The Art of Project Management

12.5. Trust is insurance against adversity

As we discussed in the last chapter, all projects will have things go wrong. Competitors have a habit of not doing what you expect them to (that's their job), technologies come and go, and important people change their minds. As a project manager, it's guaranteed that things will happen that were not predicted or accounted for. In tough or uncertain times, you want your team or your peers to be able to rely on you and trust in each other.

If trust has been cultivated and grown over time, and people have experience making decisions with each other (instead of in spite of each other), the project will be highly resilient to problems. When people believe in the team, they can summon forms of confidence and patience that aren't available through other means. Like soldiers in a foxhole, each person can rely on someone else to watch their back, freeing them to give more energy to the task in front of them.

When a team trusts each other, it also buys the project manager time to focus on solving the problems at hand, instead of trying to calm down the hallways of panicked or frustrated employees. Sometimes, the leader might need to ask for this kind of support explicitly. He has to demonstrate the respect he wants from the team by acknowledging the problem and asking, but not demanding, their support. (Yelling "Support me now!" doesn't work.) On the whole, it's connections between people that get them through tough times: not their salaries, ...