How to help your team build trust (Transcript)

Please note the following transcript may not exactly match the final audio, as minor edits or adjustments could be made during production.

Anne Morriss: Hello everyone. Welcome to Fixable from the TED Audio Collective. I'm your host, Anne Morriss. I'm a company builder and leadership coach. 

Frances Frei: And I'm your co-host, Frances Frei. I'm a Harvard Business School professor and I'm Anne's wife.

Anne Morriss: On this show, we believe meaningful change happens fast, and we like to walk the talk by solving workplace problems quickly together with our callers. 

Frances Frei: Which problem are we tackling today, love?

Anne Morriss: Well, Frances, it's Infrastructure week here at Fixable . Our caller, who we're gonna call Kelly, is a township manager in the Midwest. She makes sure that things like roads, bridges, and parks are in good shape and fixes them when they're broken.

Frances Frei: Oh, that is, that's like a fixer of things you can drop on your foot. I love that. 

Anne Morriss: A, a, a total Fixer. She is asking for help with how to increase trust and engagement among her staff, so I'll let her explain. 

Kelly: Hi Anne and Frances. I deeply value the trust building principles of authenticity, logic, and empathy, and see them as vital to building the public's trust in government.

However, I face two challenges. First, I believe it's essential to instill these values in my staff as they engage with the public just as much as I do, and play a critical role in building public trust. Unlike traditional skills, I find that these principles are challenging to teach and develop in others.

Second, I feel as though trust building actions like engagement and responsiveness sometimes conflict with governmental priorities like efficiency and cost control. While I see trust building as a worthwhile investment, others might think otherwise. So I'm wondering if you have advice on how to instill trust building values in a team, and how to balance these efforts with the need for efficiency.

Anne Morriss: Wow. I hear that Fixer, uh, in her voice. This is gonna be fun. 

Frances Frei: It's totally gonna be fun. The two things, one is how do you develop these ideas in others?

Anne Morriss: Mm-hmm . 

Frances Frei: Like how do you develop the skills on authenticity, logic, and empathy? It's gonna be so fun. And the other one, it, it's a classic trade off between I wanna invest more to have the experience be better and I need to do it in a cost effective way.

And so we're gonna explore whether or not there are any win-wins there. 

Anne Morriss: Yeah. I, I love that. I, I also think it's interesting that she's really thinking about trust at this higher level, not just interpersonally with her team members or between team members, but at the level of the team itself and the relationship of the team with their constituents.

But how do you scale this trust solution to more complicated systems? 

Frances Frei: Love it.

Anne Morriss: Frances, let's bring her in.

Kelly, welcome to Fixable. 

Kelly: Thank you. 

Anne Morriss: So give us a sense of a day in the life of Kelly. 

Kelly: Oh gosh. So the work that we do ranges from overseeing development, overseeing building and construction, and parks and trails and preservation, maintaining roads and bridges and all those things that go into just running a, a community, to the same stuff that you guys talk about on a regular basis, just organizationally. HR and IT and finance and budget and all that stuff. Problems that I wake up to can be everything from a bridge that got hit and is gonna be out for a year while we rebuild it, to a snowstorm that's coming through, to somebody that knocks on my door with a concern or a complaint, just like any other organization.

Frances Frei: So you are the person we call, that's what I'm hearing. You are the person we call. 

Kelly: Right. About so many strange things. Yes. 

Anne Morriss: What drew you to this work? 

Kelly: Uh, I needed a job just like a lot of other people do when they graduate initially, and I had an opportunity to work in local government, and here I am 25 years later.

I think what's kept me, you know, you're really connected to the people you work for, you know the community. There's something really rewarding about that. 

Anne Morriss: Yeah. It sounds like you have a sense of on the good days, what you love about it. On the bad days, what's frustrating? 

Kelly: My challenging days are the ones where I'm dealing with more of the internal organizational stuff. Just the challenge of getting people to row together in one direction. 

Anne Morriss: What inspired you to come on the show today? 

