Companies are made up of functional teams that work together to achieve results. To meet a customer’s needs, we generally have to collaborate across departmental lines, and ask for help. Everybody is busy, so when a professional in one group asks for help from a professional in another group, the two individuals do not always see the need in the same way. Usually the debate is about the priority of the request and whether it warrants changing priorities just because someone in another team asked for help. How your teams react in these situations depends on whether you have a ‘Prove It’ culture or a ‘Trust’ culture.
In a ‘Prove It’ culture, the request for help is met with questions and skepticism. “Do you really need my help?” “It can’t be that important.” “The customer doesn’t really need this, do they?” “Can’t you do it yourself?” Whatever form the push-back takes, the essence of the discussion is ‘prove it.’ Prove that I should change my priorities to do what you are asking of me. In text or messaging oriented companies, the Slack or Teams debate can go back and forth in a doom-spiral for many iterations. It may be a stalling tactic for the individual being asked to help, but more often it is a text-based inquisition in support of ‘prove it.’ The internal debate often consumes more time and resources than it would take to just comply with the request. The teams are behaving with inward focus instead of customer focus, and while the teams are debating, the customer is not getting what they need and becoming increasingly disgruntled.
By contrast, in a ’Trust’ culture we trust the professionalism of our teammates, and we believe that they have the best interests of our customers and our company at heart. We also believe that they know what they are doing, and when they ask for help, we should trust their judgement. A trust culture avoids the whole back and forth ‘prove it’ cycle. Trust has to be earned, but when we start with a trust bias, we short-circuit the debate. If it later turns out that the request was misguided, then we can treat that as a withdrawal from the trust bank, and next time we may ask a few more prove it questions until trust is restored.
How do we get from prove it to trust? Trust is earned through repeated actions over time, but it starts with a willingness to believe in the judgement of others. It requires both parties to act with professionalism to engender trust. In earlier posts, I wrote about banning the word ‘they’ so that no one could introduce a divide between teams. It banishes the finger-pointing “they screwed up,” and replaces it with inclusive language — “we have a problem to solve.” A trust culture is a manifestation of banning the word ‘they.’ A trust culture is a ‘we/us’ culture, while a 'prove it’ culture is a ‘they’ culture. To avoid ‘prove it’ mentality, everyone needs to shift their emphasis to ‘how to’ instead of ‘why not.’ “How can I comply with this request” instead of “why I should not agree to this request.” I am a firm believer that when we focus on how we can help each other, instead of how we can make our colleagues jump through hoops to prove their requests are valid, good things happen. If we get our culture right, everything else will fall into place.