High-Trust Networks and High-Performing Teams

In an earlier blog I introduced the distinction between high-trust networks and low-trust networks as a key principle for understanding the topology of work, be it in the private or public sector, for profit or not-for-profit.  High-trust networks put the bulk of their resources into getting the most out of the people on the ground with little to no investment in checks and balances, supervision, regulations, or the like.  They rely instead on aligned values, self-discipline, and a clear sense of True North.  When they work well, they accomplish amazing things. 

Low-trust networks, by contrast, invest significantly in checks and balances, supervision, and regulations because they want to prevent the misappropriation of resources.  In zones of conflict, where there is no True North to be found, they are key to maintaining order and security.  Elsewhere, they are a defense against corruption and other abuses of power or position.  They are much less effective and efficient than high-trust networks, meaning they can only deliver on a small part of the mission that led them to get funded in the first place, but they can operate under conditions in which a high-trust network cannot.

In Silicon Valley, and particularly in venture-backed companies, the focus is overwhelmingly on building high-trust networks to create high-performing teams.  In general, the conditions and culture here are highly supportive of this, but there are two recurrent failure modes which team builders need to watch out for vigilantly and address immediately if they come up.  The first is the free rider syndrome, someone who enjoys the empowerment of being in a high-trust network but does not contribute the extra capability or effort necessary to achieve extraordinary outcomes.  The network itself will identify this person and “route around them,” so that in the short term you can still get lots of good work done.  But if the situation is allowed to persist, the rest of the team will get tired and then resentful of this overhead tax on their efforts, and performance will drop.  The intervention is simple: the team leader must simply expel the free rider from the team.  Empowerment comes with responsibility—if you don’t deliver, you’re out.  This doesn’t mean you are fired.  It just means you are no longer part of this team.

A more subtle challenge to face is the presence of a low-trust operator inside a high-trust network.  This person is not untrustworthy—they are simply low trust.  At the margin, that is, they will hoard resources, sand-bag performance objectives, and take credit wherever they can, not because they are bad people but because they assume that is what everybody else does.  Often these people are extremely competent and can get a ton of stuff done, so again, in the short term this can work out OK.  Longer term, however, they undermine the high-trust network culture, diminishing its capacity and performance, so again, they have to be identified and expelled.

In both these cases, however, team leaders who believe in empowerment often have trouble seeing the problem and making this call.  Their instinct is always to give everyone another chance to show their best stuff—that’s why they do not supervise intrusively and give lots of leeway to personal style.  That’s why high trust networks form around them.  But in the case of free riders and low-trust operators, the people involved are very good at managing up to show themselves to best effect.  So team leaders can’t rely on their personal experience with them as reflective of their overall behavior.  Instead they must learn to take signals from these people’s peers in the network, as solicited and surfaced by a third party, typically via a 360 peer review.  Then, when the signals come in, team leaders have to act on them without waffling.  Again, these are not firing offenses—you just have to take the person out of the line of fire.  But you have to do it decisively in order to signal to the everyone else in the network that high-trust empowerment is as privilege, not an entitlement.

That’s what I think.  What do you think?

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Geoffrey Moore | Zone to Win | Geoffrey Moore Twitter | Geoffrey Moore YouTube