Only the Paranoid Survive: Why Mistrust is Important in Leadership

A double-entry accounting system for both trust and mistrust. Part 4 of an article series about trust in the workplace, in our personal lives, and in general.

Good golly, these green radioactive marbles of mistrust make me miserable.

In part 2 of the article series, we explored what “trust” is. We did so by defining mistrust (i.e. what trust is not) and honing our definition of trust by the process of elimination.

In part 3, we introduced the concept of the marble jar: a mental accounting system for how much we trust someone else. A key aspect of that analogy is that our trust in someone does not correlate to their trustworthiness. A glass jar full of marbles is as fragile as an empty jar.

Let’s merge parts 2 and 3 by introducing a second jar: one for mistrust.

Kevin and the Laserbeam

Remember Kevin from part 3? In the months since joining your team, Kevin has proven to be a valuable asset. His depth of knowledge is fantastic, and his analytical skills are off the charts. His intense focus earned him the nickname “laserbeam” from teammates. When you need an answer to a thorny, un-Googleable problem, Kevin will aim his laser at the obstacle and vaporize it. His insightful analyses have earned praise from customers, admiration from teammates, and attention from your bosses on Executive Mountain.

That said, Kevin’s laser focus is simultaneously his greatest strength and his greatest weakness. Kevin often shows up late to meetings (if at all) when focused on a task. When discussing a topic that excites him, Kevin often monologues beyond the listener’s point of exhaustion, and he doesn’t seem to notice that the other person is maintaining the conversation just to be polite. Kevin often treats his data-driven conclusions as infallible and impatiently retorts “I’m not an undergraduate” when someone questions his thoroughness. He either dismisses resistance to his ideas as “emotional hang-ups,” or he tries to break down other people’s emotional barriers by launching more logic at it.

Kevin’s laser scorches other people when he points the beam at them. Anything not illuminated by the laser might as well not exist. This occasionally causes internal friction with teammates and has resulted in several uncomfortable situations when Kevin interacted directly with clients. Kevin has been receptive to coaching¹, but improvement has been slow and often transitory. Even Kevin’s wife seems resigned to his peculiar mix of extreme acumen and stunted social skills, regarding it as a “package deal.”

The Mistrust Jar

It wouldn’t be totally accurate to say that you “lose trust” or “lose faith” in Kevin when he shows up late to a meeting or makes a customer squirm. These instances certainly don’t reduce his analytical skills. There’s no malicious intent, and Kevin seems to be doing the best he can with the temperament and (in)abilities he has. Instead of “losing trust/faith” in Kevin every time his laser does damage, you’re strengthening your expectation that his laser is dangerous.

Enter the mistrust jar. The trust gremlin living inside your head keeps one mistrust jar and one trust jar for each person you know. The mistrust jar differs from the trust jar in two main ways:

1. While the trust jar is made of glass (fragile), the mistrust jar is made of unobtainium (indestructible). Its exterior size never changes, but its interior can bend space-time by expanding to accept whatever the trust gremlin puts inside. It’s like a clown car that can hold an infinite number of marbles.

2. The trust gremlin doesn’t put generic marbles into the mistrust jar, but marbles of a certain color. We mistrust people for specific things, or in specific scenarios. If someone shows up late for work, we don’t automatically suspect them of robbing a bank.

After many months of working with “laserbeam” Kevin, his trust jar is full of marbles for the tremendous value he has provided. His mistrust jar, on the other hand, contains a lot of red marbles (tardiness/truancy) and several large green marbles (risky around clients). You’ve learned to compensate for the red marbles by evicting him from his cubicle and escorting him to important meetings. To counteract the green marbles, you’ve learned to minimize his exposure to the outside world, and to supervise closely when he happens to be in the same room as a client².

How to Use the Two-Jar System as a Decision-Making Tool

Let’s pretend like these colorful pebbles that look like M&Ms are actually “marbles.” CC-BY-NC International image generated by Midjourney.

