You inherit a team, or you bring in a new hire. You don’t know them. They don’t know you. Most managers would play it safe: “I’ll trust them once they prove themselves.” It feels safe, but it’s a mistake.
Distrust leads to micromanagement. It kills ownership, motivation, and speed. No one does their best work when they feel like they’re just following orders.
Trust should be the default — not a prize unlocked over time. It creates autonomy, initiative, and accountability. Exactly what you want in a high-performing team.
Trusting by default doesn’t mean stepping back and hoping for the best. It needs a framework: set clear expectations of what “good” looks like, define decision boundaries, align regularly, and make yourself available to support people based on maturity.
“Trust, but verify.” Yes — you are responsible for your team. But responsibility doesn’t mean policing every move; it means designing a system where people can be trusted. You don’t need to personally check everything. Instead, build systems that sustain trust: code reviews, outcome-based accountability (objectives), metrics and observability, retrospectives. These don’t kill trust; they make it scalable and objective.
The best way to find out if someone can be trusted is to trust them. If you find you can’t trust someone to deliver or to escalate when needed, it’s not a “trust issue.” It’s a performance issue.
You don’t fix low performance with control. You fix it by building a team you can trust.