Meet the Trust Battery (Part 1)

What if every person you work with came with a little battery attached?

Not a phone battery.

A trust battery.

The idea has been around in different forms, but Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke is widely credited with popularizing the metaphor, and David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH) and Jason Fried helped bring it into the workplace conversation through Basecamp and their book It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work.

The concept is pretty simple.

When you meet someone new, their trust battery starts somewhere around the middle.

Maybe 50%.

From there, every interaction either charges it or drains it.

Keep your word?

Charge.

Do good work?

Charge.

Show up when things get difficult?

Big charge.

Miss a commitment?

Drain.

Blame someone else?

Drain.

Act like a complete idiot in a meeting?

Probably a little drain.

The interesting part is what happens when the battery gets really low.

At 90%, someone might give you the benefit of the doubt.

At 10%, that same person might wonder what you're really up to.

You send a short email.

“What's wrong with Doug?”

You ask a question.

“Is Doug challenging me?”

You make a decision.

“Doug is trying to control things.”

Same Doug.

Different battery.

And that's why I like the metaphor.

It explains something we experience all the time but don't always have a good way of describing.

Trust changes how we interpret behavior.

A high trust battery gives people the benefit of the doubt.

A low trust battery takes it away.

But there is another problem with the trust battery.

What happens when someone else starts messing with it?

What if the battery isn't being drained by your actions?

What if it's being polluted by someone else's narrative?

That's where things get really interesting.

But we'll save that one for next time.

Doug is OK.