Innovative ideas, great problem-solving, and seamless team collaboration… all qualities founders want to see within their startup teams. Yet the core ingredient that underpins them is frustratingly intangible – Trust. It’s hard to put your finger on, but dangerously easy to break. In this article, we look at why trust is critical for startup team performance, and outline how to intentionally cultivate it (and avoid breaking it) so we can grow at pace.
When trust exists within a startup team, it acts as fuel for team performance: everyone is collaborating, sharing ideas, and united by the North Star mission. When trust is absent, productivity and efficiency suffer – but it’s rarely that easy to spot why.
Maybe you’re seeing glimpses of disharmony in the ranks; cliques forming, colleagues apportioning blame to one another, oppressive micromanagement, or perhaps people are gradually shying away from asking questions or sharing their ideas? These are all signs that trust is starting to break down.
The truth is, as founders, we don’t get a chance to think about team trust as often as we’d like. When we’re swimming hard just to keep our heads above water, it’s easy to take trust for granted, or expect it to just “happen”.
Yet, because trust is what makes everything in the team just “work,” there’s merit in seeing it as an essential growth driver offering competitive advantage. In his book, The Speed of Trust, Stephen Covey suggests that trust directly impacts the speed and cost of every interaction.
“Nothing is as fast as the speed of trust. Nothing is as profitable as the economics of trust. Nothing has more influence than a reputation of trust.” Stephen Covey
What’s more, research shows that when we feel trusted, we’re 40% less likely to burn out and 50% more productive (Zak, 2017).
So if scaling efficiently depends on the level of trust within our startup, how do we proactively create, sustain, and nurture it?
The neuroscience of trust
To make trust feel a bit more tangible, let’s first consider what’s happening in our brains when we place trust in someone.
Trust is essentially a gamble that’s made by our brain. Our amygdala alerts us to a risk, and our prefrontal cortex assesses if that risk is worth taking. When we trust, the hypothalamus releases oxytocin, reducing the threat signal from the amygdala, and allowing the reward and bonding systems in the brain to be activated.
Oxytocin is the key here. Not only is it the trigger for us choosing to trust in the first place, but it is also released when we connect with someone we trust, and when we feel trusted ourselves. It creates a powerful “trust loop”, crucial for sustaining high-performing teams.
“When we are trusted, our brains make a signaling molecule called oxytocin that causes us to put in effort to help others.” Paul Zak, PhD
As founders, we need to behave in ways that encourage this release of oxytocin, and build a team culture that promotes and protects those behaviours across the whole team.
The “psychological safety” sense check for your team
For those of you who are part of our FounderCircle groups, you’ll be familiar with the concept of psychological safety, since it sits at the heart of the trust held between you. It is also what sits at the core of team trust – so here’s a quick primer for those that want a refresh…
The concept was introduced by Amy Edmondson at Harvard, who defined it as “a belief that one will not be punished or humiliated for speaking up with ideas, questions, concerns, or mistakes.”
You might be thinking, “Of course, my team is safe – we don’t punish or humiliate anyone!” But sometimes these signs can be subtle – a raised eyebrow here, a clipped response to a clarifying question during a project meeting, or simply no forum for discussion or debate.
By understanding what sits behind the concept (openness, transparency, bravery), it becomes clear why it is so vital for startup team performance. Here are some questions you can consider or use with others to get more insight:
- Are members of my team able to bring up problems and tough issues?
- Do team members sometimes judge others for being different?
- Do my team members feel safe taking risks?
- How easy is it for members of my team to ask for help?
- When mistakes happen, do I respond with curiosity or blame?
- Do I invite input from quieter voices, or just from confident ones?
- How often do I publicly admit my own errors or uncertainties?
Framed in this way, it’s easy to see why psychological safety is such a critical component to teams having innovative ideas, problem-solving well, and seamlessly collaborating.
Let’s dive into practical ways to build it that have been tried and tested by other founders.
Team trust is fueled by alignment around one clear objective
Stephen Covey suggested that organisational trust grows when everyone is aligned around one clear objective, and with a strong startup North Star, you can max out in this area (perhaps we’re big-corp can’t).
Looping back to the neuroscience – uncertainty fuels our amygdala, creating a stress response that gets in the way of the release of oxytocin, thus making it harder to trust. But if we’re all clear on the North Star Mission at a startup level and at a project level, that ambiguity is automatically removed, making the trust gamble less risky.
What’s more, having a shared purpose across a team also creates a sense of camaraderie, releasing more oxytocin and driving better collaboration, thus fuelling that important trust loop we mentioned earlier.
