Earning the Trust of a High Performer

Zanzibar: 2006

I didn’t always struggle to step back.

I stepped back easily when I trusted the person.

I remember the first time I went on holiday with work friends.

We were traveling to Zanzibar and I flew from Cape Town to meet them in Joburg.

To this day, one of them still tells the story.

She couldn’t believe I was the same person she worked with.

I arrived with no idea what time the international flight was leaving.

No details of where we were staying.

No plan.

I didn’t check anything.

I just showed up.

Because I trusted them to get us where we needed to be.

It was the complete opposite of how I operated at work.

At work, I trusted differently.

Or more accurately, I trusted conditionally.

If someone delivered to my standard, I stepped back.

If they didn’t, I stayed close.

I stayed involved in decisions.

I checked things more carefully.

I stepped in when something didn’t land the way I expected.

On the surface, that sounds reasonable.

You want high standards.

You want strong outcomes.

You want to trust the people around you.

Going through the pattern myself I now see that, for high performers, trust isn’t just about capability.

It’s about how closely someone matches a (sometimes unspoken) standard.

Your expected standard.

And that’s where the problem starts.

Because those standards are often:

• incredibly high

• not always clearly communicated

• and don’t leave much room for learning

So what happens?

People don’t quite meet the mark.

Because they actually don’t know exactly what the mark is.

And in that gap, high performers do what they’ve always done.

They step in.

They correct.

They take over.

They carry more than they need to.

Because it takes a lot for them to trust.

I see this all the time now.

Leaders who want to step back, but don’t.

Because their teams haven’t yet met a standard that was never fully clarified.

And because there’s little tolerance for anything less than perfect, there’s very little space for that trust to be built.

So the leader ends up staying close.

If you want people to step up, they need space to do it.

And that means:

• being clear about what good looks like

• allowing for learning, not just outcomes

• and not stepping back in the moment something isn’t perfect

Because trust isn’t built when everything goes right.

It’s built in how you lead when it doesn’t.