Kelly: Well, really it was one of the recent conversations where you stepped foot into the public sector. I think in talking about the Democratic Party, and I've spent just a decent amount of my own time on the topic of public trust in government. So working with people to impart the "skills" of building trust, I find challenging. Those are soft, they're touchy feely. It's not show up on time or get this report in on time. 

Anne Morriss: Can you give us an example of when you think that the team as a whole didn't build as much trust as might have been possible?

Kelly: Sure. So there are numerous opportunities where an individual on the team has an opportunity to interface with somebody on the public. It can be just a phone conversation. It can be going out and inspecting something. It can be dealing with a complaint. And probably too often than any of us might want, that interaction has some issue, some problem, some complaint associated with it. How that person receives that information and listens and processes whatever that person is saying and responds to that person, just that interaction is so valuable and it's something you don't necessarily get back. And just being able to be humble, be open, listen, and just empathize with whoever you're dealing with, and then try to work together to solve the problem. That skill, if we wanna call it that, is, sometimes chafes against the natural human ego of wanting to be right. Of wanting to have authority, of wanting to know what you're doing. And that's what I find challenging as somebody to teach and impart.

Anne Morriss: Yeah. Beautiful. That's really clear. So in our model, which it sounds like you have played with before this call, would you say it's safe to say that the trust wobble that you would diagnose for your team is an empathy wobble? 

Kelly: Yeah. No, I, I think that's a true statement. It is difficult to disconnect your own issue that you're dealing with. So people take personal offense when it's really not, you know about them personally. 

Anne Morriss: Mm-hmm. And then in our model, we also like to highlight what we call a trust anchor, which is on this dropdown menu of logic, empathy, and authenticity, there's often, usually a strength for an individual or a team or even an organization. There's also a strength to counteract that wobble. What, what do you think is the team's strength right now? 

Kelly: Probably logic. The nature of the work is generally one where you're pointing back to some standard, regulation, policy. 

Anne Morriss: I'm curious, as you've tried to coach your team through this challenge, what kinds of things have you tried and what's worked and what hasn't worked?

Kelly: I don't know that anything, I feel like anything has really worked miraculously. Uh, I think it depends on the, the person I'm working with and just their own, uh, natural abilities. And I try to talk through how somebody's reacting to something, the effect that it has, the reasons to try to manage our reactions differently, what we have to gain from that.

I will tell you, 'cause I know this is something you talk about frequently, the art of storytelling. That is not my art. So I think that's something that I wish I did better and maybe something that could help in this regard. But I approach this with logic probably, which isn't necessarily always helpful. 

Anne Morriss: If we are wildly successful in being helpful to you today, what is different for you on the other side of this conversation? 

Kelly: If I could have, a, a dialogue, a conversation with either individuals or the group that I work with and have them go, ah, aha, I get it. I understand why this method of service delivery makes a difference. And for me personally, I see the benefit of this type of service delivery, both immediately to obviously the organization that I work for and the government I serve, I wanna be able to instill that aha moment of why this matters. 

Anne Morriss: Beautiful. That's a beautiful bar for us to shoot for. Frances, let's get you in here with any questions, and then let me invite you to just summarize where we are as well. 

Frances Frei: Great. First, I feel like you are employing my extended family. Let me just go ahead and say that. There is a Cheryl Wheeler song that is called Frequently Wrong, But Never In Doubt. But the way that you, you're invested in your own authority, it's particularly problematic when you know you're right and then our ego gets activated.

So I just wanna say I felt this situation for decades, so I think I'm gonna be helpful. So our authenticity is a logic anchor and empathy wobble, authentically. And so what we're gonna do is give you some tools in order to create the aha moment to appeal to the logic brain that cultivating empathy is worth it.

Now here's the really good news. Empathy can be taught. And I'm, you know, as somebody who really cares about government, I'm glad you have logic anchors. 'Cause that's what keeps all of those bridges that aren't falling down not falling down. And that's what keeps everything working well. So that we are going to layer on top of this empathy is a really high quality problem to have. 

Anne Morriss: I'll just also offer that I live with this profile. And so I may have some insight to share as well. 

Kelly: Excellent.

Anne Morriss: All right, Frances, kick us off. 

