We know it intuitively: we trust each person we meet to varying degrees. The trust battery is a metaphor that helps you think about and visualise these trust levels.

The concept is from Tobi Lütke, the CEO of Shopify. He explains, for example, that when a new colleague joins your company the trust battery between the two of you may start out at around 50%. Each time the new colleague acts in a way that earns your trust that level increases, and if they let you down the trust battery level goes down. It can be long and slow to fill up the trust battery yet quick to drain. Each time we interact with someone we are subconsciously considering the level of their trust battery and that level affects how we respond to people.

Lütke says at Shopify they found it a useful way to surface and talk about trust in reviews without it feeling too personal.

I learned about it from the excellent book It Doesn’t Have to be Crazy at Work

The trust battery: A handy metaphor to think about trust

What is the trust equation and what makes you trust someone in a professional context? I liked this simple equation by Charles Green, which makes it a combination of how credible, reliable, and how intimate — or how safe you feel with that person — divided by the self-orientation of the person — are they focused on their interests, or simply paying more attention to themselves vs being genuinely interested in you and your success. Depending on how you scored this abstract model, I guess that would mean that trust is either undermined by someone focusing on their own interests or strengthened the more they are focused on yours.

Trust sketches