This week presented two opportunities for powerful lessons about trust.

The first came as participants in my workshops reflected on their behaviours and outcomes for one of the games. Working in pairs, they competed against each other to produce a standard product in the shortest amount of time. The successful teams found that they divided the product into sections and delegated its construction to individual team members.

The not so successful teams tended to have both people working on the same thing at the same time.

The teams that delegated the tasks found that they had to trust that the team members would get their parts completed as efficiently as they could.

The game generated an interesting discussion around what it takes to delegate. For many bosses, delegation appears hard because they don’t trust their team to do the work as well as they can.

This can be easily overcome by having systems and processes in place and ensuring the team are trained. Of course, the manager has to be willing to let go as well.

The second point from the game included repetition. The teams had a number of trials before competing for the winning round. During the trials, the teams found that they were able to reduce the amount of time it took and in most cases they reduced the time by a whopping 75%.

Repetition leads to Mastery and Mastery leads to Trust and Trust leads to Delegation.

The second event occurred as Ross and I drove back from Woollongong to Newcastle. It was my turn to drive as we approached Sydney. Our GPS gave me instructions that I considered to be counter-intuitive. I was heading away from the signs directing me to Sydney.

I was nervous, and yet I trusted and followed the GPS and I was rewarded for doing so. We emerged on the motorway and completely missed the Sydney CBD, which is where we would have ended up, had I followed the signs and not the GPS.

How about you?

Do you trust your GPS?

Do you trust your team to get the job done or are you micro-managing?

Remember, your team want to come to work and succeed. You have to trust and let them do the work.