Great communication is built on trust

In his book “The Hard Thing About Hard Things“, author Ben Horowitz shares simple yet powerful way to speed up communication: trust. Ben simply says:

“In any human interaction, the required amount of communication is inversely proportional to the level of trust.”

The more you trust someone, the easier the communication. If you know their motivations, skills, and goals, you don’t need to babysit them as much and things can run much more smoothly.

On the other side, you can look at folks such as cashiers at fast food restaurants. Because those positions tend to turn over quite a lot, trust is never established and the workers have to follow a ton of very specific rules because they’re not trusted to make their own decisions.

Let them break the rules

It’s like I shared earlier this year with the policies that companies like Zappos and the Ritz-Carlton have where they specifically encourage their employees to break the rules. As Simon Sinek has said, “that’s what trust is”.

This is why we generally prefer full-time employees at our firm instead of contractors. We have some fantastic contractors, no doubt, but full-time employees allow us to build that trust. Our developer has been with us for years, and she knows she has the complete ability to make decisions on client needs, pricing, or whatever may come up. The reason is simple; I trust her to do what’s in the best interest of both parties, and she will. Her solution may be different than mine, but that’s fine because it’s based on the right priorities (and honestly, her solutions are very likely to be better than mine).

As a result, our communication is much easier. If you have employees that you don’t need to micromanage, it’s a beautiful thing. Trust takes some, but building it will make everything run better.