“Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much.”
Luke 16:10 (NIV)
Tell me what your morning looks like, and I’ll tell you what your life looks like.
Most men give me the same answer. Snooze the alarm twice. Teeth, clothes, coffee, kiss your wife, then out the door. But there’s nothing in it that belongs to the man himself. Not even five minutes. Why is that? he’ll tell you it’s a time problem.
It isn’t. It’s a trust problem.
Somewhere along the way, he decided that a promise he makes to himself at six in the morning isn’t going to hold, so he quit making them.
Sooner or later, everything you haven’t dealt with gets called to the floor. A business will do it. So will a marriage. And when you get called to the floor, you don’t get to stand on what you told people you built. You stand on what’s under you. Your foundation.
Do you trust your own foundation? Do you trust that it will hold the weight of the crisis? What’s been on my mind this week is that trust: how it gets built, how it breaks, and how long I had it backwards.
When I was a young leader, I thought trust was something you handed off to a man at the first instinct. You’ve proven you can do the job? Great. You’re in charge of it. Good luck. And then I’d be off building the next big thing.
It took me years to see: Trust you hand over with no follow-up isn’t trust; it’s hope. What we need is the discipline to follow up and the patience to watch for specific signs before we hand a man the keys. Not because I expect him to fail. But because that’s how trust gets built, a little at a time. Trust through verification.
So, the founder starts doing that. He starts checking in with his team. He asks a few questions and doesn’t get the answers he wanted. And his gut starts tingling. I call it the spidey sense. He can’t tell you what’s wrong, but he’s sure something is. He will then do one of two things:
The right way: Go straight to the source with specificity. “I saw [this], and they made me feel like we’re off track. Can you sit down with me and help me understand what’s going on with [that]?”
The wrong way: Avoid the conflict with generality: “I need every report available on the company, and I need them done now.” No explanation, no specifics, and deadlines nobody can hit.
If he chooses the wrong way, he doesn’t build trust – he starts a war of egos. The man he put in charge of the job is asking now himself, what does he want from me? Why doesn’t he trust me? Both men dig in for a fight. All the energy that should be moving the company forward goes into proving who’s right, and that whole part of the business stops growing.
You build trust piece by piece, and you also destroy it piece by piece. There’s not one big betrayal, but little wedges, driven in by emotion. When a man feels unsafe, or feels small, he starts writing a story that proves he’s right, and then he recruits people who’ll agree with it. You see it in families too, when a parent gives one kid more than the other, and two siblings who never did a thing to each other end up rivals.
The story doesn’t validate reality. It validates how you feel about it, which becomes your reality.
So where in your life are you living the story instead of asking the specific question? And the harder one: do you trust yourself enough to ask for the truth?
A man who can’t keep a five-minute promise to himself is going to have a hard time trusting anybody else to keep theirs.
This week’s lesson: Trust isn’t something you hand a man. You build it, one kept promise at a time, starting with the ones you make to yourself.
