This is an adaptation of an internal doc I wrote for Anthropic.

I’ve been noticing recently that often, a big blocker to teams staying effective as they grow is trust.

“Alice doesn’t trust Bob” makes Alice sound like the bad guy, but it's often completely appropriate for people not to trust each other in some areas:

One might have an active reason to expect someone to be bad at something. For example, recently I didn’t fully trust two of my managers to set their teams’ roadmaps… because they’d joined about a week ago and had barely gotten their laptops working. (Two months later, they’re doing great!)
One might just not have data. For example, I haven’t seen most of my direct reports deal with an underperforming team member yet, and this is a common blind spot for many managers [...]

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First published:
July 13th, 2024

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/EjkKtKK7KZit7Kca8/trust-as-a-bottleneck-to-growing-teams-quickly

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“Trust as a bottleneck to growing teams quickly” by benkuhn

LessWrong (30+ Karma)