The rule of trust that holds

A few weeks ago, I got into a small exchange in a LinkedIn comment thread. The post was about trust — specifically, how do you get clients to actually trust your team instead of redesigning everything themselves?

My answer was short: "Never keep clients in the dark. Be open, honest, and proactive. Even when mistakes happen." I hit post, moved on, forgot about it.

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But the thought kept coming back. Not the comment itself — the word. Trust.

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I grew up with a rule my mom gave me early. She said: "I trust people by default. Until they prove I shouldn't." I carried that rule into adulthood and eventually into business. When I started building my agency, I led with trust. I gave people room. I didn't micromanage. I assumed good intentions. And for a long time, that approach worked beautifully. The people who deserved that trust treated it like something precious. They stepped up, took responsibility, opened up. Some of the most talented people I ever worked with stayed not because we paid the most — we didn't — but because they felt trusted, heard, and respected. That trust built the company's first few years.

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And then, slowly, it started to crack.

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I began noticing patterns. Something promised but not delivered, always with a reason. A direct question about status met with vague answers. A sense that work was happening, but when I finally looked close — there was nothing behind the curtain. Just motion without results. I'd trusted by default and removed almost all control. Because I judge people by myself first — if I can't imagine acting badly, I don't expect it from others. But people are different. Not everyone treats trust as a gift to protect.

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A founder I talked to recently learned this harder than I did. His employee had been treating a key client disrespectfully, missing deadlines, creating friction — for months. The client finally left. The founder had no idea any of it was happening until it was over. Client trusted the company. Founder trusted the employee. Both bridges collapsed at once. I was lucky early on — most of my first people were genuinely great. But that luck created a blind spot I didn't see for years. I thought trust alone was enough. That if you hire well and trust hard, the structure takes care of itself.

It doesn't.

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The Friday email that changed everything

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Somewhere around 2015 or 2016, we introduced something so simple it felt almost silly. Every Friday, for every project, every client got a status email. A health report. But the key wasn't the email itself. It was what was in it. If there were problems, they were listed — along with how we planned to solve them, by when, and who was responsible. If we'd made a mistake, we said so. If a deadline was at risk, the client knew before it became a surprise. No "everything's fine" messages. No vague reassurances. Just honest, regular visibility into what was actually happening.

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That one small practice changed our client relationships more than any pitch or case study ever did. We had clients who stayed five, six, seven years. Not because we were perfect — because they always knew where things stood.

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I did the same with the team. Monthly letters to everyone — here's where the company is, here's what went well, here's what didn't, here's what we're working on next. People told me in one-on-ones that knowing what was happening made them feel safe. That clarity, for many of them, was worth more than a raise somewhere else.

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What I figured out

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Trust in a family is built on love and respect. Trust in business runs on something else — not cold, not mechanical, but built differently. Over the years I came to see that the trust I wanted in my team rested on four things. Whenever one was missing, trust would start to leak — even with good people and good intentions.

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The first was visibility. Could I see what was happening without asking? When I could, I stayed calm. When I couldn't, I'd start pulling on people — and they'd feel it immediately. That's where the spiral always began.

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The second was shared definitions. What does "done" actually mean? I learned this the hard way when my designer would say "it's done" meaning she'd uploaded the file, and I'd hear "the client signed off." Trust cracked at every handoff. Nobody's fault — we'd just never spelled it out.

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The third was ownership boundaries. Did each person know what was theirs to decide without me? When a PM didn't know whether she could respond to a client on her own, she wouldn't take the step. And I'd think she didn't care. She cared. She just didn't know the lines.

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The fourth was a feedback rhythm. Not punishments — just a regular moment where work was actually visible and discussed. Good work noticed. Dropped balls noticed too. A weekly review, a one-on-one, anything. Without that rhythm, there's silence. And silence is anxiety for everyone.

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Something to try this weekend:

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Look at your team through four questions: Can you see what's happening without asking? Does "done" mean the same thing to everyone? Does each person know what they own and what they can decide without you? And when someone does something well — or drops something — is there a regular moment where that actually gets discussed?

If any of those is missing, the trust isn't broken. It just doesn't have what it needs to hold.

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So here's what I've been thinking about: where in your business is trust leaking right now — not because anyone's doing anything wrong, but because the infrastructure underneath it was never built?

Hit reply and tell me. I read every response.

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P.S. My mom's rule still holds, by the way. I still trust by default. I just don't confuse trust with blindness anymore. The trust stays. The visibility gets built around it. That's the version that actually works — and the one that took me way too long to find.