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Story Time: Innovation, Trust, and the Freedom to Fail

Our Story Time series brings you real, personal examples from business life that shed light on specific ways to lead with trust. Our last story proved that he who eats with chopsticks wins. Today’s shows how trust can impact innovation, productivity, and staff retention.

A New Anthology

When it comes to trust-building, stories are a powerful tool for both learning and change. Our new book, The Trusted Advisor Fieldbook: A Comprehensive Toolkit for Leading with Trust (Wiley, October 2011), contains a multitude of stories. Told by and about people we know, these stories illustrate the fundamental attitudes, truths, and principles of trustworthiness.

Today’s story is excerpted from our chapter on making the case for trust. It vividly demonstrates how providing the freedom to fail, take risks, and build on others’ ideas increases a team’s ability to innovate.

From the Front Lines: A Trust-Based Business Unit

In 2005, Ross Smith became Director of an 85-person software test team within Microsoft. His team had great technical skills, passion, and excitement, but felt underutilized and unchallenged. Ross set out to improve innovation and productivity. Exploring options, they ran across a University of British Columbia study by John F. Helliwell and Haifang Huang that equated the impact of high organizational trust to significant pay raises in terms of creating job satisfaction.

The team suddenly realized that innovation required freedom to fail, risk taking, building on others’ ideas—all behaviors grounded in high trust. That cognitive snap, that a high-trust organization would address underutilization and latent talent, was the beginning of the solution.

In a high-trust organization, individuals could apply their skills, education, and experience at their own discretion. They could take risks and change processes themselves because managers would trust them. The question was this: how to do it?

Ross asked the team to identify behaviors they felt influenced trust, positively or negatively. They realized that trust was subjective, situational, and very individual, and there was no single behavioral answer. As a result, the team put together a detailed playbook describing simple principles with discussion about how to implement.

They also modeled risk-taking and trust-building by using games to approach problems; everyone was allowed to play, experiment, and fail.

Microsoft is a heavy user of metrics, for Ross’s team as well as throughout the company. The first noticeable difference was a higher-than-normal level of retention. After two and a half years, other things started to change dramatically—new test tools and new techniques were developed, and a high level of collaboration and partnership was working. Productivity numbers started to rise. As the project finished, the team was rated at or near the top across virtually every Microsoft productivity metric.

When Ross and several others from the original team moved to another division, they set out to introduce the trust-building ideas and practices which had worked so well before. Once again, they saw a high retention rate, a broader application of talent, and higher productivity numbers.

The metrics followed the changes in mind-set and behavior—not the other way around.

—Ross Smith (Microsoft), as told to Charles H. Green

Find out more about Ross’s experiments in management innovation and trust, or read his blog on productivity games.

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Read more stories about trust:

Balance Trust and Control for Innovation

The storyline almost writes itself. Blinded by infighting and bureaucracy, both Microsoft and Nokia squandered great opportunities to innovate. In turn, they are then overtaken by more nimble competitors, particularly Apple.

While there’s truth to that simplified storyline, the lessons to be learned are less obvious. Let’s tease it all out a bit.

Microsoft: Innovation Killed by Competitive Culture?

In an editorial earlier this year (February 2010), former Microsoft VP Dick Brass ran down the list. He identified three significant technological innovations at which Microsoft had a good shot, only to be leapfrogged by Apple: tablet computers, ebooks, and smartphones.

There was no doubt in Brass’ mind about the villain: Microsoft’s powerful competitive culture. Caught between competing principalities in the kingdom, forward progress was slowed. The kingdom of MSFT was therefore bogged down itself.

Possible Hypotheses:

a.    Better to collaborate than compete?

b.    Better to have top-down direction than laissez-faire innovation?

Nokia: Innovation Killed by Bureaucratic Conservatism?

Kevin O’Brien, in an International Herald Tribune front page story on September 27, 2010, writes that Nokia showed business customers a prototype touch-screen, internet-ready phone three years before Apple’s 2007 iPhone introduction. However, because it was expensive to produce, a risk-averse management team killed it.

O’Brien cites several variations on the theme: Nokia was historically a hardware-driven, not a software-driven, firm. Its previous success made it more risk-averse. The committee-structure employed by Nokia moves decisions to lowest-common denominator design and a tendency to defer decisions.

