If you want to move your business forward, trust isn’t an optional component. People need to know they can trust you, and you need to learn to trust those around you.
Stephen Covey said it well:
“Trust always affects two measurable outcomes: speed and cost. When trust goes down—in a relationship, on a team, in a company, in an industry, with a customer—speed decreases with it. Everything takes longer. Simultaneously, costs increase. Redundancy processes, with everyone checking up on everyone else, cost more.”
This can manifest itself in many ways, and one of my favorite is email. I’ve said before that as I’ve learned to trust my team to do what’s asked of them, I’ve saved myself a ton of time. I can then take that time to help move our business forward in other ways.
Developing that trust takes time, and there are no great shortcuts. This is one reason that we generally have more W-2 employees than contractors at GreenMellen. Contractors can be wonderful pieces of a team, but it takes longer for trust to develop. With our full-time staff, the hours (and trust) add up quickly, helping us all to make progress more quickly.