Imagine your bank-teller gremlin, decked out in a top hat and monocle, peering at a balancing scale with the trust jar on one side, and the mistrust jar on the other. When you’re considering a decision:

• If the trust jar outweighs the contents of the mistrust jar relevant to that decision, the trust gremlin gives you the green light to proceed.

• If the contents of the mistrust jar relevant to that decision outweighs the contents of the trust jar, the trust gremlin raises a big red “STOP” sign.

This is a mental accounting system that measures the extent of your trust in someone (or something) against the extent of your misgivings. You can make your balancing scale fast-but-imprecise (relying entirely on gut feeling) or slow-but-precise (tallying up the exact number of reasons to trust or mistrust someone)³.

Mistrust Based on Specific Behaviors

Let’s say you supervise Mary, who is a rising-star employee. Mary is diligent, responsive, and trustworthy. In most scenarios, her trust jar (full of marbles) vastly outweighs her mistrust jar. You feel the “3 Cs” (comfort, cognitive ease, and camaraderie) when you assign a challenging task to Mary, or asking her to cover for you during your vacation. Mary never lets you down.

For inexplicable reasons, however, Mary cannot get along with Alicia. When Mary and Alicia are in the same room, a glacier begins to form in the space between them, and the 3 Cs vanish in a puff. Your trust gremlin has deposited several crimson marbles in Mary’s mistrust jar, which would affect whether you’d ever allow Mary and Alicia to work on the same team, or allow one to supervise the other.

Other examples of using the two-jar system in decision-making:

• You love and trust your spouse, but they have many blue marbles in the mistrust jar for making impulsive shopping decisions.

• You love and trust your children, but they have many yellow marbles in their mistrust jars because they spend too much time on their smartphones.

• You love and trust your dog, but its mistrust jar is littered with orange marbles for raiding the garbage bin in your absence.

• Your next-door neighbor posts a video of himself drop-kicking a mewling kitten into oncoming traffic. Not only does your trust gremlin dump of handful of huge black marbles into the mistrust jar, but it also smashes the fragile trust jar. The mistrust jar will forevermore outweigh the shattered remains of the trust jar.

Generalized Mistrust (Risk Analysis)

We find it helpful to deposit several types of marbles into everyone’s mistrust jar no matter what. This is not an exhaustive list, but will suffice to illustrate the idea:

• “Flight risk” marbles. Will this employee leave the organization, possibly bringing valuable experience or intellectual property to a competitor? Will my life partner leave me, possibly taking half of my stuff?

• “Ticking time bomb” marbles. Is there any organizational dysfunction that could negatively impact an employee’s performance? Is this person likely to achieve short-term results by sacrificing the organization’s long-term vitality?

• “Force majeure” marble. How will a power outage, earthquake, ransomware attack, geomagnetic storm, or zombie apocalypse affect our work? Will this person run toward a problem with solutions, run away, or freeze like a deer in the headlights?

• “Black swan” marbles. By definition, these risks cannot be characterized or quantified. Anything you can name but cannot predict is a “known unknown.” Black swan risks are the “unknown unknowns” that lurk in the formless, shapeless abyss and bite when you least expect them.

These marbles blanket the bottom of everyone’s mistrust jar to various thicknesses. If your organization pays low wages and/or treats its employees poorly, it’s prudent to pour many “flight risk” marbles into all of your employees’ mistrust jars, no matter how content they appear to be. In an organization with weak internal controls and many incentives to engage in self-serving behavior, you’d be justified in planting a thick carpet of “ticking time bomb” marbles into everyone’s jars. If you work for an organization with zero redundancies, no data backups, and lax security, it’s wise to lay a thick foundation of “force majeure” marbles. And no matter what, it’s a good idea to keep a single black swan marble (of indeterminate size and weight) in everyone’s mistrust jar – not so you can prepare for it, but as a reminder to always expect the unexpected.

These marbles should be deposited into everyone’s mistrust jars regardless of what’s in the trust jar. The trust jar only records what you’ve seen, and 1,000 days of observation can lead you to believe that someone can do no wrong…until the 1,001st day when they leave to join a competitor or you catch them red-handed with a stranger in the cookie jar. By depositing marbles into everyone’s mistrust jars, you’re acknowledging that the most trustworthy people in your life – star employees, friends, family – are unlikely to harm you, but they’re not incapable. This mentality makes you less vulnerable to becoming the Thanksgiving turkey that we introduced in part 1.

Applying the Mistrust Jar to Yourself

We’ve been accused of paranoia, cynicism, and misanthropy for our philosophy of trust and mistrust. After some initial resistance, we’ve come to embrace these labels with one caveat: we are equal-opportunity misanthropes. We believe in mistrusting everyone equally.

In fact, we believe so strongly in fairly doling out the mistrust that we deeply mistrust ourselves.

We mistrust:

1. Our loyalties. If a “too good to refuse” offer came along, we’d leave our current employers.

2. Our own brains. They’re full of cognitive blind spots that make us prone to errors in judgment.

3. Our emotions. They’re distracting, uncontrollable, and have their own agendas. Some emotions are maladapted for what we aim to achieve.

4. Our willpower. We’re prone to relapsing into bad habits during moments of weakness.

5. Our morals. When we see loopholes in the rules, we're tempted to exploit them. We don’t (in fact, we spend a lot of time closing loopholes in our organizations), but it’s plausible that we’ll hear the siren song during a moment of weakness someday. In that moment, we’d do something legal, but not ethical.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg - there are so many other ways we consider ourselves to be flawed and fallible. No one has studied the many, many mistakes we’ve made like our own trust gremlins, which have deposited one marble in our own mistrust jars for each mistake we’ve made.

Look in the mirror and imagine that the person gazing back is a different human being (who happens to look like you). What do you mistrust about this person? Bring that mistrust jar with you when you read the next part of this series. You’ll need the marbles when we cover pre-mortems.

One-Jar vs. Two-Jar System

The single trust jar, which we covered in Part 3, is like single-entry accounting: simple enough to teach to schoolkids and young adults. Most people can get through life just fine by making decisions based on how full someone’s trust jar is. But they’ll always be vulnerable to the Thanksgiving turkey’s problem of misplaced trust.

Contrast that with the two-jar system. The jars of trust and mistrust are like double-entry accounting: more complex, more tedious, but far more thorough. Just like double-entry accounting is useful for detecting theft and money leaks, the addition of the mistrust jar is useful for detecting and preventing problems. It can’t prevent all Thanksgiving turkey problems, but it can help mitigate the damage from unpleasant surprises. More on that in the next article.

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If you feel like this article about mistrusting everyone (including yourself) was a downer, take heart. The next articles will be:

1. How to avoid becoming a Thanksgiving turkey and mitigate the impacts of misplaced trust

2. How to cope with the emotional black hole of mistrusting everyone, including yourself

3. How to build trust and reduce mistrust

4. Cautionary tales of excessive trust and mistrust

It won’t be sunshine and rainbows the rest of the way (scenarios involving misplaced trust rarely are), but it’ll generally be an uphill, bumpy ride from here.

1. The only coach who managed to make a difference is the one who appealed to Kevin’s way of thinking (“using logic to overcome someone else’s emotional hang-ups is like administering medicine to a dead person”) and used Kevin’s impatience against himself (“investing some time to overcome emotional hang-ups today will pay off by saving you an order of magnitude more time in the future”).

2. Reducing a subordinate’s face-time with clients generally limits their career opportunities and bring them closer to the Career Swamp, so this is not a decision to make lightly. Fortunately, this solution is a win-win for you and Kevin; his natural habitat seems to be a solitary confinement cubicle, lit with the fluorescent glow of four monitors, where he can aim his laser at spreadsheets and squiggly-line charts. He’s happy enough to have you insulate him from demanding clients.

3. Snap decisions are usually better for low-stakes decisions, or scenarios where one jar vastly outweighs the other (we call this “passing the fat man test” because sometimes you don’t need to know how much someone weighs to know that he’s fat). Slow, meticulous decisions are usually better when the jars are nearly balanced, thus forcing you to pick between the lesser of two evils. For high-stakes decisions, a rigorous accounting of both jars forces a close examination that might uncover something that affects your decision.