Trust is a funny thing — we slap it interchangeably to the smallest transactions and the most intimate relationships. It’s about as elastic as words get.
“My boss doesn’t trust me, he’s a micromanager.”
“The test result is negative, but I don’t know if I can trust it.”
“I can’t trust him to do the laundry.”
It’s an important concept to us, trust. We use it to carry such important relationships forward – or keep them in check. Evolutionarily, we have a predisposition to trust — it helps us survive from the earliest life stages. As we age, most of us extend the habits of trust in appropriate ways in other areas of our lives.
Habits of trust are alchemical. They help us cooperate and collaborate. They help transform groups into high-performing teams.
But what if there’s someone on our team — what if it’s the leader — who doesn’t have those habits of trust?
We’ve all worked with someone who has difficulty trusting subordinates – or more usually, anyone! – to complete tasks without constant monitoring. But most of us don’t work with such a person for very long. No one does – because working within an atmosphere of distrust is intolerable to us; it’s unnatural.
7 people died in 1982 as a result of drug tampering with Tylenol bottles, generating widespread panic. Tylenol changed their packaging. They wanted people to know they could trust Tylenol.
The kind of trust Tylenol struggled with, through no fault of its own — packaging safety — is clear-cut. You believe Tylenol is safe, or you don’t, and you act on that belief. It’s simple, clear, and measurable. That’s because your relationship with Tylenol is transactional. It’s sufficient that you trust them in a fairly narrow lane. Within that lane, you may have very low tolerance for failure, but it’s a known quantity. Tylenol can determine what is necessary to earn your trust, and Tylenol can measure when it has achieved it.
But what about the micromanager boss? That’s more complicated because there we need habits of trust — a pattern of trust that operates organically, extending to unanticipated situations.
The unanticipated piece is key. We’ve all worked with managers — perhaps we’ve even been such a manager! — who don’t understand how they’re micromanaging.
“Trust has to be earned,” a manager said to me recently. But what did he mean? This manager meant that he needed to observe his team members doing exactly identical tasks without variation before he could ‘trust’ them to complete their work on their own. That’s not trust at all — it’s rote training.
Rote training is the opposite of trust and the secret weapon of the micromanager. Elaborate training processes — or none at all — with detailed directions prevent employees from learning and development. They stop people from thinking, or punish them for it. And no one will stay in an environment that discourages independent thought a second longer than necessary.
As anyone who’s worked with one for any length of time knows, who Untrusting Boss supervises doesn’t matter. Micromanagement is never about the micromanagee, but only the micromanager.
Untrusting Bosses are often almost tragic figures. No one tells them what they’re doing wrong, and they go through their professional lives astonished by the incompetence of all who surround them. The potential that Untrusting Bosses hold within them remains within them. Who can they trust to help them realize it? Who can bring their dreams closer to reality? When you can’t trust, such calls can never be answered.
My friend Tom is brilliant — fast on his feet, intuitive, decisive, and with exceptional instincts. But for years he struggled professionally — he couldn’t maintain the staff continuity close to him that he needed to undertake the bold initiatives he envisioned. And he couldn’t think why.
“They don’t understand how important this project is-” Tom would begin, and I would know another associate would soon have one foot out the door. When only Tom appreciated the project, only Tom would soon be left holding the bag. It happened again and again, and finally Tom asked my advice.
“What would happen if you just … trusted your team to do it?”
Tom’s face actually turned white — it was just like a Victorian novel. He couldn’t imagine it.
“Seriously,” I said, “what if you just left town?”
Every year Tom and his wife went away, just the two of them, for two weeks. The annual trip wasn’t far off.
We talked through strategy and he decided to start small — to kick off a project the week before departing for vacation, and let the team manage it without his interference, or supervision, as Tom preferred to call it.
Of course it was fine; it’s always fine.
Tom never became a person who trusted easily, or without a careful assessment of the other person. But he did come to see that he wasn’t the only person who could do things. It made it possible for him to have meaningful collaborations with people — to engage more deeply and powerfully in his work as a creative enterprise.
Trust transformed Tom’s professional life. It unlocked creative energy, fired his staff’s growth and learning, and made him a leader people love being around — it made him a truly visionary, inspirational, leader instead of a frustrated and frustrating one.
It made him successful. But it also freed him from a terrible loneliness. Trust is a powerful thing.