In yesterday’s mega-collaborative post of better work tips (and thanks again, everyone, for contributing, reading, and commenting on the post), I shared the following observation about doing better work:

My advice: assume nothing until you have established solid trust in the different people that you work or partner with.

President Ronald Reagan helped to popularize the saying “Trust but verify” and I think there’s a lot of truth in that statement. A mistake made by someone you’re depending on (or made by us when we mistakenly assume that a commitment is in place) can cost more than any productivity gains from any tips.

Trust

It’s a sad state of affairs that a book like Trust Agents had to come out.  That book is about humanizing modern business, especially on the Web or over the Internet, based on finding ways to look and act as a reputable citizen of the Web.  It’s about lifting individuals onto more human-looking perches and having them behave accordingly.  The foundation of the Trust Agents house is that when we are perceived as being trustworthy, we will do better in business.  You have to be more than just a superior (well, OK, great) human being, though.  You have to earn trust through your actions.  You have to give a lot before you can feel remotely comfortable about starting to ask for things.

It reminds me of when I first started buying and selling on eBay years ago.  eBay reputation was the Web 1.0 prototype of the “trust agent”, in my opinion, although reputation and reference-based commerce went back to the days of the BBS and Usenet.  eBay, though, had the first relatively clean and easy way to make reputation, and by extension trust, available for literally any idiot to use.  Many people would almost literally give stuff away, losing money on sales, trying to earn positive feedback while avoiding the dreaded negative feedback that knocked your reputation down from 100% to some smaller percentage.  I know I did.  And I know it stung like hell on the very rare occasions when I got negative feedback (and, yes, I did screw up a couple of times, although it was out of sloppiness or ignorance rather than greed or malice).  To my mind, this is when online reputation became available to the masses.

Amazon.com reviews ushered in a new type of reputation proof through the quality of your reviews and the feedback that you got from other Amazon.com community members.  This was another step towards what we now have for social media because while you could profit from eBay sales, it wasn’t very easy to profit from Amazon.com book reviews since you never got paid for reviewing their products – they were more about reputation or “whuffie”, as Tara Hunt or Cory Doctorow might say.

Today we use social proof for creating visible reputation on social networks, social media applications, and blogs.  Twitter followers, Facebook friends, blog subscribers, and LinkedIn recommendations are the Web 2.0 version of eBay reputation.

Assume nothing

The reason that I listed “assume nothing” as my work tip is that I used to have that phrase taped to my work computer monitor over a decade ago when I was helping to coordinate parts of the largest project I’d ever been on:  an acquisition that my employer was absorbing into one of its existing divisions.  I was dealing with a number of external parties for the first time in my career:  I was in a back-office IT role and I normally only dealt with other employees of my company.  Lots of new stuff; lots of new people to deal with, even from within my own company.

Deadlines were tight, the stakes were high, and money was involved.  My risk management strategy was to assume nothing and make darn sure that something needed to happen, then it would happen.  Thus, a lot of follow-up, verification, and ticking things off lists filled my days.  You could argue that it’s the only sane way to work with people in places that aren’t familiar to you.  Imagine, for instance, what it must be like for a CEO to start with a company that he or she has never worked for before.  They’re building trust from the ground up – they have to be a bit paranoid in order to survive.  If you’re in this position, the only way you can afford to let your guard down is either:

• deal only with people you can trust based on your own experiences with them
• deal with people who have high reputation, with references and accomplishments to back it up

Reputation management, not personal branding

I know I would have liked to have had some kind of online reputation system in place when I worked on that acquisition over a decade ago.  I bet the people who dealt with me the first time would have liked to have the same thing.  Instead, we had to take increasingly larger risks over time to built the required trust to be able to let our guards down and not keep trying to prevent disasters from happening.

This is why I think the Trust Agent concept, or some similar type of widely accepted reputation system might be a good thing.  Over time, this may become the dominant factor for hiring or for making business deals, replacing the walled gardens of corporate files and Intranets or the shadow word of mouth networks that exist.  And I think it could be a very good thing if everyone plays that way and follows the rules.

As long as it can’t be gamed.