Trust is Dead. Long live trust.

Companies start small, and they witness plenty of mistakes in the early days and if they survive despite that they usually try to fix them.

Companies identify that many of the mistakes happen with a carelessness which can be prevented by a simple process. Someone says, ‘Remember that one person who did not know how to design a large system, and we asked him to create one? Let’s remedy that by adding a design round to the interview’.

When implemented, it works initially. Not many fail at large system design in the company anymore. Now let’s solve the similar problem for coding, problem solving, low level, behavioral, bar raiser. A golden document is born, ​“The levels and competencies”.

Pretty soon, your hiring speed comes to halt. And you ask, why can’t I find engineers like we used to? The world hasn’t changed. It’s just that you have added 6 new filters that remove 99% of the world’s engineers. Now here comes the crucial point. Does the company trust the leaders making the hire call or not?

In an organization of renters(those who don’t operate with the mindset of the owner), the company doesn’t trust the leadership, and it will not let you relax any filter. The renters don’t care about relaxing a filter to take risks. Nobody makes any noise to relax the filters. Those who make that noise to rationalize, are seen as barbarians who crashed the party. The “barbarians” leave the company for startups, often their own, and thrive. The elites keep increasing salaries until they find enough unicorns.

In an organization of owners, executives ensure that leadership is aligned with company objectives. Leaders care less about how many competencies candidates clear and more about, ‘Will candidates improve shareholder value?’. Or often, ‘Will I be happy, 2 years down the lane, to have the candidate on my team?’

Large companies don’t have a monopoly on bad practices. These things can happen in small companies too. It’s just that small companies don’t survive long enough with such mentality, unless they have some monopoly.

Similar deliberation happens during promotions too. Will the company make 100x what we are paying for the person and person’s team? Asks the owner. Does the person confirm the idea of a level document that was written 10 years ago? so asks the renter. Renter often blames the document.

The renter’s company is slowly falling behind the owner’s company. All blame “The levels and competencies”. We must have missed something. The renter’s change the document to reflect what they have seen in the owner’s company. “The levels and competencies 2.0” is born. Nothing changes much, now renter’s companies hire unicorns that have graduated from top-5 colleges. Also, unicorns have to sing like opera performers otherwise they won’t get promoted, no matter how many magic they performed right in front of you!

If you work in a company, where they don’t trust the line manager’s feedback for perf/promo, the company is trying to avoid a mistake without a guilty mind. Because company “Thinks” 4 people are less likely to make a guilty mistake, even though 4 people will have less than 1/4th of the manager’s context and 1/16th of motivation to take the right risk for the company and for the team.

The values that executives preach Risk/Reward, Trust, if those doesn’t apply in the perf/promo, may be the company has too many renters who do not qualify for the trust to make informed risk/reward decisions. At this stage, the company’s bright unicorns leave the company, because they hate renters, also because honestly ​no unicorn should be punished to write a 45-page document every time they make the magic happen!