THE LEAFLET

October 05 2023

I-shaped teammates, the busted math of trust, in praise of history nerds

I-SHAPED TEAMMATES

On my last couple teams, we riffed on the IDEO concept of a “T”-shaped teammate. We told candidates that the only kind of people who enjoyed working with us were “I”-shaped teammates. Like the “T”-shaped teammate, the “I”-shaped person has a breadth of skills and a depth of specific expertise. The crucial thing an “I” shaped teammate adds is enthusiasm for work at the top and bottom of the I. Top of the I is the high-status, high-stakes work most organizations reserve for leaders. Bottom of the I is the gritty, unglamorous, often unseen stuff that keeps the team moving forward and sometimes crops up unexpectedly.

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THE BUSTED MATH OF TRUST

I have often heard folks say that they just haven’t had enough time with other people to trust them. I have also often heard that trust comes from vulnerability - specifically emotional vulnerability. The theory is that trust between teammates comes from a) lots of time together b) talking about feelings (or past experiences that generate difficult feelings). I think that’s bad math.

In my experience, trust on teams is driven by reps rather than duration and by vulnerable doing rather than vulnerable feeling. This is why folks who work together at a startup, on a campaign, on a championship team, at a great high school, or in a platoon can enjoy immense trust in a matter of weeks or months that other teams fail to cultivate in years. Those high-trust teams do lots of things (reps) with real stakes (stress / risk) in a short amount of time.

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IN PRAISE OF HISTORY NERDS

What your Diverse Group of People Doing Something that Matters is up to, no matter how cutting edge it is, fits into some long tradition. It has a history. Time spent reading and understanding that history is time well spent. You can use that big context to right-size problems, inspire your team, and pick better, more specific heroes and boogeymen (“there’s a lot we don’t know. but we know for sure we don’t want to be like that organization and we do want to be like this one.”)

When crucible moments arrive, good or bad, your people will need you to tell them what is happening, why it matters, and how “people like us” or “teams like this one” move forward. History helps.

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Keep going, keep growing,

Eric