Building Trust at GitLab
Introduction
Trust is the foundation of how we operate at GitLab. We trust team members to do the right thing instead of following rigid rules, and trust is what lets us move fast without breaking each other.
Think of trust as structural integrity. A company scaling from $1B to multiple billions takes on a lot of strain: hard technical, people, and business problems, long hours, stress, and the tension and frustration that come with being human under pressure. Teams with strong trust flex under that load. Teams without it rupture, and when they do, everyone loses opportunity. We can hire for skill, experience, intelligence and work ethic. Trust is different. We have to keep building it with each other.
Trust isn’t static. Every interaction adds to it or takes away from it. And no matter how much trust a relationship has, it can always get stronger, which makes it the best protection we have against the storms ahead.
Remote work raises the stakes. It can be isolating if managers don’t take the necessary steps to build trust and social cohesion, and it usually takes remote team members longer to get to know each other than it would in an office. We use informal communication to close that gap, and this page covers what else leaders and team members can do.
Check your trust-o-meter
We know trust when we feel it. We’re also so used to working without it that we stop listening to our gut and just deal with it. Tune back in and use your gut as a primary gauge for the health of your working relationships:
- Do you trust your manager? You already know the answer.
- Walk through your team one person at a time. Do you trust each of them?
- Do the same for the peers you work with regularly.
Make a note of every relationship where trust is missing or weaker than you’d like. Those are structural integrity issues that often only you know about, and only you can fix.
Three ingredients of trust
We think trust comes from three things: empathy, respect and selflessness.
Empathy
AI makes it easier than ever for anyone to sound smart and confident. With that much reasoning power on hand, and with the stakes and pace we operate at, it’s easy to forget that people aren’t purely rational. We’re emotional first, and only rational when our emotions are in check. People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.
Everyone you work with is fighting a battle you know nothing about. Leaders hear only a fraction of what’s going on in people’s lives: health, family and personal challenges alongside missed deadlines and hard business problems. Underneath every title is a person doing the best they can with what they have, and our first job is to support them.
Supporting someone doesn’t mean enabling them. Empathy doesn’t mean tolerating mediocrity or poor performance. Anyone struggling professionally is also struggling personally, because no one likes to fail. Empathetic leaders care enough to acknowledge when someone isn’t meeting expectations, work through that gap in a human and professional way, and help them find a better path if the role is no longer the right fit.
Day to day, empathy is mostly small things:
- When it’s appropriate, spend a few minutes on life outside work before diving into problems.
- Ask for the other person’s ideas before sharing yours, and actually listen.
- When working through a challenge, ask how they feel about it and how it affects them.
- Acknowledge those feelings openly, even when they don’t change the direction.
Empathy isn’t only a manager-to-report thing. Trust runs both ways between any two people, so it matters peer to peer and upward too. Next time your manager seems frustrated, ask if they’re ok and what’s behind it. Then listen.
Respect
It’s hard to trust someone you don’t respect, and in a healthy relationship respect flows in both directions. Most of us work with people who are experts in areas we’ve spent little or no time in. Even in fields we know well, the technology has moved and GitLab’s context is unique.
One of the most important ways to show respect is to respect people’s time. Everyone has more work than they can possibly do, so everyone is constantly making tradeoffs and leaving valuable work undone, and often giving up personal time and energy as well. Every time we call a meeting, pull someone into a problem or change their priorities, we’re spending the thing they have least of.
Ways to respect time:
- Be in the details. If you don’t know something, say so and go find out.
- Make good use of sync time.
- Be as succinct as possible.
- Send thoughtful async content, not AI slop.
- Give people a good return on the energy they spend with you.
- Be deliberate about escalation.
Other ways to show respect:
- Acknowledge the experience, skills and talents others have that you don’t.
- Recognize and reward other people’s results.
- Give credit for ideas, and praise in broader groups.
Selflessness
Would you want to do business with someone you knew was only looking out for themselves? Selflessness is the opposite of that.
Being selfless doesn’t mean giving up ambition. Nearly everyone here is ambitious and motivated to provide for themselves and their families, and that’s fine. What matters is how we pursue success. If everyone looks out for themselves first, we all lose. If everyone puts the company first and optimizes for the global maximum, everyone gets a chance to win. Nothing’s guaranteed, but it takes that leap of faith to earn the long-term individual rewards.
