Which one does your leader prioritize/biased to : Trust or Performance?

Performance is about technical competence. How good someone is at their job. Do they have grit? Can they remain cool under pressure? Trust is about character. Their humility and sense of personal accountability. How much they have the backs of their teammates when not in combat. And whether they are a positive influence on other team members. In other words, just because I trust your technical skills doesn’t mean I think you are trustworthy as a person. You might be able to keep me safe in work, but I don’t trust you enough to be vulnerable with you personally. It’s the difference between physical safety and psychological safety.

Looking at the Performance vs. Trust graph shown above, it is clear that no one wants the person in the lower-left corner on their team, the low performer of low trust. Clearly, everyone wants the person in the top-right corner on their team, the high performer of high trust. What is interesting to note that the person in the top left of the graph—the high performer of low trust—is a toxic team member. These team members exhibit traits of narcissism, are quick to blame others, put themselves first, talk shit about others and can have a negative influence on their teammates, especially new or junior members of the team. Any team would rather have a medium performer of high trust, sometimes even a low performer of high trust (it’s a relative scale), on their team than the high performer of low trust. Like the Indian military/air forces (similar to US marines/seals), who have some of the highest-performing teams in the world, prioritize trust before performance, then why do we still think performance matters first in business.

In a culture dominated by intense pressure to meet quarterly or annual targets, too many of our leaders value high performers with little consideration of whether others on the team can trust them. And those values are reflected in whom they hire, promote and fire.

Jack Welch, CEO of GE during much of the high-flying 1980s and ’90s, offers an extreme example of what this looks like. Welch was so concerned with winning and being number one (he even titled one of his books Winning) that he focused almost exclusively on performance to the detriment of trust. Welch popularized so-called "rank and yank" policies used now by other corporate entities. Each year, Welch would fire the bottom 10% of his managers, regardless of absolute performance.?He earned a reputation for brutal candor. He rewarded those in the top 20% with?bonuses and employee stock options. Welch also ranked his executives on two axes. However, his axes were performance and potential, basically, performance and future performance. Based on these metrics, those who won biggest in a given year were earmarked for promotion. The underperformers were fired. In his drive to produce a high-performing culture, Welch focused on someone’s output above all else. (Though Welch did have metrics on culture, if you ask anyone who worked at GE at the time, it was largely ignored.)

Environments like the one Welch cultivated tend to benefit and celebrate the high performers, including the ones of low trust. The problem is, the toxic team members are often more interested in their own performance and career trajectories than they are with helping the whole team rise.

And though they may crush it in the near term, the manner in which they achieve their results will often contribute to a toxic environment in which others will struggle to thrive. In performance-obsessed cultures, these tendencies are often exacerbated by leaders who encourage internal competition as a way to further drive performance. Pitting their people against each other might seem like a good idea to finite-minded leaders like Welch. Eventually, it can lead to behaviors that actually undermine trust, things like hoarding information instead of sharing it, stealing credit instead of giving it, manipulating younger team members and throwing others under the bus to avoid personal accountability. In some cases, people will go so far as to intentionally sabotage their colleagues to advance themselves. As expected, in time, the organization as a whole will suffer , maybe to the point that it is forced out of the game altogether. Time is always the great revealer of truth.

If leaders, in any profession, place an excess of stress on people to make the numbers, and offer lopsided incentive structures, we risk creating an environment in which near-term performance and resources are prioritized while long-term performance, trust, psychological safety and the will of the people decline. This is especially very true in today's business(especially now during the layoff period). If someone who works in customer service is highly stressed at work, it increases the likelihood that they will provide a poor customer service experience. How they feel affects how they do their job. Any work environment in which people feel like they need to lie, hide and fake about their anxieties, mistakes or gaps in training for fear of getting in trouble, humiliated or losing their job undermines the very things that allow people to build trust.

Performance can easily be quantified in terms of output. Indeed, in business, we have all sorts of metrics to measure someone’s performance, but we have few if any effective metrics to measure someone’s trustworthiness. The funny thing is, it is actually incredibly easy to identify the high performers of low trust on any team. Simply go to the people on the team and ask them whom they don't trust. They will likely all point to the same person.

Conversely, if we ask team members whom they trust more than anyone else on the team, who is always there for them when the chips are down, they will likely also all point to the same person. That person may or may not be the highest individual performer, but they are a great teammate and may be a good natural leader, able to help raise the group’s performance. These team members tend to have a high EQ and take personal accountability for how their actions affect the team’s dynamics. They want to grow and help those around them grow too. Because we tend to measure only someone’s performance and not trust, we are more likely to miss the value of a trusted team member when deciding whom to promote.

When confronted with the information about how others feel about them, high performers of low trust rarely agree or even want to listen. They think of themselves as trustworthy, it’s everyone else who can’t be trusted. They offer excuses instead of taking responsibility for how they show up. And though they can feel that the rest of the team may not include them in things (probably convincing themselves that everyone is jealous of them), they fail to recognize that the only common factor in all these tense relationships is them. Even when told how the rest of the team feels about them, many higher performers of low trust will double down on performance instead of trying to repair lost trust. After all, thanks to lopsided corporate metrics, it is their performance that helped them advance their careers and provide job security in the past.

Good leaders don’t automatically favor low performers of high trust nor do they immediately dump high performers of low trust. If someone’s performance is struggling or if they are acting in a way that is negatively impacting team dynamics, the primary question a leader needs to ask is, “Are they coachable?” Our goal, as leaders, is to ensure that our people have the skills—technical skills, human skills or leadership skills—so that they are equipped to work to their natural best and be a valuable asset to the team. This means we have to work with the low-trust players to help them learn the human skills to become more trusted and trusting, and work with the low performers to help them learn the technical skills to improve their performance. Only when a team member proves uncoachable—is resistant to feedback and takes no responsibility for how they show up at work should we seriously consider removing them from the team. And at that point, should a leader still decide to keep them, the leader is now responsible for the consequences. Teams naturally ostracize or keep at arm’s length the member they don’t trust. The one who is not one of us. This should make it easier for a leader to know whom to coach or remove so that the whole team’s performance can rise. Or does it? Is it the team member who is low trust or is it the rest of the team? Therefore culture can be defined as:

Culture = Values + Behavior

To build a culture based on trust takes a lot of work. It starts by creating a space in which people feel safe and comfortable to be themselves. We have to change our mindset to recognize that we need metrics for trust and performance before we can assess someone’s value on a team. A culture in which pressure to meet numbers was replaced with a drive to take care of one another and serve the community better. To do this, however, one needs to know that one would need to change the way that he recognized and rewarded his people. If leaders are responsible for creating the environment that fosters trust, then are we building a bench of leaders who know how do to that? Which one is your leader choosing: trust or performance?

References: 1) The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek

2) Rank and yank policy: