We all know the proverb «Trust is good, control is better». It is one of the most important management principles. The bigger the enterprise, the more its management and legislators are focusing on control. But the cost-benefit equation is abysmal: The Swiss banks, for instance, have never paid higher and more frequent fines than in 2008, despite a sharp increase in directives, control as well as laws in that year. This led to Mark Branson, chief executive of the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA), demanding a change in culture from the banks in autumn 2014.
The good news is, though, that even in banks the majority of employees don’t need control to behave. One of our clients once told Fredi: «You know that we go through all the trouble of establishing control thanks to about 3% of our employees?»
This is why successful organisations are investing in trust, increasing the transparency and reducing the control. Roche, for example, eliminated the control over travel expenses in several departments by publishing them on their intranet. The result: The expenses were reduced! (cf. The Leader’s Dilemma, S. 95 et sqq.). Yet another prerequisite for the reduction of control is to create trust.
Jurgen Appelo suggests (cf. Management 3.0, S 18 et sqq.), to work on four kinds of trust (cp. diagram above): A manager (YOU) should trust his Team (1) in order to gain the trust of his team (2: SHE and HE); he should make sure that the team members trust each other (3). A manager should furthermore trust himself (4) in order to delegate more of the decision-making to his team, for example.