Day to day, selflessness means backing words with action. Selfish people talk and don’t follow through. Selfless people spend their time and energy overcoming obstacles and doing what they said they’d do. And when we fall short, which all of us will, we own it and try again. Excuses are an insidious form of selfishness.
There’s no room for politics, hierarchy games or self-interest. When they creep in, trust starts to erode. See playing politics is counter to GitLab values.
Putting the company first has a useful side effect: it’s the one thing everyone can agree on. Sometimes that means your idea isn’t chosen or your team doesn’t get the budget or priority you wanted. If you’re focused on the company winning, and you look for ways it still wins without your priority, it’s much easier to get past ego. You win when the company wins.
How trust connects to our operating principles
Our operating principles line up closely with these three ingredients.
Speed with quality is about respect for time. We have a limited window to act on our opportunity, and each of us has limited time to spend. In the push for speed, don’t forget respect.
Ownership mindset is about selflessness. Owners put the company’s success first, knowing individual success follows.
Customer outcomes is about empathy. Customers are among the most important people to care about and put ahead of ourselves. Apply it as a filter to everything: will this lead to a happier, more successful customer over the long term? If yes, it’s probably the right thing to do. If no, or if the customer wouldn’t even notice, why are we doing it?
What trust is not
Empathy isn’t walking on eggshells. One of the most respectful things we can do for each other is tell the truth when something could be better. Kindness isn’t blindness. Everyone needs help seeing past their own perceived limits, and that’s how we help each other reach levels we didn’t think were possible.
Trust lets us be real with each other when things are going well and especially when they need to improve, which is most of the time. With trust, we can face the facts together, confident that we’re all optimizing for what’s best for the company.
Ten dimensions of trust
Sid Sijbrandij, GitLab’s co-founder, identified ten dimensions of trust. Trust lets us assume positive intent and helps prevent political behavior. When a relationship feels off, use these as a diagnostic: which dimension is weak? The table shows how they map to the three ingredients.
| Ingredient | Related dimensions |
|---|---|
| Empathy | Familiarity, Responsiveness, Confidentiality |
| Respect | Information, Build, Competence |
| Selflessness | Optimizing efficiency for the right group, Mindset, Consistency, History |
- Optimizing efficiency for the right group
- We versus I optimization
- Organization versus individual
- Other teams versus your team
- Global versus territorial, kingdom building
- Mindset
- Abundance
- Positive sum position instead of zero sum
- Open-minded
- Looking for creative win-win solutions
- Familiarity
- Knowing the person better
- Listening (actively)
- Spending more time
- Informal communication
- Information
- Providing and receiving feedback
- Bad news travels fast
- Transparency (show your intermediate work)
- Wide access to information, meetings, and meeting notes
- Responsiveness
- Availability
- Open to suggestions
- Confidentiality
- Respected
- Safe space
- Negative in a small group, not large forums
- Discretion in what can be shared and when
- Build
- Praise in a broader group
- Giving credit (for an idea)
- Constructively picking arguments (steel man vs. listening for weak arguments)
- Make each other better
- Explain the why (Simon Sinek)
- Celebrate successes
- Competence
- Calibrated to what is required
- High standards
- Relentlessly resourceful
- Consistency
- Opinion/behavior independent of who is in the room
- No backroom conversations
- No alliances, other than with all peers
- No politics
- History
- Keeping commitments
- History of success
Everyday practices for remote teams
People leaders should work on trust when they form a team, when new people join, and all year long. These practices help, especially across time zones.
1-1 meetings
1-1 meetings are the best place to get to know each other personally and professionally. No two people are alike, and an approach that works with one person may not work with another. Showing vulnerability in 1-1s builds trust.
How to apply: Give people time to talk about their weekend or what’s going on in their lives. Especially early in a working relationship, spend the first 5-10 minutes on them before work topics. Remember what they tell you about family, pets and hobbies, and follow up. If they live somewhere you don’t know well, learn a bit about what’s happening there. For tips on small talk and connection, listen to Rachel Greenwald in Episode 89 of Think Fast, Talk Smart.
Ask for feedback
Managers should be open to receiving feedback from their teams. Most people are uncomfortable giving a manager constructive feedback, so openness has to be shown, not assumed.
