About Trust Reviews
When I first became a manager of Software Engineers in 2018, I couldn't have imagined that I would love management as much as I love software engineering. Over the years since, it's become clearer that my love of management was something I developed long before I became a manager. I've grown up listening to stories of my family members being managed. I witnessed not only how management changed the way they approached their work and interactions with people, but how it affected their personal lives and their family's lives too. When managed poorly, the negative impact and energy spread into every aspect of their lives and was felt by everyone around them (customers, coworkers, everyone).
The work of folks like Dan Pink, Simon Sinek, and many others seems to clarify the pattern I've witnessed from my family, friends, and coworkers. Teams work better, when people enjoy working with each other and trust each other. Developing that is almost impossible without honest and specific feedback. As a manager, it's difficult to give accurate feedback and understand how much your teams trust each other and you. As Simon Sinek has said, we have loads of metrics in business to measure performance and next to none, to measure trust.
I learned about 360 feedback and peer reviews in 2021 when I trialed them to provide anonymous feedback to team members during their probationary period. By 2022, I'd begun to target the contents of the peer reviews toward measuring and giving feedback on trust and job responsibilities. By 2024, I was managing 28 software engineers and needed a more efficient way to schedule and summarise the peer reviews. The timing happened to coincide with the boom in Generative AI and with a bit of help from friends and family, I was able to make my summaries scalable for the first time. This is how Trust Reviews came to exist and I hope many people will benefit from it.
'Encourage, lift, and strengthen one another. For the positive energy spread to one will be felt by us all.' - Deborah Day