The best gift is trust

A great reflection of modern large corporate life - free your people from this and they will be grateful

Do you want to get the best out of people?

Do you need help from experts when you are starting up but can’t afford to pay?

Do you want to build a good corporate culture that will stay with your company and continue long after you have exited?

Do you want have employees and managers who do the right thing by the business?

If you answer yes to any of the questions above then you need to learn how to trust and how to give that trust.

For many founders this can be hard. I count myself in this category too. If you have given up your secure paid job to take the leap into the great unknown then it is easy to be obsessed with details.

If you want your employees and suppliers to like working with you then you need to give trust.

This doesn’t mean you have to live in a juvenile fantasy world in which everybody does everything on time and perfectly. It means learning to live with imperfections, taking a ‘good enough’ attitude to things and building in extra time for people to go on the learning curve.

Our childhoods are basically about being progressively trusted more and more by our parents and teachers over time. This doesn’t need to stop when working.

Trust your employees with small things that you think they can accomplish then increase what responsibility and trust you give them over time. Some people grow quickly, some less quickly, but they all grow.

People realise that being given trust is increasingly rare in modern companies and if you can do it in such a way that your company doesn’t spiral out of control then you will go far.