How to apply: Ask for feedback regularly, in 1-1s or through our performance management platform. Every 1-1 is a chance for team members to share feedback on your performance. Create an environment with no ego so people feel safe being forthcoming.
Give credit to team members
Use the #thanks Slack channel to recognize team members publicly. Review team accomplishments weekly, monthly and quarterly, and meet with each team member to go over theirs. Take a coaching approach and let people talk through what they accomplished. Look for chances to have executives recognize the team, and to recognize the team in front of executives.
How to apply: Set a weekly reminder to review team accomplishments and spot individual recognition opportunities. A regular cadence shows team members you’re actively invested in their careers.
Enable team members to make decisions
When someone on your team excels, give them room to make decisions. Trusting people with decisions is one of the clearest signals of trust there is, and it plays to their skills.
Personality assessments
Personality assessments help teams understand how they differ and help managers understand their direct reports. The results can show ways to adapt your processes to work better for different people. Never type-cast anyone by their results. Use them to start better conversations.
Some free options:
- Understanding Social Styles
- Emotional Intelligence Assessments
- Gallup Strengths Finder
- 16 Personalities (also known as Myers-Briggs)
- DISC Personality Test
- HEXACO Personality Inventory
How to apply: Have team members take an assessment when they join, then have strengths-based conversations about the results. Encourage people to share their strengths and styles with the team, and to add them to their READMEs if they choose.
One-slider personal summary
A one-slider is a simple way for remote teams to get to know each other. Start from the template and adapt the prompts however you like.
How to apply: Ask one or two people to fill out a one-slider a day or two before the next team call. Spend the first 5-10 minutes letting them share, give everyone equal time, and encourage questions.
Social time
Optional, non-work time together builds familiarity. Options include weekly or biweekly social calls with a rotating host and topic (favorite foods, two truths and a lie, most recent vacation), “no work talk” chats where the only rule is exactly that, and team days with activities like hometown tours, walk-and-talk calls, or online games. See this example from the Growth team.
How to apply: Mark attendees optional and rotate times so every time zone gets a turn. Alternate sync calls with async versions, for example by posting the questions through the Geekbot Slack app, so people who prefer other formats can still take part.
Lunch & learns
Letting team members lead training on complex topics shows how they think and communicate, and helps managers see where support is needed. “Lunch” can be breakfast, dinner or a snack, depending on time zone.
How to apply: Have the team vote on a topic each quarter, or let someone volunteer. One or a few people build the session, and the whole team attends with plenty of time for Q&A.
Overcome unconscious bias
Everyone makes assumptions about others, and managers can unintentionally favor some team members over others. Unconscious bias does real damage to trust.
How to apply: Take the implicit-association test (IAT) as a first step. Block time each quarter for inclusion-related training. In team discussions, put yourself in others’ shoes to understand their perspective.
Use the Building High Performing Teams model
The Building High Performing Teams model is widely used for team development, and trust is a big part of it. High-performing teams trust each other, support and respect each other, and are open and forthright.
How to apply: Review the high performing teams page, run an assessment with your team to gauge trust, and use the resources there to guide a discussion.
Take time to learn
Show you’re invested in people’s growth by encouraging time for learning. Share articles, research and videos on trends in your domain, point people to our tuition reimbursement policy, and make it clear it’s ok to block part of the week for development.
Where to start
If you want more trust with your manager, a peer or someone on your team, the answer is simple to say and sometimes hard to do: have an open conversation. Tell them you want to build more trust. Tell them what has eroded it. Set expectations for what you need from them. Then listen, really listen.
If you’ve tried earnestly and it still isn’t working:
- Check expectations. Are you clear on yours? Are you clear on theirs? If not, have you spent enough time in open conversation?
- Get help. Talk to your People Business Partner (PBP), a mentor, or a skip-level you have a relationship with, and adjust based on their advice.
- Be honest about the outcome. Respect the person enough to tell them it isn’t working, and give them time to plan a transition while you plan yours. Don’t leave them high and dry. This doesn’t have to end badly for anyone. Sometimes relationships just don’t work despite everyone trying, and that’s far better than never trying and wondering what might have happened.
If you want to build trust, you have to extend it. Someone has to go first. Let it be you.
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