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Give trust first
Watch bonds form
Progress flows swift
-安天美
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My father used to say that a closed palm can neither give nor receive. I thought of his words, as I handed control of our compound maintenance budget to our facility manager, whom others thought needed close supervision. "You'll track and plan the work as you see fit?" I said, not really a question. His posture changed, a new confidence emerging. He'd never been trusted to manage finances before. The house has been efficiently maintained so far!
Trust's first step often feels like walking off a cliff, except the ground rises to meet your feet. When I started my new role, I decided to be transparent about how long certain tasks were taking me - something unusual in our fast-paced environment. "But won't they think I'm slow?" I worried to myself. To my surprise, being open about my time management led to colleagues sharing their shortcuts and automation tips, helping me streamline processes I'd been struggling with, and ultimately creating a collaborative environment where we all learned from each other's workflows. My productivity doubled within weeks.
The initial extension of trust creates a momentum that can bypass months, even years, of traditional trust-building exercises. It's like skipping the long prelude of a symphony and starting with the movement that makes everyone sit up straight. When we trust first, we don't just accelerate the process – we fundamentally alter its nature. The energy typically spent on proving worthiness gets redirected into creating value.
I watched a remarkable transformation at 16/16, a creative incubator I discovered in 2022. The space operates an honesty bar system - shelves stocked with sweet potato chips, Igbadun beer, and other refreshments. You simply write down what you take and pay later. Everyone typically thinks this system is risky in a busy creative space. The space is known not just for its creative work, but for this beautiful exercise in shared trust.
The multiplication of trust operates at cellular level in society. Each person who experiences being trusted becomes a carrier of that possibility, infecting others with the courage to extend trust themselves. A student trusted with real responsibility in one classroom becomes an advocate for student autonomy in others. An employee given freedom to innovate brings that expectation to every future workplace. The exponential growth isn't just mathematical – it's transformational.
In my work with corporate teams, I've noticed a peculiar phenomenon: the moment trust is extended, people begin sharing ideas they've held back for months or years. It's as if they've been carrying around locked boxes of creativity, waiting for someone to offer the key. A customer success team I worked with had struggled with efficiency for years until their new manager started each shift by saying, "I trust you to know this process better than anyone. What would you change?"
The flood of innovations that followed wasn't just about technical improvements – it revealed how much energy these workers had been spending on protecting themselves from blame, documenting every decision, second-guessing their own expertise. When trust came first, that energy was suddenly available for its original purpose: creativity, problem-solving, collaboration. Within six months, they had revolutionised their operations process, not through expensive consultants or new technology, but through liberated human ingenuity.
This liberation of vision extends beyond individual creativity. When organisations lead with trust, they often discover capabilities they didn't know they had. Teams that once needed constant oversight become self-regulating organisms, capable of responding to challenges in real-time. The speed of innovation increases not because people are working faster, but because they've stopped working against their own instincts.
Consider the story of two competing building projects in our city. One implemented traditional security and verification systems – badges, sign-ins, material checks, detailed documentation requirements. The other, led by a veteran contractor known for his trust-first approach, simply gave each worker a key and the authority to order needed materials. The first project finished three months late and 20% over budget. The second finished early, under budget, with higher quality scores and, surprisingly, less material loss than the heavily monitored site.
What this contractor understood was that trust isn't just a moral choice – it's an economic multiplier. The costs of distrust are largely invisible but massive: the meetings to verify decisions, the systems to track compliance, the energy spent documenting rather than doing. More subtle but perhaps more costly is the loss of spontaneous collaboration, those moments when someone sees a problem they could fix but doesn't because they lack the authority or autonomy to act.
These hidden taxes of distrust compound over time, creating organisations that move slowly not because their people are incapable, but because they're mired in the quicksand of verification. The true efficiency of trust comes not from eliminating necessary oversight, but from shifting resources from policing to enabling, from controlling to empowering.
As we stand at the threshold of an era where change is the only constant, the ability to move at the speed of trust becomes not just an advantage but a necessity. The organisations and communities that will thrive are those that understand trust as a force multiplier, an accelerant of human potential rather than a risk to be managed.
This future requires a fundamental shift in how we think about leadership. Instead of asking "How can we verify?" we must learn to ask "How can we enable?" The paradox of modern progress is that our most sophisticated technologies and systems still depend on something fundamentally human: the willingness to extend trust first, to create space for others to rise to our expectations rather than prove themselves worthy of them.
The revolution of trust is quiet but profound. It happens in moments when a manager decides to eliminate time sheets, when a teacher hands over the curriculum design to her students, when a parent gives their teenager the car keys without a lengthy lecture. Each of these moments creates a ripple that joins with others to form a wave of transformation, moving at a speed that no amount of control or coercion could match.
Be trustworthy and trust people. Really
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<aside> <img src="/icons/backward_blue.svg" alt="/icons/backward_blue.svg" width="40px" /> Creation Courage
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<aside> <img src="/icons/forward_blue.svg" alt="/icons/forward_blue.svg" width="40px" /> Release and Power
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