Possible Hypotheses:

a.    Re-organize to separate mature and evolving businesses?

b.    Develop an incubator operation to nurture small-sized innovations?

These are only a few hypotheses, of course. Another way to phrase the problem might be: When do you go open-source, and when do you dictatorially shut down debate?

Greater minds than mine have been over this issue. Sometimes it gets phrased in terms of innovation; other times, it surfaces as a debate about centralization vs. decentralization. 

It also shows up as a trust issue: when do you trust, as in collaboration–working closely and openly with others. And when do you trust, as in delegation–being willing to let go, to subordinate your wishes to a greater good.

Seen this way, the right answer is probably a blend. Business innovation rarely comes from brilliant minds sitting in isolation; it grows when people are willing to openly engage with each other, rather than to identify their mission as self-aggrandizing. (Ross Smith has written about this, as has Robert Porter Lynch.) Successful innovation depends on successful collaboration at the personal and organizational level.

But a successful organization can’t live on innovation alone: great insights have to be commercialized, produced, marketed, sold, and controlled. These tasks require different skills. (Malcolm Gladwell draws an interesting parallel when he dismisses the idea that Twitter can be a tool for political revolution; looking at the civil rights movement, he suggests its power came from personal connections, not distant ones).

Ideally, then, a successful organization would manifest two kinds of ability to trust their internal teammates.

1.    the ability to trust peers—to offer up insights, and to hear criticism without shut-down and resentment; to be open to ideas from others; to be free of NIH syndrome, and to embrace others’ ideas as your own;

2.    the ability to trust superiors (or designees), to defer to a majority, to sacrifice one’s own good for a greater good; to accept another as speaking for oneself; to delegate without clawing back; to grant others control over ourselves.

These trust dimensions are not any easier than the dimensions of centralize-decentralize. It’s tempting to look at Apple and glean lessons there; after all, they are cast in the role of successful challenger in both the Nokia and the Microsoft stories.

But technology is a distinct business; and while Steve Jobs’ reputation as a controlling manager is clear, it’s not clear (to me) whether Apple’s at what time in the process a decision is made and the ‘trust me’ approach takes over from the ‘we trust each other’ approach.

My guess is—as in most organizational design issues—the ‘right’ answer consists of a carefully crafted statement of ‘it depends,’ pointing out clearly the what, how and when of ‘depends.’

Robert Porter Lynch on Trust, Innovation and Performance (Trust Quotes #2)

Robert Porter Lynch may be one of the best trust thinkers you haven’t heard of.  A long-time thought leader in strategic alliances, he has written several books on collaboration and innovation. He quotes Robert Frost, has studied how the Greeks created trust, and counter-balances Machiavelli. He is equally at home with high tech companies and with laborers in the trenches.

He’s currently working with Paul R. Lawrence (Professor Emeritus, Organization Behavior at Harvard Business School) on Lawrence’s new book: Driven to Lead, and his own book: Leadership and the Architecture of Trust (to be published)

Excerpts from our Interview:

CHG: Welcome to the Trust Quotes series, Robert. You cover a range of trust-related topics, but let’s start with one. You talk about the strong link between trust and innovation. Can you explain that link to us?

RPL: Absolutely. All innovation comes from people who think differently — that is, one perspective meets another, and something new can be born. If two people in the same room think alike, one is unnecessary when it comes to innovation,. The eminent psychologist, Carl Gustav Jung wrote: The greater the contrast, the greater the potential. Great energy only comes from a correspondingly great tension between opposites.

But two differing perspectives don’t automatically create something new, and all too often the differences become destructive: like Republicans vs. Democrats, old vs. new, my way or the highway.

So the art becomes: how can you increase the creative aspect of interactions between opposites? And the answer is trust. When this tension exists in a trusting environment, people’s creative juices are aligned, and they become jointly innovative, thus trust is an alignment of human energy. This aligned energy is also referred to as synergy – something that is so often elusive in organizations and relationships.

CHG: That’s fascinating. Earlier in this series, Ross Smith of Microsoft said very much the same thing. Are you two in cahoots?

