PushPress Operating Tenet #13: Foster Trust & Collaboration
The Trust Tax: Why Every Business Interaction Either Builds or Breaks Your Bottom Line
⏱️ Estimated read time: 4 minutes
TLDR: Trust is your business accelerator. When it breaks, everything stalls. When it thrives, decisions and innovation happen faster. Like a bank account, trust builds through small daily deposits and earns interest over time, but one breach can drain it completely. Great leaders balance trust with strategic verification to create teams that collaborate effectively even during disagreement.
Remember when we ditched our fluffy core values for actionable operating tenets? Today we're tackling a critical leadership tenet:
Foster Trust and Collaboration. We communicate openly, listen actively, and treat each other with respect. Trust is built through transparency, accountability, and a commitment to shared success.
This isn't about building a kumbaya culture. It's about creating conditions where work moves faster, innovation thrives, and we serve customers better.
Why Trust Matters
Trust is the cornerstone to business. Between brand and customer. Between leadership and teams. Between teams. From person to person. Trust is the currency that makes everything work.
The business case for trust is brutally simple: without it, everything slows down, innovation dies, the best talent leaves, and your customer experience suffers.
Without trust, everything costs more. More time. More energy. More money.
Trust but Verify: The Balancing Act
Great leaders understand that blind trust misses the point - smart trust is the goal.
At PushPress, we expect our leaders to default to trust while setting clear expectations, creating lightweight checkpoints, addressing issues promptly, and gradually increasing autonomy as your team proves themselves.
The difference between great and mediocre leadership comes down to one thing: the best leaders trust deeply but verify strategically.
The challenge emerges when verification happens in a low-trust environment - that's when necessary oversight morphs into what feels like micromanagement to the team.
When Trust Breaks: The Real Operational Cost
When trust erodes, what should be healthy verification turns toxic. As leaders start Taking Ownership and Digging Deep the teams will feel micromanaged and under a microscope.
Without honesty from both sides, this quickly degrades into cover-your-ass updates, back-channeling, and work slowing to a crawl as documentation and justification replace execution.
Between teams, the damage multiplies: finger-pointing replaces problem-solving, defensive documentation explodes, and information gets weaponized instead of shared. This is especially dangerous between peer teams where no clear authority exists to resolve the conflict.
The remedy isn't complicated but requires courage: become radically honest with each other and refocus on our "Customer Obsessed" tenet. When everyone puts customer outcomes first, being "right" matters less than fixing the problem.
The Magic of Trust
When high-trust teams collaborate, everything changes. Decisions speed up, information flows freely, problems surface earlier, innovation explodes, and resources get allocated more effectively across departments.
True collaboration isn't about eliminating conflict – it's about transforming how conflict happens: openly (not in backchannel conversations), focused on ideas (not attacking people), with everyone able to honestly disagree, yet fully commit once decisions are made.
This is the collaboration advantage that makes trust so valuable. It unlocks our ability to have urgency and be impact driven on behalf of our customers.
Trust Is a Bank Account
Trust works exactly like a bank account. Here's how:
Micro-deposits only: Trust builds through tiny, consistent actions over time - keeping your word, sharing information openly, taking accountability for mistakes. You can't make one giant deposit and suddenly have full trust. It simply doesn't work that way.
Earns interest: Like a good investment, consistent trust deposits start generating their own returns. Teams that have built strong trust reserves find people giving them the benefit of the doubt in ambiguous situations - that's your trust interest payment.
Massive withdrawals: While trust builds slowly, it can be drained instantly. One major breach - a promise broken, information withheld, blame shifted - can zero out your account in seconds.
Just like with your money, you need to be mindful of your trust transactions every single day. And just like with money, it's easy to overspend if you're not paying attention.
The leaders who succeed at PushPress are the ones who recognize this reality and protect their trust accounts as carefully as they do their financial ones.
The Bottom Line
In a remote-first company like ours, trust isn't a nice-to-have—it's the glue that holds everything together.
For PushPress, fostering trust and collaboration isn't about creating a comfortable environment. It's about building the operational backbone that makes everything else possible.
The next post in our Operating Tenet series: "Drive Clarity, Focus & Context" - How the best leaders cut through noise and create alignment around what truly matters.