What to Do When Coworkers Don't Trust You
Coping with the energy costs of workplace skepticism
Mistrust at work creates a lot of extra work. Such skepticism creates an auxiliary set of assignments that nobody talks about. Nobody puts sticky note reminders on your monitor or sends you Outlook notifications or scribbles on your office whiteboard. But still, you’ll know the weight of this parallel endeavor. It’s obnoxious and unfair and exhausting when you have to…
Prove yourself: Anxious, threat-minded supervisors demand surveillance. Sometimes, you find yourself answerable to a reporting system detached from your actual work. Job #1 has somehow become justifying your job.
Protect yourself: This is especially hard when your goal is to be a Basically Nice Person. You just want to be on the team and cheer other people on—and instead you find yourself acting out a poorly written script from Game of Thrones.
Pander to others: Sheesh, your work is demanding enough—you’re checking 10:00 PM emails, for Pete’s sake—and yet you also have to massage the egos and manage the emotions of your teammates. Q4 is coming fast, so why are you spending several hours a day anticipating other people’s anticipations of threat?
Love this A.I. mockup of a sexy library thriller, featuring a lot of neckties and, somehow, Ben Affleck 20 years back.
Let me tell you a story of professional mistrust.
Right out of college, I was hired to run a morning show for a 100,000 watt radio station. I was a dubious hire based on a boss’s hunch. The story was, she had seen me acting in a one-man live show at a nearby theatre and thought, “Wow, he has no experience in radio, no training in audio equipment, and is 39 years younger than our average target listener. Let’s hire him.”
I remember my first days in the studio, being taught by another deejay—let’s call him Bill—how to use the automation system, how to load reel-to-reels machines, and how to cue digital audio tapes. Bill quickly figured out I was clueless. I’m guessing that loading the CD player upside-down was a leading indicator.
But to be fair to my young-adult self, I was stepping into a wild industry in tectonic transition. I mean, we had editors splicing tape ribbon with razor blades—when, just a year or so later, we’d be talking about satellite hookups.
Bill was an afternoon drive guy, and, although he wouldn’t have admitted it, he disliked me a lot. I mean, the man had a case: I was a wonder kid without the wonder skills. But the hard part was that the station management disliked him, too. I will never forget hearing my boss say, “Yeah, we’d like Bill better, if he sounded like you.” Never a smart managerial move. As a 23-year-old kid, I had no idea how to respond to all the spicy chili of favoritism and mistrust.
Bill took out his frustration by watching for my flubs. And to be honest, I gave him a lot of material. But as uncomfortable as his passive aggressiveness made my life, he had it far worse. Over the next few years, he found himself with less and less air time—and then eventually with none at all. The other announcers smiled over his shoulder and sidestepped him in the studio.
And it was all such a sad waste. Aggressive changes in the industry meant that Bill and every other announcer in the radio station eventually left or got cut, leaving me as the one and only deejay.
Call it a dark parable for how corporate handles poor team dynamics: if employees don’t trust each other, no problem—just replace them with automation.
Looking back, I wish I had done better to build trust with and for Bill. Based on those regrets, here are some changes I’d recommend when you find distrust circulating in your organizational culture.
Do the thing, don’t play the game. Doing your job won’t allow you to avoid strategic thinking completely, of course. Even Jesus said it’s not enough to be dove-pure; you gotta be snake-smart, too. But as much as possible, try focusing your energies on the work itself. Game-playing gives you a rush sometimes. Most of the time, unless your Frank or Claire Underwood, it’s a waste of spirit.
See mistrust, but don’t share it. My tendency in professional life is to identify as much as possible with others. Some of that, let’s be honest, comes from cowardly conflict-avoidance. But over-identification becomes problematic when I absorb other people’s cynicism. The good news is that you can learn to see how others live and work without making the same choices. (I’m still working on this one.)
Wait for tells, ask the questions. It’s not a good idea to treat workplaces like poker tables, watching for other people’s secret signals. “So, like, he’s playing nice with me—can I trust what I’m seeing?” Wrong question. Don’t waste your time squinting whether you can trust niceness. Soon enough, moments of crisis or seasons of scarcity will make everything clear. By their tells you will know them—eventually. The hard part is when you encounter an inconsistency to ask the tough, friendly, unfinished question: “So, yeah, the other day we all agreed to this, but now you’re saying—?” It takes courage, but go ahead and let them finish the question for you.
Trust is an essential aspect of workplace culture. But here’s the confusing thing: trusting people has very little to do with liking people. Years ago, there was a communication theorist named Charles Berger who developed Uncertainty Reduction Theory. His claim was we eliminate uncertainty about each other by liking people and being liked by them. It’s a fair description of human life. But it’s bad advice. Better not bother your brain with the question of “Do they like me?” or “Do I like them?” Instead, of trying to be superhumanly likable, be the trustworthy professional. Your coworkers don’t really need you to like them. They do need you to trust them, which is another way of saying they need you to see them, to listen to them, and to coordinate with them.
-craig
The Mode/Switch Team has a lot to give thanks for to Yuxiao (“Max”) Zhang, who is now completing her term as our Communication Coordinator. These are her last graphic designs for the Newsletter—and her last edition of Listen While You Work. Thanks, Yuxiao!
If you’re reading this far in this week’s newsletter, you probably find value in the Mode/Switch’s stock and trade. The insights here come, in significant part, from my own organizational research and from ongoing conversations with research partners. But as the audience has grown, I’m feeling the need for the research to grow as well.