Frances Frei: Yeah, I'd love to. First, let me just ask you this. You clearly are very fluent with authenticity, logic and empathy as a trust triangle. Have you ever, uh, shared this framework with your team? 

Kelly: I haven't actually. Uh, you know, I think I've thought about it. I'm somewhat self-conscious that, again, back to the logic anchor, my instinct is to say, here, read this. This'll fix you . And I, I don't want people to react negatively to that, but no, I haven't. 

Frances Frei: Yeah. 

Kelly: And that may be a good place to start. 

Frances Frei: Okay. So I'll tell you why that's my first recommendation, is because you are very comfortable with your diagnosis of you and Anne is comfortable with her diagnosis of her and I'm comfortable with my diagnosis of me because they were self diagnoses. And the power of this model is the self-diagnosis.

Kelly: Mm-hmm . 

Frances Frei: It does not work very well as an other diagnosis, and I think that's why you're hesitant. So telling someone else they're an empathy wobbler, whew. It's not gonna go well. But allowing someone else to identify their strength and where they struggle, that's already sanded you so that you can come in and paint for solutions.

So I encourage you to, to teach them about it and let them do a self-diagnosis. And your preamble in the beginning can be, this has really helped me to understand me and I wanna share that gift with you. To the extent that it's helpful for you individually, and I'd like to see if it's helpful for us collectively.

So, okay. So, so that is, I think that's the first one, is to introduce the language of anchors and wobbles. And the meta reason for that is that wobbles are not fatal flaws. They are just the tendencies that tend to get in the way, and we all have a wobble. And so you get to celebrate people's strengths and then say, now where do we want to bring in some learned behaviors?

Now doing this at the team level, like when everyone is doing it with one another. What will certainly happen is on your team, you're gonna have some empathy wobblers, but on your team, you're gonna have some empathy anchors. You get to ask them questions, so it's not you. You are not actually, you're just facilitating. They are going to be celebrated for the deep insight that they have, and people are gonna look around and be like, oh my gosh. Wow. So you probably need no extra skills from what's already in the team. We just haven't given them the microphone and the spotlight to do it. Also, the people that are empathy wobbles that are being a little defensive, you're gonna get them in touch with their strengths on the logic side, and it's a beautiful strength, and so you get to celebrate that.

The other thing about it is trust is in the eye of the beholder. This is a really lovely technique, that it's not that I think I'm logical, for example, it's do you experience me as logical? It's not that I think I'm empathetic, it's do you experience me as empathetic? And then it becomes a curious puzzle.

So let's say, well actually I do care about the public, but they are not experiencing it. We're gonna go find the few pebbles that are in the way, and it's gonna be so awesome because you are gonna get credit for all of that loving empathy that you have that just is like just a teeny little shift away.

Anne Morriss: Kelly, what's your reaction to this direction? 

Kelly: I love it. I love the idea of sharing the framework, and I've seen it where people have the best of intentions and they truly want the best outcome, and they're just not perceived that way. So that idea of just cleaning up whatever the, the little obstacles are.

I like that. 

Anne Morriss: I'm gonna push on another lever in this conversation, which is, there is a story embedded in the experience you shared with us, that the defensiveness on your team in these interactions is rooted in ego. The human ego is rampant. It plays a starring role in every story. So with that caveat- 

Frances Frei: Thank goodness.

Anne Morriss: I'll say that sometimes this defensiveness, when I see it in logic anchors, is their deep understanding that whatever they're being asked for is a threat to the beautiful design of the system that they're defending. And for example, and Frances, I will tee you up for a part of this, there is this idea in service business that the customer is always right. So when they call, like the empathetic thing to do is to give them what they want, but if we push on this, we know that if we give the customer everything they want, they will put us out of business. So sometimes as you're bringing the logic anchors along on this like market facing interaction, not only can you say no to some of these constituent requests, you must say no.

And it is the empathetic move if we're trying to solve for the best interest of this organization continuing to function over time. The key is to communicate the no with empathy. And communicate the no in a way that says, I see you. I see what you want. It's a totally legitimate request, but here's why we're gonna have to say no to you. Or here's why the answer is not now.