“Teams with high trust work like musicians riffing off each other, they intuitively know what their teammates need and deliver it reliably,” Paul Zak, PhD
So, if there are signs of distrust emerging in your business, ask your people how clear they are on the North Star Mission and North Star Metrics of your startup with tips here.
Show your team you trust them
Nothing demonstrates trust in a business more than a leader extending trust to their team. When people are given autonomy in how they complete a task, and they believe their leader has their back, it signals safety to the brain, thus reinforcing trust (Zak, 2017).
Delegating effectively is a skill that regularly comes up for founders in coaching and FounderCircles, because it’s not easy. As we explored in our article about “letting go” it requires crystal clarity about purpose and scope, an empowering style of leadership, and demands that we do our best to “get out of the way”. Without the latter, we’re signalling distrust.
And here’s the rub! Unless you genuinely trust your team in the first place, empowerment is always going to feel disingenuous – for you and them – and probably lead to micromanagement of one kind or another. So how do we solve this?
It can be helpful to remember the neuroscience: trust isn’t “blind faith,” it is an informed risk and you can interrogate the equation:
- How well do you know your team / team members – do you understand their competencies and their attitudes?
- If, by doing this, you identify skills gaps, how can you up-skill or build contextual-knowledge through training or peer mentoring?
- Are the right tasks being delegated to the right people, and do they have the context-knowledge they need? Start with low-risk, smaller tasks first if a reciprocal trust relationship isn’t established yet, like when onboarding new people.
- Are you signaling psychological safety and making it clear you have their backs and are available to explore any early snags and help problem-solve?
These questions can help us reflect on factors that could be getting in the way and blocking pace and performance. They help us be honest with ourselves, and identify genuine trust gaps where we can take action to close them.
How not to kill trust when things go wrong
We’re startup founders… Sh!t is going to go wrong (let’s face it, sometimes daily!). So, how did you react the last time you trusted a member of your team to deliver, and it went horribly wrong?
Seething rage? Disappointed silence? Retreating into a hole to “fix it” and failing to communicate?
We’ve all done it. And it’s not because we’re bad leaders, it’s because we’re so emotionally invested that when things go wrong, it physically hurts. Research has shown that our emotional connection to our startups is similar to that of a parent and child (Lahti et. al, 2019), and it can skew our judgement.
So when these moments happen, how can we manage these more visceral reactions and then move on to rebuild trust and preserve the culture you’ve worked hard to create?
Managing failure in our teams is something we spoke about with Rachel Stockey in our FounderFuel Show, and she gave us some helpful strategies:
Timebox the emotional response: We know we need to be mindful of our own emotional reactions to failure with the team, but suppressing them won’t help either. So Rachel suggests “time boxing” them: Give yourself time today to wallow in the anger/frustration/sadness [delete as appropriate], then focus on moving forward positively tomorrow.
Name it and share it: Trying to hide your emotions is more likely to leave the team guessing how you’re feeling and worrying about that. So instead, try to name how you’re feeling AND shift it to become a team sentiment. The likelihood is they feel it too – given how driven most startup teams are by the mission. By shifting from “I am angry…” to “I imagine we’re all angry it hasn’t gone to plan” the team stays united and can move forward together, rather than apart.
Separate from blame: Blame is divisive and can cripple trust, so work on separating the “wallowing” and expression of emotion from any notion of blame. Focus on shared responsibility and future-focused thinking – using phrases like “I backed you to the decision. It turns out the decision we took didn’t work out, but now we know, and we can rethink!”
This then sets you up to protect or rebuild trust with that individual and work on their own confidence for the future, too.
How strong is the trust loop in your startup?
So if you’re seeing disharmony in your team, reflect on how much cultural trust there is in your startup. As a starting point, here are some questions to recap:
- What signals are you seeing in your team around trust – is it there and fuelling them, or are cracks beginning to show?
- Based on Edmonton’s prompt questions, how do you think your team members would rate team psychological safety?
- How clear is the team on the direction of the business, and can this be used to empower your people more?
- Does your team feel like you trust them enough? Do they feel empowered?
- How are you managing those moments when things go wrong, and what could you do differently?
Need help building and nurturing a culture of trust in your startup?
It stands to reason that trust becomes more nuanced and complex as the team grows (the sweet spot is about 10 people (Sap et al, 2019)). If your startup team is scaling and you want support to establish a foundation of trust, then get in touch about our team coaching and training.
Other FounderFuel articles on a similar theme
Using the power of your north star mission
The art of bringing people with you
Sources
Zak, 2017 – The Neuroscience of Trust
Sapp,et. al, 2019 – Trust in group decisions
Lahti et. al., 2019 – Why and how do founding entrepreneurs bond with their businesses
