There are many blog posts which highlight the importance of trust withing company’s culture. Today I will talk about potential demage which can be caused by lack of trust when your company is in the stage of growth. Let’s say you are manager in a company with size of 50-80 people and have a plan to grow up to 400-500 people. With 80-100 peope as a manager you are in a position when you’re more or less keep controll and keep eye on all projects and major decisions. You are very successfull with your jugements, opinions and push backes. During this time what happens that you build very strong opinion. You even start owning more and more services, projects and becoming more and more important within organization. At some point you think makes sense to involve more people into discussions so maybe you can delegate more stuff to them. But after first meeting you are really disappointed as your new peer didn’t reason correctly and judge situatiin in a deeper way(your opinion). Next time maybe you don’t involve here or even if you keep her in a meeting you don’t allow to talk much. You just don’t trust her. In the same time you are powerfull and you enjoy that. But sorry, you are bottleneck and your organization is really weak because of you! What happens next that you start growing and hiring more people, which leads more parallel and complex projects. You still want to be involved in projects and keep controll. What happens that your work quality goes down or you want to shoot projects as you realize you are unable to controll. You break relationship with your peer managers. You are proper bottleneck!
In most of the cases the issue here is not that you have a bad intentions. No. You just don’t trust people. Because of your trust issues you didn’t allow people to fail, learn and grow, i.e. to grow and distribute knowledge throughout the company. Because of this now your company can not run parallel projects and make independent decisions.
Instead what you had to do you had to create a culture where people feel safe to explore things. For instance, when engineers try to switch to new library, technology, etc, and for some reason they don’t succeed they are not blamed but rather they organiz knowledge sharing sessions and celebrate learning. You still consider it as a win! Your engineers are not scared to explore anymore. Having culture for exploration is very important for having innovative and scalable company.