And the beautiful high analytics, fast processing speed folks on the team, like making that discussable in the system, that we're not changing the what, we're changing the how. And let's get really clear on the what, because your instinct here to say no was exactly right. 

Kelly: Yeah, a hundred percent. And I've experienced that numerous times.

And we're step, one step beyond the service industry, where chances are we are gonna have to say no on so many things, and there has to be that explanation as to why. I've spoken with so many people where my answer is no, but just the act of listening to them, empathizing with where they're coming from, and explaining the no so often the result of that conversation is, I understand. I really appreciate you listening to me. I'm frustrated, but I understand, and it's a positive ending. So it's in my mind, I keep thinking this is really simple. 

Frances Frei: Yeah, and to operationalize it, what's instinctual to you, Kelly, might not be instinctual to the team and it might thus have to be taught so that it becomes a learned behavior.

But even that small thing you said, listening so that the other people feel heard. 

Kelly: Right. 

Frances Frei: I think that has to be taught. Because as an anthropologist, if you observe people who are listening so that the other person can be heard, you can watch that with the volume off and you can see it. Now, so I would say to people, even when you're on the phone, I can tell if you're listening so the other person wants to be heard, versus you are listening so that you can get in and say no. And that is a reframe. The explaining a no. Here's how I would frame that. Instead of my saying no, I'm gonna give you the story so that you conclude no. But if you give me all of the context for it, and then you too, also rationally understand, ah, this isn't gonna work.

Did I lead them to conclude that no was a reasonable response? And it's an investment in the other person to do that. It's an investment in the psyche. 

Anne Morriss: Just to underscore, Frances, where you're going, these things that we assume are kind of inherited and intrinsic, you either got, you got it or you don't. This empathy thing. In our experience, they, all of these things can be taught, but you have to create the space to teach them and make them discussable. And there are probably people in the system who are already modeling this and are probably pretty good at who do this at talking about it. Can you imagine within the, the constraints of this organization creating space for more formal discussion, training, education around this stuff?

Kelly: We've been making an effort to do that in a number of different ways, and just the frameworks that we've discussed are helpful in advancing that. 

Anne Morriss: So if you can conjure in your mind's eye, like a couple of people on the team who you think could really benefit from this kind of work, like if we invited them into this conversation, and let's just call this person Annie.

Kelly: Mm-hmm.

Anne Morriss: And she's describing what happened to her. Like what language would she use in the moment? 

Kelly: Particularly if it's a person who's overseeing another department, they feel that their group, their department is under attack and it is theirs to defend. They're defending the integrity, they're defending an honor. That's so, that's one way to go about it.

I have heard entitled. Where somebody's receiving a, a complaint that they think is absolutely ridiculous, and there's no reason that somebody should be complaining about something so trite and they have a hard time empathizing or putting themselves in that person's shoes. In fact, they don't want to because it's so unreasonable.

Frances Frei: Those are great. 

Anne Morriss: And then do you have people on the team who are particularly good at fielding those kinds of calls? 

Kelly: Yes. 

Anne Morriss: If the kind of meta question is can we create more space for what we would call training, but I think can show up in very different ways. So like, let's say for the next 90 days, we're gonna pilot a, a weekly meeting where people come into the room and they bring examples of experience they had with constituents, like conversations that didn't go well. 

Frances Frei: Didn't go as well as they wanted. 

Anne Morriss: And the whole team is there as a resource to workshop different ways to handle this situation in the future. So sometimes that, we'll see in the public setting, there's, there's a constituent training moment that happens when people come on the team, but it's not an ongoing conversation where that kind of development can continue over time and people really get into it. And you're signaling that our job, like it's a very powerful cultural signal that our job is to continuously improve.

It's not to get this right every single time. 

Kelly: No, I love that. Yeah. And I like just bringing it in as a discussion point as, as opposed to just me being the one that's having the dialogue. 'Cause I don't have all the answers. And there are certainly things that other people do far better than I do. So getting them all together is great.

