Trust comes before it’s earned

In most organisations, you earn trust. You start at the bottom, prove yourself and get more room step by step. At Libertel I saw the opposite: managing director John de Wit asked an employee who’d been there for 2 months to work on a project with a big financial impact. This article is about what that choice says about leadership, what respect looks like in everyday work and which question you can ask yourself as a leader before you trust someone with a difficult problem. On giving trust as a leader, up front and without conditions.

Two months in

I’d been at Libertel for 2 months, the company that later became Vodafone, when John de Wit asked me if I wanted to help him. John was one of the founders and the first managing director. I was a marketing employee, had just started and had never really spoken to him.

He barely knew me. My manager wasn’t in that conversation, and neither was the head of my department. The CEO asked me himself.

I’ve never forgotten that moment. Mainly because in every organisation I worked for afterwards, I started checking whether things worked the same way there. Usually they didn’t.

A handful of people at the table

The project turned out to have a huge financial impact. For a decision like that, a CEO normally calls his directors and senior managers together: the people with the titles and the years of experience. John picked a handful of employees who were close to the daily work and knew the operation from the inside.

He opened with something I didn’t expect from a managing director:

“I don’t know how I’m going to sell this project to the board.
I need you for that.”

And he immediately added:

“Don’t look to your manager to check whether that’s okay.
By taking responsibility now, you’re already taking care of that yourself.”

Everything was in there. He admitted he didn’t have the answer, and in one sentence he removed the hierarchy that could have held us back. If you were in, you didn’t need anyone’s permission. The responsibility was simply ours.

We worked on the plan in isolation for a few weeks. Then John asked one of us to present it to the board. He was in the room and never left any doubt: this was his project and he stood behind it.

The board said no. It was a big investment and a bold step, one the board didn’t dare to take at that moment.

Still, this story is about what happened before that presentation.

A savings account

In most organisations I’ve seen from the inside since then, trust works like a savings account. You start at the bottom, you deliver, you prove yourself and after a while you get a bit more room. Trust becomes a reward for what you’ve shown in the past.

John turned that around. He started with trust and only adjusted it if you gave him a reason. That’s a deliberate choice about how you build an organisation, and it asks more of a leader than the usual route. Because if it goes wrong, you’ve given someone room that, according to the org chart, they hadn’t earned yet.

It works the same way with clients, by the way. In Business development starts one step earlier I described how a relationship grows on trust, long before there’s a contract.

Pay attention to a phrase you hear in a lot of companies: “Let’s give him the benefit of the doubt.” It sounds generous. But whoever says it starts from doubt and gives the other person temporary credit. If you really trust someone, that phrase doesn’t even cross your mind.

Libertel in those years

Libertel was a special place back then. Only later could I put into words what it was: a shared belief in what we stood for and a culture where everyone felt free to carry that out, whatever their role. That started at the top, with the way John and the people around him treated employees.

Later I worked in organisations where things went differently. Managers talked about departments as if the work done there didn’t really matter. A receptionist who treated every customer in a friendly, professional way was dismissed as someone with a “nine-to-five mentality”. As if arriving on time and leaving on time is a flaw. As if your value as an employee depends on how long you hang around after closing time.

I still run into that pattern and it surprises me every time. It’s unfair and it’s unwise, because your people are the most important thing you have as an organisation.

Eckart Wintzen, founder of BSO, which merged into Origin and later became part of Atos, put it more sharply in his book Eckart’s Notes than I ever could: “To begin with, your employees aren’t an ‘asset’ at all, they’re not yours!” His point: they’re people who go home every evening and decide again the next morning whether they want to come back to you. Only when they come back because they want to are they real co-workers, and not ‘staff’.

Small things, every day

You rarely show respect with a grand gesture. It’s in the small things you do consistently.

It starts with knowing who works around you. You know the people above and next to you on the org chart. But do you know the colleague who sets up the meeting room every morning? Do you know what the administration department actually does, and what would happen if it wasn’t there tomorrow?

It’s in the words you choose. “That department doesn’t do anything anyway” sounds like a joke at the coffee machine, but people remember it. Words build up or break down. There’s no neutral version.

It’s also in how you listen. Especially to what someone almost says, but doesn’t finish. I wrote about that earlier in What you don’t hear, doesn’t exist.

And it’s in moments like John’s. Daring to say you don’t know and asking for help. Putting someone in front of the board who, on paper, has no business being there yet. And if the plan fails, carrying on with the same team without looking for someone to blame.

The project was never approved. Still, in those few weeks I learned more about leadership than in any training, because I got to see it up close.

Who you ask to the table

In Leaders Eat Last, Simon Sinek describes how the best leaders take care of their team first and only then of themselves. I read that as a practical observation rather than idealism. A team that feels safe and valued takes initiative and does more than it’s asked to.

You don’t need a book for that. You can start tomorrow.

Walk through the office and greet everyone by name, including the people without an impressive title. And ask yourself the question John showed me back then. If you need someone tomorrow for a difficult problem, do you choose based on who has something to say? Or based on who’s been there longest and has the highest position?

Further reading

If you want to go deeper, I recommend two books: Eckart’s Notes by Eckart Wintzen, for his view on employees and organisations, and Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek, on what happens to a team when it feels safe with its leader.

Sinek, S. (2014). Leaders eat last: Why some teams pull together and others don’t. Portfolio/Penguin. ISBN 9781591845324.

Wintzen, E. (2024). Eckart’s Notes (R.J. Pabon, Ed.). McTypeface Publishing. ISBN 9789083448800. Originally published in 2007 by Lemniscaat. Available in Dutch only.