People can easily sense if their leadership trusts them or not. If they don’t trust their staff it is shows up in ways that very obvious. For instance, one organization I worked for had the CEO approving all purchases of food, to the point that a $25.00 order of pizza was to have been approved by the CEO of an organization grossing over $100M in annual revenue. You can only imagine the “control mechanisms” for more meaningful expenses.
When people know that you don’t trust them—they don’t trust you either. It is a two way street on trust for sure. I choose to trust people until they prove themselves untrustworthy. I’ve been bitten before by following this model, but I find people respond much more to being empowered than by being hamstrung with a short leash.
