I think the bottom line is this: Where do you want to spend your time? Yes, you can use process and tools to make a low trust team “work”. This is in fact how

I think the bottom line is this: Where do you want to spend your time? Yes, you can use process and tools to make a low trust team “work”. This is in fact how most government works. This isn’t horrible per say, it is just very ineffective. You will spend 2-3X the amount of time/money to produce the same result as a highly effective team. The multiple gets better with good process and tools, the multiplier gets worse if you have bad processes on top of having low trust. If you want to change things, and don’t have support/the ear of leadership above you, then the alternative is to do what you can that is in your control. This is where great leadership shines (and leadership is much different than management, more on that another time). A great leader doesn’t need formal lines of authority. They gain influence indirectly by “casting a vision” and enrolling others to pursue it. If you can do that, you can (over time) shift a culture. It is just very slow, and not straightforward to do. The one bright spot is that in general, the more something is resistant to change, the more readily it will adopt/embrace it once changed. If you can shift the culture, they will never want to go back to how it was before. But once again, you need to decide you WANT to do this, and in particular do it for this particular org. For most folks, that isn’t what they want to do, therefore they have to either learn to live with an ineffective organization, or move on.