Trust is the process
Small, consistent team ceremonies that build trust quickly
The cool thing about working in software is that you can work in almost any industry, for any company, building almost any product, for almost any type of customer.
But when it comes to the type of team I want to work on, I only want to work on high-trust teams. High-trust teams move fast and have good energy. They do great work and are generally places people want to stay long-term.
Trust takes time to develop, but I’ve found that certain team habits, even small ones, can build real trust pretty quickly. You can also deliberately build trust into how a team works. You don’t have to wait around and hope it develops.
Here are a few ceremonies we use to build trust quickly on the team.
Show & Tell
Your old team probably called these “standups,” but it’s not important if you’re standing or sitting. What’s important is that you show or tell something from your work. Each team starts its day with Show & Tell.
Engineers show something they worked on from the previous day. They could show a completed ticket and demo a finished feature, but it could also be a rough demo, unfinished code, the ticket you’re working on, or a problem you’re trying to solve. It doesn’t matter. Showing the work, in any stage, builds trust quicker than telling.
During the meeting, the tech lead calls on each member by name and asks if they have something for Show & Tell that day. It’s rare for someone not to have something to show or tell from the previous day’s work. It would be unheard of for that to happen two days in a row.
That might sound like a lot of accountability, and it is. But nobody needs to manufacture something impressive to share. Sometimes the most useful thing someone can show is a problem they haven’t figured out yet. That’s often when the team can help the most.
You’re hearing from your teammates, in their words, about their work every morning. You see what they’re doing, you learn how they think, and you get opportunities to help each other. And everyone participates.
That’s a deposit in the trust account.
EOD Message
At the end of each workday, an automated Slack message goes out asking for an End of Day update. Each team member must respond. AI cannot do it.
We want to hear what happened during the day, what you thought was important, what got accomplished or started, and where you’re stuck. And we want it in your voice.
AI could probably write a decent summary of someone’s day based on their tickets, commits, and Slack messages. But I want to know what that person thought was important.
Maybe they spent half the day on something that turned out to be a dead end. Maybe they discovered something unexpected. Maybe they’re stuck and aren’t sure what to try next.
Those are useful things for the team to know.
Between starting the day with a Show & Tell and ending the day with an End of Day message, we now have two touchpoints for the progress of the work. These two touchpoints alone help increase our velocity, unblock us quicker, and prevent work from going down unproductive paths.
People are more likely to ask for help when they’re used to talking openly about their work. Teammates can help better when they know what’s going on.
It also helps to hear from everyone every day. Over time, you get a pretty good sense of how your teammates work, what they’re good at, and when they might need a hand.
Another deposit in the trust account.
BUFU (By Us, For Us)
BUFU in our vernacular means BY US, FOR US. Anyone stepping away during the day says so. Dentist, taking a pet to the vet, a long lunch with a former colleague, picking up kids at school. Whatever it is. It’s a notice. We’re not asking for permission, and the reason is optional.
Sometimes it’s just “I’ve got an appointment.” Other times you can say you have a dentist appointment, and you might get an over/under on the number of cavities.
BUFU is a small thing, but I think it’s one of our more important rituals. Trust is often defined as being willing to be vulnerable with someone else, and BUFU gives us a way to practice that in small doses every day.
It takes a little vulnerability to tell your teammates you’ll be unavailable. At some jobs, disclosing these small, incidental, human events can invite ridicule or judgment. We’re pushing against that. When you tell your team that you’re gonna be out for an hour or two, you’re trusting them to be okay with it. And they’re trusting you to manage your time without needing an explanation.
We all have lives outside of work. Sometimes those lives need attention during the workday. Nobody should feel like they need a good enough excuse to step away for a couple of hours.
BUFU also turns what would be a withdrawal of trust into a deposit. Two unexplained hours of afternoon silence can irritate your teammates over time. The same two hours, with a heads-up, build trust. The team knows you’re unavailable and can plan around it. You can take care of what you need to do without wondering if someone is looking for you.
Pretty simple.
Monday Kickoff
We have other ceremonies that help us build trust.
Each Monday, at our department-wide Weekly Kickoff meeting, we go around and ask each person to share one thing they did over the weekend. There are 40-45 of us in those meetings, which means that part alone can take 30-45 minutes. We started doing this when we were a small department of six people, but no one wants to stop. It’s too valuable.
If you’re the kind of person who thinks every meeting should be as short as possible, spending 45 minutes hearing about people’s weekends probably sounds ridiculous. I get it. That’s a lot of time.
But you learn a lot about people this way. You find out what they like to do outside of work, what’s going on in their lives, and what they care about. You discover things you have in common with people you might otherwise only talk to about work.
And you get to know people from other teams who you don’t work with every day, and that matters. It’s easier to ask someone for help when you know them. It’s easier to work through a disagreement when you’ve spent time getting to know the person on the other side.
I think it’s also good for people to have a chance to talk about something other than work. We spend a lot of time together. Knowing a little about each other’s lives makes that time better.
Another deposit in the trust account.
Trust compounds
One thing I like about these ceremonies is how simple they are.
Show your work. Tell your teammates what happened during the day. Let people know when you’re stepping away. Take time to get to know each other. None of this is particularly complicated.
But doing these things consistently, day after day, gives people a lot of opportunities to build trust with one another. Over time, all those little interactions add up.
People get comfortable asking for help earlier. They get better at recognizing when a teammate needs help. They spend less time wondering what everyone else is doing, and problems tend to surface before they get bigger.
That’s a big part of why I think high-trust teams move faster. Trust reduces the friction of working together.
I also like the trust-account analogy because it reminds me that the little things matter. You can build trust over a long time and then lose a lot of it with one bad interaction. You have to keep making deposits.
We’ve built these ceremonies into our workday because we think they’re worth the time. And after doing them for years, I wouldn’t want to work on a team without something in place that builds trust quickly.
Trust is the process.