Trusting them to act

I want to start by saying why this chapter exists, because we have been circling it for four days now.

Yesterday I wrote about who is allowed to organize, and put it down to resources. What an organization can afford. How much somebody has to learn before they are useful. What kind of work we hand out. All of that is true, and all of it sits on top of one question our sector has never looked at squarely.

We do not let anybody outside the staff do the real work of politics, because we do not trust them to do it.

Everything else is downstream. The approval queue, the toolkit, the tasks built so that nothing much depends on them. We have arranged an entire operating model around a question of trust that almost nobody has examined, largely because saying it out loud sounds like an insult to the people we rely on.

Let me be exact about what I mean by the real work, because our sector has become skilled at blurring it.

Stuffing envelopes is not it. Sharing a post is not it. Turning up on a Saturday to hold a placard somebody else designed is not it. None of those things require trust, which is precisely why they are the ones we give away. We have built a whole category of work that can be handed to anybody, because nothing depends on it.

The real work is the other kind. Deciding what her group is going to do this month. Talking to a journalist who has turned up at a meeting. Choosing not to run the action because the timing is wrong. Sitting with somebody who is about to walk away and finding out why. Every one of those requires that a person believe she will do it well, and that belief is the thing we have not been extending.

James MacGregor Burns spent a career on why this matters, and his central claim reframes the whole problem. Leadership exists only in relation to other people. Somebody acting alone is not leading. They are simply acting. Then the sentence I keep coming back to:

Leadership is nothing if not linked to collective purpose... Leadership mobilizes, naked power coerces.

Mobilizing and coercing both produce action. Coercion produces it regardless of the other person's will. Leadership engages that will, which means leadership only exists in situations where somebody could have said no. Remove the possibility of no and you have not got a weaker form of leadership. You have got management.

There are structural reasons we ended up here, and I have spent three chapters on them. The exposure that lands on one person's name when it goes wrong. The absence of any structure for handing authority over or taking it back. The single organizer whose week is the whole program's ceiling. Every one of those is real, and every one is sufficient on its own.

They are also, every one of them, answers to the same underlying question. Can she be trusted with this?

Few in today’s political sector have taken that question apart to see what is inside it. Let me try.

Stephen M. R. Covey, in The Speed of Trust, has a device I keep coming back to. Imagine you have been called into a courtroom as an expert witness, and the lawyer is trying to convince the jury that you are credible. What does he actually have to prove?

Four things, in Covey's account. First, that you are a person of integrity, that you are honest and congruent, that you have a reputation for being truthful, and that you would not lie. Second, that you have good intent, that you're not trying to deceive or protect anyone, that you don't have any hidden motive or agenda that would color your testimony. Third, that your credentials are excellent, that you do, indeed, have expertise, knowledge, skill, and capability in the area in which you are called to testify. And fourth, that you have a good track record, that you have demonstrated your capabilities effectively in other situations in the past, that you produce results.

Two of those are about character. Two are about competence.

Put one of your volunteers in the witness box.

She has been giving up her evenings for eight months. Nobody is paying her. She turned up because something called her and she wanted to be useful, and whatever else is true about her, she did not come to damage anything.

The character half is not the question. It almost never is with people who are giving their time for free, in one direction, for no return beyond the feeling of having done something that mattered. As statements of intent go, that is about as clean as public life offers.

What we do not know is the other half. Whether she can run a meeting people want to come back to. Whether she can hold a hard conversation without it turning into a fight. Whether, when something goes wrong in public, she does the thing that helps rather than the thing that feels good. We do not know, because nobody has ever seen her do any of it.

Which means we have spent twenty years treating a competence gap as though it were a character risk.

Look again at every instrument we reached for. The review step, the sign-off, the approval queue, the extra check-in. All of them police integrity and intent, neither of which was ever in doubt. None of them builds a capability. You cannot supervise somebody into being able to chair a difficult meeting.

Covey puts the way out in a single sentence, and it is the most useful thing in his book:

What gives trust its harder, more pragmatic edge is recognizing that competence is as vital to trust as character, and that both character and competence are within our ability to create or to change.

Character is difficult to build in an adult. Competence is not. The half that was missing is the half you can do something about.

Let me be honest about how much is actually missing, because our sector has a habit of pretending leadership is a personality trait that some people arrive with. It is not. Burns is emphatic on this: transforming leadership is developmental, and leaders and followers raise one another to higher levels of motivation. It is learned, over time, in relationship, and it takes more than we admit. Knowing when to let a disagreement run and when to close it. Knowing which person in the room has stopped speaking and why. Being able to say what the group is for, out loud, in a way that makes somebody want to stay. None of that is charisma. All of it is practice, and practice needs somebody to practise on and somebody to notice how it went.

