Building a trust architecture for your new team

CIOs bring a lot to their new jobs: decades of leadership, transformation, pattern-recognition, and outcomes. But none of that matters in your new job. During a time of generalized uncertainty, your team — and every stakeholder — needs to trust you more than anything. But how do you build that trust in a new environment, and as quickly as possible? For Cengage CIO Ken Grady, the best approach is an architectural one.

What is a trust architecture, and why did you develop it?

I’ve been a CIO for almost 20 years, and when I joined Cengage six months ago, while I had roughly 7,300 days of evidence that I knew how to do this job, not one person in that building had ever seen any of it. The proof existed on my résumé. The trust did not.

On day one as a new CIO, you have no shared experience with your team, so you have no trust. Your team might have respect for your background, and hope you’ll succeed, but personal trust is something you must build from scratch.

So how do you do that when the currency of trust for your team can shift depending on the situation? Establishing trust with the people in your new business requires an intentional approach, an architecture.

What are the different currencies of trust?

The first is technical currency. My team needs to know that as a new CIO, I’ll respect their technical expertise, have enough of my own to be helpful, and engage in healthy technology discussions. To solve for that, I sat down and led an open conversation early on about whatever was on their minds, and I showed them that their technical expertise is valued.

The second is investment currency. Can I, a technology leader, speak to ROI or NPV? Can I explain why we should invest in this technology, or address this technical debt, or move from this version to that one? My team needs to respect my ability to guide our investments.

The third is human currency, which addresses the questions people are afraid to ask. Why did we move our offices? Why are we incentivized this way and not that way? IT people are people, and they have non-technical questions.

Technical, investment, and human currency get exchanged in a cadence of conversations, and that cadence almost matters more than the content itself. People value leaders who are steady.

How are you using the trust architecture now?

People have questions when a new leader comes on board, and they need a safe place to ask them. That’s why we built a monthly Enterprise Architecture Review, an open meeting with no agenda where technical people talk through hard problems concerning what we’re trying and learning, what’s working, and what isn’t.

We’ve also built a monthly portfolio review called Steps-to-Green. We talk about the yellow and red projects, and how we can help each other move them to green. There’s no punishment in this room, only encouragement. If your product is yellow, that means you’re one step closer to green.

But the fear is wondering if it’s okay to say what you really think, so the senior leadership team holds a monthly anonymous Q&A. Ask us anything, what you’re worried, frustrated, or even angry about. We might not have all the answers, but we’ll try. If you give your team that kind of safety, they’ll use it.

What’s the benefit of this safety?

You get a high-functioning team willing to challenge existing norms and continuously improve. There’s no such thing as a perfect organization, and safety creates an environment where anyone can suggest an improvement, try it, test it, and report back.

What you get with safety is democratic governance. If there’s a quality problem, anyone in IT can hit the big red button to say we’re not doing this release, we have a quality problem. Anyone on the team can know more than I do about this technology, migration, or this HR issue, and hit the button.

It doesn’t mean there’s no bandmaster. I still need to lead the band since that’s my job as CIO. But the trombone player has to trust me enough to tell me we’re not playing it right.

What advice do you have for CIOs building a trust architecture in a generally anxious workforce?

I cure prosciutto in my basement. Every time I start a new one, I remind myself it takes 18 months, regardless of how many years I’ve been doing it. Trust doesn’t care about your résumé. It’s earned, not given. Before your next conversation, ask yourself if you’re building trust in the currency this person accepts, or the currency I’m most comfortable spending.

Empathy should be your lens. With my team, I show up ready to learn something, connect with them, not to perform leadership. With my stakeholders, I understand they don’t care about my migration strategy. They care whether I’m making their life easier. With my board, empathy isn’t warmth. It’s precision on knowing they need confidence from me, not just an update.

Each direction takes a different currency for team, stakeholders, and customers. As a CIO, you can’t be comfortable in one lane and neglect the other two. You must invest in all three.