Frances Frei: And a weekly rhythm tends to be a nice rhythm is that you can imagine using it to, let's celebrate the wins in that, what we achieved. And then let's also talk about where I, gosh, I'd like to revisit that pitch. And so let's workshop it. Now, what we have learned, it helps if you come up with some questions that you wanna visit or other high status people come up with questions they want to revisit first. 'Cause otherwise it'll be silence. You wanna show that it's a high status activity, and then really beautiful things happen. So let me give you an example. You do this for a couple of weeks and then I struggle with entitled callers, let's say. I have an entitled person alone. I'm like, oh my gosh, can you hold on for one moment?

And then I just got my friend to get on the call with me. I have Jane here who's just, your question is super interesting and I've brought in, I've brought in Jane to be helpful to us. I stay on the call and I get to watch and learn with how Jane succeeds and diffuses. And so if you just have that as a norm, now, first of all, Jane feels like a freaking hero. A freaking hero, because she did it. We're talking about an investment of four minutes, maybe five minutes. It's not a lot of extra work, but you're getting the like community feel of it, and we're working together. So to Anne's point, you will get better every week.

Anne Morriss: I also think this is an invitation to bring some levity. 

Frances Frei: Yes.

Anne Morriss: Particularly in government can feel very serious. Our job is to make sure the bridges don't fall. They're like, that is a real burden. And if you can show up and even have some fun with it, this is the session where we get to get better and we get to normalize like making mistakes and we get to learn together. And I don't have all the answers. Like, this is really hard stuff. And it is really hard to, for our egos to not get activated when someone's screaming at us. And oh, by the way, when life is hard, one of the first phone calls we get to make is to call our elected representatives and let 'em have it, let 'em have it.

So you guys are also receiving a lot of stuff that, that has nothing to do with you. The degree of difficulty of that is high. 

Kelly: Oh, right. 

Anne Morriss: And it is a learning by doing sport. 

Kelly: A hundred percent, yes. That environment of being able to do it in that setting, will disconnect it from the ego. First, it takes, you know, adds a little bit of time to it, whatever it is, and it, it, they are entertaining. So it, it can absolutely be entertaining. It becomes, as I said in the beginning, a a bit of a personal challenge and instead of really avoiding or pushing these calls away, they become somewhat fun. 

Anne Morriss: Lower the stakes. 

Frances Frei: Yeah. Like a puzzle. 

Anne Morriss: Then it's four weeks in, you're like, oh, I saw this TED talk on trust. I don't know. Might be helpful, but there's some vocabulary here we might be able to use. I don't know. 

Frances Frei: Learning collectively is a beautiful way to do it. What you're gonna do is let the heroes, let the pros reveal what's going on and let everyone learn it experientially and it will be really beautiful. 

Anne Morriss: And you get to show up on a totally different emotional frequency.

So it's not, oh, mom is disappointed in us. 

Kelly: Yes. 

Anne Morriss: Yeah. You're the, now you're the cool aunt who like wants to figure this out. 

Who's got really good snacks. 

Uh, and is like, I, I don't know. Like how do we do this? We're getting a bunch of these calls and people are stressed in 2025. 

Frances Frei: Like how do we want to respond?

Anne Morriss: And how do we get this right and how do we support each other? 'Cause this is not a solo sport, to be on the front lines. 

Frances Frei: No. And then you also prime high status people, who people think are like getting the As, have them come, come up with problems. So now we think, oh, high status is coming up with problems. That's really important to do early. 

Kelly: Well, and it shows the level of vulnerability and not making other people feel like they're on the hot seat. 

Anne Morriss: Where are you now in this conversation, Kelly, compared to where you started?

Kelly: I'm energized. I feel like there's some ideas certainly that I haven't thought of before and that are not only doable but fun. So looking forward to it. 

Anne Morriss: Yeah, play with that emotional frequency challenge. As the leader of this team, what are you noticing that people are feeling around you? And then what is it that you want them to feel and where, where do you see the gaps? 

