I was listening to a podcast during my daily walk and came across an idea discussed by the hosts. It's a podcast related to soft skills in the technology world, and the hosts, with decades of experience in this field, share ideas that are both funny and enlightening.

It's about the "trust battery" analogy. This analogy explains how both fruitful and frustrating relationships can develop between two colleagues. Instead of focusing on people or the nature of tasks, this analogy illustrates that the quality of interpersonal relationships depends on each interaction between two colleagues; how they stack up. Everyone starts with a battery charged at 50%. Based on the results of these interactions, the battery either charges or drains.

Immediately, for me, this analogy illuminates two important aspects of the quality of interpersonal relationships at work.

First, this analogy emphasizes the relationship rather than the people. What makes certain collaborations frustrating comes from the quality of the relationship. Any reflection on people's value and competence can be avoided.

Next, by characterizing the relationship first rather than the person, the trust battery analogy brings important nuances when talking about interpersonal frustration at work. By emphasizing the quality of the relationship rather than the people, it becomes clearer that a person at work can have extremely pleasant and productive relationships with certain people while others experience significant frictions with.

[At Shopify] We’re very honest about everyone’s strengths and weaknesses. We even post them on our internal wiki. Everyone is invited to do it, and they can explain how they like to work and what they value. It takes a year of working together until you sort of understand people. We’ve always been looking for ways to accelerate this.

Another concept we talk a lot about is something called a “trust battery.” It’s charged at 50 percent when people are first hired. And then every time you work with someone at the company, the trust battery between the two of you is either charged or discharged, based on things like whether you deliver on what you promise.

Humans already work like this. It’s just that we decided to create a metaphor so that we can talk about this in performance reviews without people feeling like the criticisms are personal.

translated from french by Claude Sonnet 4

sources

Adam Bryant (2016-04-22), "Tobi Lütke of Shopify: Powering a Team With a 'Trust Battery'", New York Times