Trust

The base of every relationship is mutual trust. Without trust, everything else is a waste of time. You trust your team to do their best work in the interest of the company, and your team trusts you to take the right decisions and have their back.

This foundation is needed before you talk about anything else. As if you don’t trust your team and check everything they do twice, you not only kill their drive and sabotage their growth, you also waste the time you need to work on your goals and scale the team.

Yes, building trust takes time. Still, you need to give people a basic (but not naive) level of trust to them from the beginning. It will give you a huge competitive advantage to others that claim trust takes years to build.

To achieve this for yourself, you have to remind yourself that everybody is here to their best work. Sure, there are exceptions to that, but you will have an easier and more productive life as a manager if you generally assume the best in people.

To visualize this, I like the concept of the trust battery: Imagine a battery that half full when you meet a new person and every action either charges or drains it. And every relationship has their battery. You start with a basic level of trust and have the potential to grow without being too naive.

Real world example

• give people small projects with minor impact and see how they are doing
• Based on the results you can give them bigger projects that carry risk