Trust and bureaucracy

Tom Breur

13 March 2016

There is a hackneyed management joke that goes something like this: “We need to train our staff!” “But what if they leave??” “Well, what if we don’t train them, and they stay??” There is an obvious underlying dynamic behind this riddle that portrays a lack of trust. It’s nice (for some: necessary) to work in a trusting environment, but there is no law that says you must trust. If management –for whatever reason– is not grounded in trust, then what are the available alternatives?

The Taylor approach (“Scientific management”) involves a lot of checks and balances. In a dynamic and fast-paced environment, that seems like an awfully expensive and “heavy weight” way to run an organization! The elaborate control this requires, creates a tremendous, administrative burden on anybody overseeing work.

If you choose not to trust your people, it sure takes an awful lot of (expensive…) bureaucracy to stay “in control” – is that really worth it? To me it seems, that although trust doesn’t just “fall on us”, as managers you don’t really have many options other than to attempt to create a trusting environment, because distrust is pretty cumbersome and expensive, too!