Trust, You Must
You hired good people, now let them lead
Trust feels particularly difficult to come by these days.
Our employers have made it abundantly clear they do not care about us, laying off thousands of workers while posting record profits. Profits over people, amirite? 🙄
Our politicians are lying to us. Our news outlets and social media sites are feeding us a constant diet of misinformation, altered images, and deepfake videos about pretty much everything.
And then there’s AI. It responds so confidently but hallucinates so regularly that it’s impossible to tell fact from fiction—and who has the time or energy anymore to even try?
It’s exhausting.
With all of this going on in the world around us, it’s no wonder that we have a difficult time trusting our teams and the folks we’ve hired to lead them.
But Trust, You Must
If you’ve hired someone to do a job, you have to trust them to do fully whatever it is you hired them to do—to strategize, build, lead, manage, execute, operate, analyze … whatever.
For the leaders you’ve hired, that trust should extend to everything they do to lead their team, including how they:
structure that team,
define roles and responsibilities,
assess performance and potential, and
manage and develop individuals on their team.
I chatted with a leader this week who, for over a year now, has been struggling with a problematic employee. They finally convinced the organization’s VP to allow them to manage this employee out.
The deciding factor? The leader had a direct (and not entirely positive) experience with the employee themselves. 🤦🏼♀️
Y’all—you cannot succeed as a leader-of-leaders if you require direct engagement or experience to make a decision, or to support your leaders in making them.
And the leaders you’ve hired can’t succeed that way, either.
Is It Them … Or You?
As a senior leader, it can be difficult to cede control. I get it.
But when one of your leaders tells you they have a problematic employee on their team, you need to believe them—and if you don’t, something is wrong.
If you can’t trust that your leader knows best in this situation, ask yourself why:
What are they doing, or not doing, that makes it difficult for me to trust them?
Is the lack of trust specific to one issue or type of situation (eg, I don’t trust them with difficult customer situations), or is it consistent across a range of situations?
Is it fixable? Is there something specific that can be done to create trust?
Perhaps the most important question of all, however, is this: “Is my inability to trust related to something they’re doing, or is it me?”
It’s not always easy to turn the focus on yourself. You may actually believe that you do trust your leaders. But if your actions suggest otherwise, then it’s time for some self-reflection:
Why do I need direct knowledge or experience to make a decision, or trust the decision of a leader under me?
Am I having difficulties “letting go” of control, and if so, why?
Do I exhibit the same behavior with all my leaders and most situations, or just some leaders, some of the time? What distinguishes these leaders and situations?
If the answer to this last question is “just one leader, most or all of the time” then you almost certainly do not have the right person in the role and may wish to make a change, asap.
But if your responses to these questions are more nuanced than this (and they often are), then you’ve done the hard part—you looked in the mirror and realized that you are the problem.
Which is great news, because it means you’ve hired good people. Now, trust them to lead.
Photo credit for cover photo: Jonathan Cooper on Unsplash
Bonus read: Letting go of control can be challenging for many leaders, especially newly-minted managers. Learning to lead through others is one of several mental model shifts folks need to make when transitioning to a leadership role:
