Trust and Disruption: Leading Teams with the 90/10 Principle
There’s a rhythm I’ve noticed in effective leadership - a pattern that emerges when building high-performing teams. I call it the 90/10 rule: spend 90% of your time pulling people forward gently, and 10% pushing hard enough to break patterns.
The 90%: Building Your Trust Account
Think of trust like a relationship bank account. Every time you support your team, every moment you have their backs, you’re making deposits. The 90% is about consistently showing up, creating psychological safety, and building a foundation of trust.
In my one-on-ones, I make this explicit. “I have your back” isn’t just a phrase - it’s a promise backed by consistent action. This creates the psychological safety that Amy Edmondson talks about, where team members feel secure enough to take risks, admit mistakes, and challenge the status quo.
Trust isn’t complicated. You show up. You defend your team. You take responsibility when things go wrong. Most importantly, you trust them to rise to seemingly impossible challenges. No shortcuts, no hacks - just genuine support backed by action.
The 10%: The Power of Pattern Interrupts
But psychological safety isn’t about being soft. Sometimes, the kindest thing you can do is deliver a stark wake-up call. That’s where the 10% comes in - those moments when you need to break patterns, challenge assumptions, and push for excellence.
In practice, this might look like straight-up saying “Fuck that” when you see over-engineering or complacency creeping in. The room goes quiet. People straighten in their chairs. What just happened? The calm, supportive leader they know just threw a grenade into the discussion. These aren’t random acts of disruption - they’re strategic interventions made possible by all those trust deposits.
Setting seemingly impossible standards is part of this push. I might suddenly declare we need to deliver in half the time, or cut our WIP (Work In Progress) limit from 5 to 2. You can see the mental record-scratch as people process this. These aren’t arbitrary constraints - they force the team to think differently. When you say “we’re going to do the same work with a WIP limit of 2,” you’re really saying “find a better way to work.” The team might push back, there might be nervous laughter, but that moment of shock creates space for new thinking. That friction creates growth.
The Virtuous Cycle of High Performance
Here’s where it gets interesting: when you get this balance right, it creates a virtuous cycle. The safety built during the 90% enables bolder “push” moments. Successfully navigating these challenges together - like hitting that “impossible” delivery date or thriving under strict WIP limits - builds even deeper trust. This deeper trust allows for more audacious challenges, and suddenly you’re operating at a higher level of both psychological safety AND performance.
This is tough love at its finest - the team knows you have their backs, which is precisely what allows you to set such high bars. Each constraint becomes an opportunity for innovation rather than a source of stress.
Teams that get this balance start operating differently. They develop their own rhythm of support and challenge. They start setting their own impossible targets. The conflicts become productive, the solutions get better, and the standards keep rising. It’s not magic - it’s what happens when people feel secure enough to push each other while maintaining unwavering standards.
Making It Work
The sequence matters:
- Build psychological safety first
- Demonstrate consistent support
- Then (and only then) earn the right to use those jarring interventions
New team members might need time to understand this dynamic. That’s okay - it’s part of the learning curve. They need to experience both sides of the equation: the consistent support and the occasional tough love.
This isn’t about creating a minefield where your team tiptoes around waiting for the next explosion. It’s about targeted disruption in an environment of trust. The 90% is what makes the 10% constructive rather than destructive.
The key is remembering that the 90% and the 10% aren’t opposing forces - they’re complementary tools in your leadership toolkit. The gentle pull of support and the sharp push of challenge work together to create something powerful: a team that can handle intense disagreements because they have absolute trust in each other’s fundamental support and good intentions.
This approach isn’t for everyone, and that’s fine. What matters is transparency about how and why you operate this way. Building a high-performing team means being the bad guy sometimes. Not because you like conflict, but because you believe in your team’s potential to achieve what seems impossible.
Wrap up
Just like with the 80/20 rule, the ratio isn’t exactly 90/10. In some constellations it’s 99/1 and in some it’s 85/15. The more a team works together though, the more it leans towards 99/1. The more you get to know one-another, the more you can jump past the productive conflict stage.
The beauty of this dynamic is how it evolves with team maturity. As your trust account grows richer, you need fewer sharp pattern interrupts to maintain high performance. Those early deposits of consistent support and tough love create a foundation where even subtle course corrections can have powerful effects.
This brings us full circle to what high-performing teams are really about: the ability to navigate both support and challenge with fluidity. Whether it’s 90/10 or 99/1, the principle remains the same - build the trust that enables transformation, then use that trust to push boundaries. Because the real magic happens when “impossible” targets start feeling like business as usual.
