How to Build Trust With Your Team by Giving Up Control

Give your team a sense of autonomy and agency, and they can bring their best selves to work. You can guide your team to real results if you've built a trusting relationship with each person reporting to you, and there can only be real trust when people feel free at work.

The first rule of building the kind of relationship that makes people feel free at work is to relinquish unilateral authority. If you're a manager at Google, it got laid down for you. If you're a manager at almost any other company, you're going to have to relinquish it voluntarily. That takes enormous discipline. It's natural to crave a little control. But power and control are illusory and won't get you where you really want to go. Relationships are more effective, and more satisfying.

Why Does Feeling Free at Work Get You Better Results?

When everyone on your team is able to bring the best of what they've got mentally, emotionally, and physically to their work, they are more fulfilled in their jobs, they work better with one another, and the team gets better results. You can't get that out of people with power, authority, or control.

A CEO I was coaching explained why succinctly in an email he sent to the whole company. "If you have to use someone else's name or authority to get a point across, there is little merit to the point (you might not believe it yourself). If you believe something to be correct, focus on showing your work to prove it."

If you can build trusting relationships with people so that they feel free at work, then they're much more likely to do the best work of their lives. But you're not "getting it out of them." You're creating the conditions for them to bring it out of themselves.

Why Does Unilateral Authority Break Trust?

There are few things more damaging to building a trusting relationship with another person than unilateral authority or a sense of superiority. The way you treat people determines whether you'll get their best effort, a perfunctory effort, or an effort to sabotage you. When you treat people like cogs in a machine, you'll get no more than you demand, and you create an incentive to break the machine.

I'll never forget the time I did a consulting project at a steel mill when I was in business school. I designed what I thought was a very clever compensation system that treated the workers as if they were "coin-operated." The foreman said to me, "With a system like that, guys who can't write their names will learn calculus to figure out how to screw me!" I realized he was exactly right.

Isn't Giving Up Control the Same as Anarchy?

No. The only thing worse than tyranny is anarchy, which is, as Hobbes put it in Leviathan, "nasty, brutish, and short." In anarchy, bullies get away with optimizing for their narrow self-interest and the overall results are often nonexistent.

A Russian anecdote about the dictator and the lawless warlord explains this perfectly. The warlord visits the home of the dictator, who shows him the spectacular view outside his window. "You see that road?" the dictator asks, and then beats his chest. "Ten percent for me. Ha ha ha ha!" When the dictator visits the warlord, the warlord has an even more spectacular view to show off. "You see that road?" asks the warlord. "What road?" asks the dictator. The warlord beats his chest. "One hundred percent for me. Ha ha ha ha ha!" In a state of anarchy, the warlord's authority is even more unchecked than the dictator's in a totalitarian regime.

How Did Google Replace Unilateral Authority With Process?

Shona Brown, who wrote Competing on the Edge: Strategy as Structured Chaos before she joined Google's Executive Management Team to lead Business Operations, wanted to avoid creating dictators or permitting the rise of warlords. She carefully constructed a hiring process, a promotion process, and a performance review process with this in mind.

None of those processes existed to control employees. They were aimed at replacing unilateral authority, which is easily hijacked by expediency or narrow self-interest, with a process that required the input of the whole team. By forcing managers to lay down unilateral control, Google encouraged them to build good relationships with their direct reports and ensured that everyone could feel free at work. It also dramatically improved decision-making.

That distrust of unchecked managerial authority played out in virtually all of Google's procedures:

Hiring

Managers couldn't just hire people. They had to put candidates through a rigorous interview process that then sent "interview packets" all the way up to Larry Page to approve or disapprove.

Promotions

Promotions were decided not by the managers but by a committee of peers.

Performance Reviews

Performance ratings were influenced by 360-degree feedback on each employee, not just the manager's subjective opinion, and then calibrated across teams to make sure standards were similarly upheld. That made it pretty hard to play favorites or hold people back unfairly.

Whether or not Google's extreme approach would work for your company, you can see how it gives people a sense of fairness and autonomy simply by reducing the odds that any individual can be at the mercy of a single person. Bosses can't become petty bureaucrats.

When you have too much unilateral authority, you'll inevitably do things that will erode trust, ruin your relationships, and make your direct reports want to escape from their jobs the way they'd want to break out of jail. Sometimes even just a tiny bit of unilateral authority is enough to make people behave badly. Think about your last trip to the Department of Motor Vehicles. That's why the first rule of building the kind of relationship that makes people feel free at work is to lay down unilateral authority.

Where Should You Start Giving Up Control?

I'm not recommending abdication or anarchy. I'm not talking about simply ignoring the people who report to you, or letting them do whatever they want. You have a job to do. You have to guide your team to achieve results, and to do that you're going to have to break ties and make tough decisions, often unpopular ones. That's part of why building relationships based on trust, in which people feel free at work, is so important.

Look for places where you can let go of some of the traditional sources of a boss's control, and signal to your reports that you want them to be more autonomous.

Want More Ways to Build Trust With Your Team?

Every week, the Radical Refresher brings you one story and one concrete practice for leading with candor. This week's edition turns the idea above into a single move: the one source of a boss's control to hand over first, and what to watch for when you do.

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