Lessons - The Importance of Building Trust | Danielle Brown - CMO at Points

In this Lessons episode, you'll explore the critical role of trust in building a high-performing team, especially in remote work environments. Learn how to foster accountability, transparency, and open communication while managing resistance to new process. Discover strategies for empowering your team to take ownership of their work, creating a culture where trust drives real results, even under pressure. Now there's a component of that that I wanted to ask you about. There's also a component of trust that I think is sort of layered on when somebody's working from home because there has to be an extra layer or level of trust. So you're a leader. You're dealing with a relatively large marketing team. You said 90 individuals. How do you trust them to get their work done? What's your process for feeling comfortable and making sure that they know that you trust them? You know, Timmy, I love that question because I do think the job of a leader is to leave space for people to do their work, to do their best work. And you're only going to do that if you trust them. What they said truth thing is, here's the second squishy topic we're talking about, right, which is trust. We're happiness and their trust. And we actually built a trust model on our team as well. And that was again another crowdsource model. I'm really big on if I'm going to ask the team to do something and build it themselves, right? Exactly. And so we did build a trust model, right, where we said, okay, and this goes back some time, this goes back to my first stint of points. And it's actually survived, then survived while I was gone, where it was actually a recipe for solving a problem where the team was a bit broken. And when I went in to try to figure it out, it was because they didn't trust each other. And you have people double checking other people's work, people like going into areas that weren't their own because they weren't trusting the people on their team. And when we finally got down to it and said, okay, what would it take for you to trust the people that you worked with? Again, crowdsource, we got four things. We got, if you could create transparency, sorry, create transparency, practice accountability, deliver results, and have honest talks with people. So if you're pissed off at me, don't go call your body, come and tell me. And if we could all exhibit those four behaviors, then we would all be able to trust each other. And what we actually did in order to reinforce that is, oh my god, my team hated me when we put this together. But it's actually survived was we would actually on a monthly basis, the team was a lot smaller. So it was easier to do is we would give each other a word. So we would have our update meetings. And then I would say, hey, this month I'm going to get Scott the award for honest talk because I screwed up and she actually confronted me on it. And I totally didn't see it from his perspective. And not hot balls. And so here you go, I'm giving you the award for honest talk. And and I also forced the team to give themselves an award. So then I can say, and I created transparency because something broke here and I let everybody know. And this is what I did. And so it was this it was this exhibiting that trusting behavior too, where you could have an open honest form. And people could have those conversations to say, hey, this is broken. I didn't get this from you. And building that trust. I think having that foundational language again made it easier for us to be working from home and say, okay, I'm not I don't actually understand what's going on over here. I don't feel like I'm having transparency in your part of the business. We need to figure out how to communicate better. Or I'm you're laid on this for two days. And I don't know where it is. So let's just talk about the accountability here, right? I liked it a lot. And I have a question because I'm sure you dealt with this. What do you do when you bring in these models? And you're you are getting team buying. You're getting like everybody's buying because they're literally building the things that they think will work best for them. And then you're you're you know, that's what you're going to go with for both like happiness and trust. But there's going to be people that are going to say this is stupid. This is retarded. I don't understand why I have to give somebody an award. Like this is doesn't make any sense to me. I don't why am I giving myself an award? How do you get those people to buy in? Or is that something that every organization struggles with? You can't you can't do anything about that? No, look, I think I think I think people are wired differently, right? And I am I do realize that I defaults to this. Like right? I'm a very like let's start with our feelings. Let's figure something that's going on, which makes people make to make certain people uncomfortable, right? And so so I always say to my team, can you just try it? Can you I know you hate it? And I know how painful this is for you. I just need you to try it. And I think understanding that I they they have to do it. Look, you don't get to opt out of this thing. I'm actually going to make you do it. And then if it's not working, I think it's having check ins, right? Give me three months. Then let's talk again in three months and tell me why it's not working for you. Don't just get to say, Hey, I hate that. Tell me something that would work better. Or I like that. I think there is we as leaders have to give people responsibility for their own careers and their own career development. And it is not just let me give you the map, right? It is I'm going to teach you how to work through this if the map isn't working for you. So if you want more transparency, if you want more responsibility, then you have to show me what you're going to do about it. It's not just up to me to build that to draw that map for you. I like that a lot. I see. So the people that do have an opinion about it. Okay, that's fine. But you have to you have to come up with something because there's a there's a clear gap here that it's causing the business to suffer in this area or the other. So if if you don't think this way is going to solve that problem, you think it's stupid. Think of something that will solve this problem. And let's talk about it. Yeah, definitely something that will work better. Get together with some of your colleagues and build something else. I would love that, right? Yeah, it would take a lot of stress off you. Exactly. That's very okay. So this, you know, what I'm seeing here, what we're getting is a master class and building a culture in probably one of the industries, you know, your travel adjacent that is probably one of the hardest hit. And there's one more point that I want to I want to ask you about. I want to ask you about process and process, you know, especially in a work from home environment. And how that's important. But I want to also get some data points from you on when you build out this this squishy happiness model, this trust model. And then we can go into process as well. What does that, what does that look like in terms of actual results? How has your, how has points performed? How has, you know, how it could be, I don't know what metric you want to, you want to relay over if you have any off top your head and then sort of coming at you, you know, I didn't ask you to prep for this. But I think it would be interesting to take this away and like actually see what it, what the end result is like in some way or another. Yeah, look, it's it results are interesting, right? I think I think if I look at last year where we went into last year with a plan that obviously we didn't achieve, right? We've got people would be flying. We thought people would be, we said it in November, a year before. But when we recast our plan, we achieved our recasted plan, right? Which to me is huge. But we're what that, what that meant for us was things came from different places, right? So I'm talking, so from my marketing team, not, I won't share the breakdown, but my marketing team was previously in the work that we had to do responsible for way less of a percentage of the overall revenue of the company. By the time the end of the year came, I would say the absolute lion's share of the company's revenue was directly related to marketing promotions. And so what you have is a situation whereby you have a team that is now disproportionately responsible for the whole company's revenue and imagine the stress and the pressure on that to not be able to fail, right? In a culture that I'm building that says, you can fail, you can try things, it's okay. And then you're just like, oh shit, but if we don't, if this we don't hit the number, like terrifying, right? So then if I then go back to say, how did we handle the pressure? How did we not crack? How did we hit our reforcav? That's how we did it. Because we were taking care of the squishy stuff and we were making sure that people understood their direction so that they felt hurt and they felt taken care of and they could power forward and get their jobs done. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.