Don’t know if you caught a piece in the news yesterday – A vicar in Huddersfield, called Rev Richard Steel.  (Luckily not Steal!).  He had £450 – 45 people – who took the £10 each.  He asked them to go away and invest it – no names, no lists.  Parable of the Talents from the bible, one o three people didn’t invest it, and only returned it – so was consigned to the  outer darkness, and the weeping and gnashing of teeth.  Richard promised he wouldn’t do this.  His experiment will be seen to work if they return with more on Easter Sunday.  I look forward to hearing the result.

But how often would we have that sort of level of trust in our organisations?  It’s the same as delegating an important task or project to someone – and not interfering too much, isn’t it?  Would we get a lot more out of people if we did trust them more?

One of the problems with trust is it is very volatile – abuse it once and you may lose it forever.  I tend to be black and white on this – perhaps too extreme, really.  People (rather than leopards) can change their spots.  It may take you a long time to resurrect it if the loss of trust was your fault.  It’s like trying to roll up a ball of string, and dropping it.  It goes miles before you can stop it, but then you have to start reeling it back in.

It is worth the effort…

The audience (and showroom) trusted my cooking!