Kelly: Right. Certainly the temperature of the overall political environment impacts not only the, the staff and the way they, they do their job, but also the public and how they interact with quote, the government, and, uh, so while we're not in the trenches really on the issues, uh, that are really on people's minds at the moment, the, the, the temperature still plays a role. And we've been through this several times in the last decades. Uh, so just recognizing that, I think that we have, we're in a better place now than we were 10 years, 15 years ago. Just as a team, I think the team has coalesced, so there's, I think we're more able to have the levity that you are referring to and the open discussions than we were a decade ago. So that's positive. And it becomes more and more important as the environment around us becomes a little bit more tenuous.

Anne Morriss: Yeah. All the more reason to get together on a regular basis. So tension is being absorbed at the team level and not by individual team members where it's gonna come at the highest cost. Did we achieve the objective? Did you get what you came for? 

Kelly: You did. It was a lot of fun. 

Anne Morriss: Well, we are so rooting for you.

I'm still thinking about your opening comment about your best days in this job that is among the hardest jobs in the world, and particularly right now, that what's deeply meaningful to you is when people reach out and say thank you. And so I just wanna offer a public service announcement to reach out and thank the people toiling for you and your families.

And we wanna thank you for your now decades of service making these systems work. And we're totally humbled by it. 

Kelly: Well, thank you. You've, you've energized at least another decade or so. So we'll keep going. 

Anne Morriss: Yes! That's our performance metric. 

Frances Frei: Perfect. Perfect.

Anne Morriss: Frances, what do you want listeners to take away from that conversation? 

Frances Frei: The challenges of individuals can be solved by the collective wisdom of the team. You just need to create a forum for it. 

Anne Morriss: Mm-hmm . 

Frances Frei: And that forum needs a cadence. Weekly sounds good. That forum needs snacks, and that forum needs a facilitator, not the distributor of knowledge, but just the person that's hosting the session that makes sure that people talk and that things are safe.

And then it should also have lots of celebration and letting people come in being the hero with their knowledge. 

Anne Morriss: So, so many beautiful things can happen in these forms, and I think we touched on a lot of them. One we didn't touch on was just the power of also celebrating failure. 

Frances Frei: Yeah. 

Anne Morriss: Sometimes, not just workshopping it, but celebrating it.

We wrote about this in our last book, but NerdWallet, a beautiful personal finance company, they famously have a fail wall, where people come in and put sticky notes of their, you know, failures up there publicly. 'Cause it also, we have these little like pieces of shame that get stuck when we get it wrong. And there's something really powerful about just bringing them into the light and that shame often just evaporates. The CEO is an active participant in Fail Wall. Always coming in and putting stuff up there. And so that's one thought I'm having. The second thought I'm having is last night at a wonderful dinner with a bunch of chief people officers in the neighborhood, and even in, not just in the public sector right now, but in the private sector, people are feeling a really strong sense of their obligation to take care of the people around them.

And we were having a conversation about what was working for people, and really reinforcing for everyone that no one is in this alone. That for every aspect of the job, they are connected to a team. And so forums that reinforce that for people, I think are particularly valuable right now. There's just a ton of uncertainty in the world and the human animal is really feeling it.

Frances Frei: Yeah. What I appreciated about this conversation is that we often think that, oh, if I'm gonna invest in my team, it's gonna have a large ticket price and it's gonna come at the expense of all of these other things, and we're talking about a 30 minute weekly meeting that's gonna make everyone better and it's gonna pay for itself and save time and higher engagement in weeks. And so I love the lightness of this structure. This is an investment that's gonna be, you can measure in single digits.

If you wanna be on fixable, please call us at 234 FIXABLE. That's 234-349-2253. Or email us at fixable@ted.com. 

Anne Morriss: We're gonna do a future episode focused on HR quick fixes, and we'd love to hear from you about what's on your mind when it comes to people issues, and the art and science of human resources.

Frances Frei: We look forward to hearing from you.

Anne Morriss: Fixable is brought to you by the TED Audio Collective and Pushkin Industries. It's hosted by me, Anne Morriss.

Frances Frei: And me, Frances Frei. 

Anne Morriss: This episode was produced by Rahima Nasa from Pushkin Industries. Our team includes Constanza Gallardo, Banban Cheng, Daniella Ballarezo, and Roxanne Hai Lash. 

Frances Frei: And our show was mixed by Louis at Story Yard.