Leaders trust

Trust.  It’s the fuel that relationships run on.  It’s the “currency” that every relational “transaction” uses.  Like a solidly-built bridge, trust under-girds every fruitful conversation.  Like a trusty weather balloon, trust lifts relationships out of the mundane of mere affection and into the stratosphere of sacrificial love.  It empowers and reminds; supports and emboldens.

Trust is also rare; ever so tentatively bestowed.

Why?

Because when you trust someone, you choose to place a piece of your future in their hands.  It’s a piece of you, really.  Their success becomes your success.  Their failure becomes your failure.  Now they can hurt you where it counts.  Reputation is on the line.  The secret is out.  The project is handed off.  The car keys are handed over.  Now what?  It could go either way.

I believe that a most of the courage we must have as leaders should be dedicated to the matter of trusting people.  I mean, really trusting people with things that matter.  We’ve been burned by people before, I know.  They’ve failed us and left a mess for us to clean up.  Here I am asking you to possibly go through that again.  Why do we even bother?

But have we forgotten how much it meant for someone to believe in us?  Not just to say it, but to give us care over something that really mattered to them.  At that moment we realized we could really mess things up, but we also knew the kid gloves were off.  This was the real deal.

And more often than not, we rose to the occasion.  Because no person likes to be sold short, and nearly every person wants to feel the exhilaration of being trusted.

As leaders we can give people the exhilarating gift of trust!

But we won’t give the gift if we’re so afraid of failure that we can’t take the risk, or we’re so cynical that we no longer believe people capable, or we’re so fixated on our own glory that we won’t share credit.

Leaders, we didn’t begin this journey only to be reduced to risk-free, glory-seeking loners, did we?

We must trust people with things that matter.  Someone did it for us, now let’s go do it for someone else!