Trust Battery is coined by Toby Lutke, Shopify CEO. It is a simple mental model that applies the Battery and Charge analogy to Trust between people.

My mental model for trust is a slight variant. Especially in the context of workplace and my team.

I start all my interactions/relations with 100% Trust. And then if the person doesn’t live up to the trust level they lose some charge. If they do well it stays at 100%. If someone loses charge(constantly) beyond a level it makes very less sense to invest my time/energy in working with that person.

When someone picks up a task(or even an offline favor), I fully trust them to deliver on it. However, I plan some buffer(or a plan-B) in case they fail. In which case they lose some charge. I usually plan to pick up the slack in case I incorrectly trust a person.

Why this works for me:

Not trusting requires a lot of energy. So partly its my laziness.

Practically, I have found that a trust-fail-fix approach takes up much less mental bandwidth than not trusting at all.

Starting from a place of low-trust means trying to guess all the different ways in which the person could fail. This leads to putting in place precautions/measures to avoid those paths to failure.You are trying to prevent a problem that you don’t know about. And you do so by going brute force. That is trying to anticipate and solve all those potential problems in your head. This consumes too much mental bandwidth.

Instead I feel much more comfortable dealing with this after the fact. i.e. after the person has failed to deliver. There is now one concrete problem to solve. This now requires very focused energy and zero guess work.

This has greatly impact the velocity. Going safe is slow. (Fail Fast and Iterate)

Lack of trust is usually the underlying rationale for a lot of cumbersome processes that we see in the industry.

And When you Fail…

Solving of problem after the fact could take multiple forms:

  1. you do the task yourself.
  2. you assign someone else(with higher trust) to do the task.
  3. you show the person how it needs to be done and let him iterate.
  4. most importantly you plan sufficient buffer to allow one of the 3 solutions above.

What does trust really mean?

I tend to think of trust in two independent lanes:

  1. Trust of Motivation/Intention: Is the person motivated enough to deliver on a task with 100% commitment?
  2. Trust of Ability: Does the person have the actual skills and knowledge to complete the task?

Without Motivation, Ability is of no use. If there is Motivation, lack of Ability can be bridged given time(implies hard work).

If you are working on critical projects, esp. time critical projects, then its very important that you can trust both motivation and ability. But most of the times this is an ideal situation.

As a leader it is very important to learn how to keep your team members motivated. If you know how to do that, then all you need to do is have a strong hiring process to find people whose Ability you can trust.

Motivating every individual is tricky and probably the biggest challenge for a leader.