RPL: Nope, never heard of him, but that’s how memes work. That and he’s obviously an insightful man!

The Trust-Innovation Link

CHG: Well, how does creating greater trust enable greater innovation?

RPL: Turns out that’s a great question. Let me re-tweak it a bit, if I may. The question is: how can teams act at the highest level of performance? And the reason I phrase it that way is that there’s solid evidence to show that the highest team performance comes from trust. So high performance teams ought to know something about trust.
CHG: Where did you look, and what did you find?

RPL: I spent 2 years looking over the worst-to-first instances in sports: such as Vince Lombardi’s Green Bay Packers of 1960 going from the bottom of the league to the Superbowl, or Pat Riley taking the L.A. Lakers to the NBA championship, or the most exciting of them all — arguably the greatest worst-to- first performance of all time, the 1980 American hockey team that won Olympic Gold against all odds, culminating in a win over the monstrously dominant Russian team.

One thing people forget is that Coach Ross Brooks — a man who had himself had been turned down from an earlier Olympic team — turned down a player who himself had more talent and better credentials than probably any other player on the team.

Why would a coach refuse a superior player as you’re heading into the Olympics? Well, the player was asked to practice with the team, and the team confronted the coach unanimously, saying ‘you can’t hire him.’

‘Why not?’ asked the coach.

“Because he doesn’t give 100%,” the team said.

“But he’s more talented than anyone else, even at less-than-full effort, he’s arguably the best player on the ice,” the coach protested.”

“But coach,” the players said, “if you never know what effort he’s going to give, you can’t trust what he’ll do. You never know how much game he’s bringing. You cannot depend on him to be reliable.  He wasn’t a collaborative kind of guy, he’d rather try to score himself than pass the puck to someone better positioned.”

That’s why in hockey they still call Wayne Gretzky the “Great One:” because he not only scored more goals than any other player, he also had more assists – he was the ultimate team player.

And it is this sense that permeates all great teams. They trust each other; they trust each other to give the utmost to the team. Which means, everyone can rely on everyone else’s motives, and everyone can trust the results. Unqualified commitment by each member of the team drives trust, and trust enables high performance.

That’s the link.

CHG: I get it. So, where are some lessons for business?

RPL: Well, you’d think way more businesses would grasp the obvious economics of collaborating — cross functional teams, innovative supply chains, alliances and joint ventures, for example. But very few companies do them right—because they don’t trust, because they don’t know how trust is created or destroyed.

CHG: How does that play out?

RPL: Todd Welch and I researched this; and the one thing we found was that unless there is trust at the top of the organization, collaborations don’t work. When trust is lacking, legal agreements are erroneously expected to fill the gap. And, of course, the longer the legal agreement, the stronger the distrust, because nearly all legal agreements actually generate more distrust, exacerbating fears and thus making it less likely the venture would succeed. You could make book on it.

CHG: You told me a story of a client who does major huge deals on a handshake basis. What’s the real story behind that one?

RPL: That is the real story. The only thing surprising is that the rest of us consider it surprising. The company is Daymon Worldwide, which provides private label brands to the grocery industry. I’ve seen Du Pont and Merck put a billion-dollar joint venture together on a handshake, and the legal agreements followed a year later. I witnessed Fleet bank enter a multi-million construction of their headquarters on a handshake with Gilbane Construction company. Handshake deals are far more common than many think.

CHG: You have developed a couple of models for thinking about trust; can you tell us briefly about them?

RPL: One of the primary reasons trust has been an elusive mystery is because we have either ambiguous or complicated understanding about why humans act the way they do. Recently Paul Lawrence has cracked the code on human behavior and provided a very elegant way of explaining what others have made so convoluted. Anyone from senior execs to high-school students grasps it in about five minutes: Here’s a brief explanation.

Trust and Ethics

CHG: What’s your view of the connection between trust and ethics? And what’s the state of ethics in business these days?

RPL: It goes without saying that ethics are in an abominable state of affairs, but I’m not sure that’s really different. Washington is better now than it was in the 1870’s, and business is probably no worse than it’s ever been. That’s an empty compliment because poor trust is very, very expensive. The biggest problem with ethics is the illusion we all have that good ethics would cure the problems of distrust.