Then there is the fourth core, and it is the one we have never had any way to satisfy.

Covey says results have three dimensions: what you have done before, what you are doing now, and what people expect you will do next. An organization has all three about an employee. It has months of evidence, what she said she would do in March, whether she did it, how she handled the week everything went wrong. About a volunteer leader it has almost nothing. A sign-up form and a good feeling.

The trust had to be extended blind, which is not trust. It is a bet, made with the organization's name as the stake, and people who declined to make it were behaving reasonably.

If the bet went wrong there was no way back, and that is the part I want to state precisely, because the loose version is wrong. It is not that you cannot remove a volunteer. You plainly can ask somebody to leave.

It is that removal has no structure.

Firing an employee runs on scaffolding built for the purpose. A contract. A documented record. A process with steps. An expectation, held by both sides since the first day, that this is a thing that can happen. None of it is pleasant, and all of it makes the ending procedural rather than personal.

Take a role away from a volunteer and you have none of that. What you have is the relationship — nothing else. The removal costs you the relationship, and usually the relationships of everybody who watched it happen. In a local group that is not one person leaving. That is the group.

The withholding was never about doubting people. It was about having no way to be wrong safely.

It is also why every software answer to this problem has felt like a betrayal. There were three on offer: constrain what she can do, watch what she does, or build a mechanism for removing her. Each solves the organization's problem by taking something from her. Each polices the two cores that were never in question and does nothing about the two that were.

Burns saw the deeper version of this in 1978. A volunteer leader has no coercive lever, no wage or rank that compels, and in his account that absence is not a weakness in the role. It is the condition of leadership itself. Authority that has not been earned and granted is not weak leadership; it is not leadership at all. So the search for a mechanism to control her was never a search for a better management tool. It was a search for a way to stop the relationship being a leadership relationship.

Nobody trusts you when you scream trust me at them. The purpose of a system is what a system does, so whatever an organization says about believing in its people, watch what its system does all day. It reviews. It approves. It waits. That is the purpose.

There is a version of this argument that turns into a fight with adrienne maree brown, and it would be both unfair and wrong, so let me go the other way.

Emergent Strategy lists two principles next to each other, and between them I think they answer the whole problem.

The first is trust the people, and in brackets, if you trust the people, they become trustworthy. That is an inversion of Lao Tzu, and she says so: in Stephen Mitchell's translation, if you don't trust the people, they become untrustworthy. She is right, and she is right about exactly the half I have been describing. Trust their intentions. Treating somebody as suspect is the most reliable method anybody has found for making them so.

The second, immediately after, is move at the speed of trust, a line brown credits to the communications strategist Mervyn Marcano, remixing Covey. That one answers the other half. Capability and track record are not things a person has or lacks. They accumulate, at a rate, and the rate is the whole point.

Two principles, side by side, covering all four cores between them.

Our sector took the first and ignored the second. We said trust the people at every conference for a decade, and then required that the trust show up whole and on day one, or not at all, which is precisely not moving at its speed. When it did not show up that way, we called the result a failure of nerve.

brown has a line about this I find hard to argue with. Trust is a seed that grows with attention and space.

Here is where it actually gets stuck, though, and it is more specific than either of them needed to say.

Trust grows on work. A person builds a record by doing something that mattered and having it come out, and then doing something slightly harder. That is the entire mechanism. But in most organizations the work that matters is the work only staff are allowed to do, so there is nothing for the trust to grow on. We hand people tasks we have already decided are not important, and then wait for a track record to appear.

You cannot build a track record on work that does not matter.

Trust is a seed that grows with attention and space, and we have been planting it in a parking lot.

The thing that has changed is not anybody's willingness. It is the sequence.

Trust used to have to come first, before anything could be seen, which is why it so rarely came at all. It can now go the other way round. The doing first, the record accumulating behind it, the responsibility growing as the record does. That is the order every trade on earth has used for centuries. It is what an apprenticeship is. It is the order organizing itself always used, and the one our sector quietly abandoned when the work moved onto screens.

It runs in both directions, which is the part I did not expect when we started building for it. She lacks something she cannot issue herself — the standing to walk into a room and say the organization has given her the go-ahead. You lack something you cannot conjure, which is evidence about somebody who has never been your employee. Credibility flows down. Record flows up. Neither side's confidence is bought with the other's dignity, and if it were, it would not be worth having.

What that needs is unglamorous. A record of what she said she would do and whether she did it, visible to both of you, accumulating quietly while she works. Scope that widens as it fills. Nobody has to trust anybody in advance.

She would earn it the way people have always earned it. We would just be able to see her doing it.