3. Identify adjustments

4. Take action

   

Acknowledge the impact

There is a difference between intention and impact. Most of the time we don’t intend to do harm. How many times has a request been made by a tech lead or another member of your team, and they never specified when they needed it done? In one person’s mind, it would get done by the end of the week, in another person’s mind, it needed to be done within an hour. Trust can be broken by small things, and we don’t need to have malicious intentions for there to still be some damage done. 

Regardless of our intent, if our actions caused harm, it’s important to acknowledge the impact.

When there is defensiveness or over-explanation of intent it can shift the entire tone of the conversation and puts the other person in a position of having to “prove” there was trust broken, rather than moving straight into a discussion on how we can solve it. 

Whether or not the intention was malicious doesn’t matter at this point - acknowledging impact is an essential first step before we can move into problem solving mode. 

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Understand the problem

The second step is to understand what contributed to the impact in the first place. 

If a developer is consistently submitting buggy code, and they acknowledge that they are doing so - but have no idea WHY, it does not instill any confidence in the rest of the team that they will be able to fix it. 

However, if the developer submitting buggy code takes a moment for self reflection and realizes that he typically submits his worst code late at night, during his 3am coding sessions, it might be a starting point to begin to change his behaviors and experience a different outcome that is better for his team. 

We have to identify what contributed to the problem in the first place, so we don’t repeat it. Apologizing for harm, and then doing the same thing over and over again, will not repair trust. It will simply confirm that we are either too stupid to realize what happened or too lazy to investigate. 

Identify adjustments

Once we have identified the problem we must come up with an adjustment. 

“We are not delivering on our tickets at 100% capacity because they are not being estimated accurately. In order to fix this, we are adjusting our estimating framework to improve accuracy.”

This is an example of what it looks like to identify the problem and proposes an adjustment that can prevent the event from repeating. 

Take action

Words are cheap, but action speaks volumes. After we have acknowledged impact, identified the problem, made the adjustments it’s time to do what we said we’d do. 

Taking action and SHOWING the difference our adjustments are making is the final step to repairing harm and rebuilding trust. 

We grow as we go

It is not an easy road to take ownership of your actions and do the work required to rebuild trust, but when we have these tools in our tool belt, we don’t have to be afraid of making mistakes. 

Fear of being “imperfect” locks us up and slows us down. When we know how to repair harm, we can take action quickly and trust that we are skilled enough to correct and repair and move forward.