Ethics actually creates a dilemma for building trust. While the lack of ethics will definitely destroy trust, the presence of ethics may only bring trust to a neutral point. Good ethics implies “I won’t do something wrong;” it takes the fear out of the picture. But it doesn’t mean “I’ll be effective,” nor “use sound judgment,” nor “be collaborative,” nor “compassionate,” nor “spontaneous.” Other things are necessary.

We all know ethical people who are ornery, dispassionate, inconsiderate, self-righteous, or uncooperative; thus while “trustworthy,” they are still not able to generate a trusting relationship. Trust embraces far more than ethics.

Real trust comes from people who are willing to be highly cooperative as well as ethical. Trust manifests when three things are boldly present: good character, good competence, and good collaboration. When we see great trust, we see people who know that their self-interest must always be put into a bigger picture: what’s in the mutual interest of the relationship itself.

Just yesterday I was asked to help rebuild a relationship between two business partners where the trust had broken down. The older of the two partners said it so well:

“For me at this stage of my life, I find it very difficult to separate friendship from business. The qualities of a great friend are quite similar to those of a great partner. Frankly, I don’t know where the dividing line is any more. The qualities of trust, integrity, mutuality, loyalty, and commitment to a larger mission are inherent in both a friendship and business partnership. As we embark on the threshold of a noble destiny together, I want these qualities to be present between us. In fact, this is more than a “want,” it is an “essential ingredient.”


This is the second installment of Trust Quotes, our new series featuring interviews with leading thinkers and practitioners in the world of trust: people who apply trust in powerful ways in business and society.

Previous Issues:

Trust Quotes #1: Ross Smith of Microsoft on trust and innovation

Innovation: The Critical Link to Trust

You know how sometimes you hear a theme every once in a while, and you don’t make much of it? But then you hear it five times in a week, and suddenly you say whoah, something’s going on here!

That’s how it is for me with trust and innovation. I have now seen enough about their connection that I notice it.

Got problems with innovation? R&D not giving you much bang for the buck? Suffering from same-old service offerings? Product un-differentiation got you down? Read on.

Observation: Pessimists Don’t Innovate, Nor do they Trust

In Why Victims Can’t Invent Anything, Michael Maddock and Raphael Louis Viton suggest a simple test for the ability to innovate: the old glass is half full, half empty test. If you are optimistic, you are a creator.  If you are pessimistic, you are a victim. Guess which one wildly out-innovates the other?

Now marry that up with the profile of trusting and non-trusting people from Eric Uslaner, arguably the world’s leading academic expert in trust. Paraphrasing, high-trusting people believe that life is good, and that they are in control of their lives. Non-trusting people believe life is fundamentally unfair, and that other powers are in control of their lives.

You want to increase innovation? Hire optimistic, high-energy people; shun conspiracy theorists. And why does this work? Because they trust each other.

Diagnosis: More Trust Yields More Innovation

Let’s follow this logic further. Trusting each other means people are open to each others’ ideas. Robert Porter Lynch explains the link. 

Creativity happens, he says, very little by sitting around contemplating. Rather, it comes about from our interaction with others. In particular: people different from ourselves, who think in fundamentally opposite ways from the way we think.

If we’re not open to others—if our fundamental approach to others is fear-based, if we come from anger or ego or fight/flight responses—we shut ourselves off from the creative forces that come through sharing those different perspectives. We see them as threats.

The bridge is trust. If we can trust the other person, then we can hear and consider their perspectives, as they do ours. Net: communication, creativity, new ideas, innovation.

Trust and Innovation: Does It Work in the Real World?

Forget the thinkers: who does this? One who can speak to this directly is Ross Smith at Microsoft.  When in charge of the Windows Security Team, Ross and wingman Mark Hanson realized they had some incredible talent on the team that was under-utilized. They needed to innovate. As Ross studied innovation, he began to realize trust was the key to getting there.

Does it work for Ross? He’ll answer a resounding ‘yes.’

In the course of the next month, you’ll be hearing from several of these people: Eric Uslaner, Robert Porter Lynch and Ross Smith in particular, as well as others. I think you’ll enjoy reading what they have to say.

For now, let’s just notice what they all agree on: the road to innovation goes through trust.