The invite said 7:30.
So I was there at 7:29. Parked, walked up, rang the bell. The hostess opens the door holding a stack of napkins, half the food still in foil, somebody’s cousin running an extension cord across the living room floor.
She looks at me, real friendly, and says: “Oh! You’re early.”
I was not early. I was on time. I have the invitation.
And then she said the thing that has ended many an evening for me. “Girl, we put 7:30 so people would get here by 8:15.”
I said “oh, okay!” and then I sat on that couch with a plate and an attitude for the next two hours.
For years I had a whole story about this. People just need to respect time better. I carried that around like it was a principle. And it left things strained more often than I want to admit.
Here’s what took me embarrassingly long to see: she wasn’t late to her own party. She was perfectly on time, to a rulebook I never handed her. I was the only person at that party keeping score, and I was the only person who knew the rules.
We do this at work too. With stakes.
Trust is one word doing way too much work
Trust is the thread running through coaching conversations, team workshops, and every alignment session I’ve ever been in.
Distrust of management.
Not being able to hand a task to a team member, which quietly kills delegation.
Not being able to say the true thing out loud because of what it might cost you.
All of that, hanging on one little word.
But almost nobody can tell you how trust actually gets built for them. Every time I ask, I get the same face. A pause. A “hmph. I’ve never thought about that.”
And yet so much of how we treat people is riding on the answer.
The list he’d never said out loud
I asked a senior leader I coached what builds trust for him.
Long pause.
Then: “When I can feel like if I fail, everything will be okay. They won’t throw it in my face.”
So, safety to swing and miss. Good. That’s real.
Then I flipped it. “What does it take for you to trust the people on your team?”
That answer came out fast, and it came out clean.
“I look for them to…
– Show up on time
– Get it right
– Ask questions early enough that we can course-correct
– Stay composed in front of a client”
Crystal clear. He’d had that list for years.
So I asked him the question. “Does your team know this? Have you ever told them, explicitly, that these are the things that matter to you?”
“Honestly… no. Not like that. I thought folks would just… know.”
Meanwhile, he had been quietly routing the good work to about three people he “trusted,” and away from everybody else. And people were starting to notice.
Not out of malice or spite. He just, somewhere below the surface, trusted those three more.
Nobody had been told anything. Nobody had gotten direct feedback. They were just getting passed over, again and again, on a rule that lived only in his head.
That’s the thing about a private checklist. It never stays private.
It leaks out as behavior. Who gets the project. Who gets the benefit of the doubt. Who gets the “you know what, let me just do it myself.”
People feel the docking. They just don’t know what for.
So what’s actually on your list?
Trust tends to get built along two lines.
Relational: Do you care about me? Can I mess up and still be okay? Are you telling me the truth? Are you fair?
Technical: Do you know what you’re doing? Will you do what you said? Is your judgment sound?
And whatever you find on those two lines is going to land in one of two buckets.
Some of it is preference. Time. Tone. How fast somebody answers an email. These are real, and they genuinely affect how I feel about working with you. But they’re mine. Nobody signed up for them.
And some of it is non-negotiable. Honesty. Ethics. Owning it when you get it wrong. Those aren’t quirks and they’re not up for a vote.
Though even those need a conversation, because not everybody’s honesty is the same. What reads as protecting the team to one person reads as withholding to another.
Most of us keep both buckets in the same pile and react to a violation the same way either way. Somebody’s five minutes late, somebody shaded the truth in a status update, and our body files them under the same heat.
So go look at what’s already happened to you. Which bucket each one lands in will tell you a lot.
- Who do you actually trust? Not who you like. Who do you depend on? What do they do that earns that?
- What has broken trust for you? Get specific. Was it a behavior, a tone, a silence?
- Are you a time person? Be honest.
- How do you measure competence? Is somebody allowed to take a slower road to the same place, or does that cost them points too?
Write it down. It’s going to be shorter and stranger than you expect.
Mine has time sitting right at the top like it owns the place.
The part where it gets uncomfortable
Here’s where I think most trust advice quits.
Your checklist is not a standard. Not yet. Right now it’s a preference you’ve been charging people rent for.
Which means you don’t get to enforce it. You get to disclose it, and you get to ask for theirs.
That’s what actually fixed my 7:30 problem, and I promise you it was not the world learning to respect my time.
Now when an invite comes in, I just ask: “Is that a real start time, or what time should I actually aim for?” Four seconds. Saves the whole evening.
And with people I work closely with who have a more laissez-faire relationship with a clock, I say it plain: “Hey, if you’re ever running late, shoot me a text so I know. I’m quirky about time and it’ll help me chill out.”
I published my rule. I asked for theirs. Nobody had to change who they were.
Because here’s the thing about both of those buckets:
Neither one gets met if nobody knows it’s there.
Not a better list. Not stricter standards. Just telling people what matters to you, out loud, before you start keeping score.
Say email responsiveness is a thing for you. Instead of quietly stacking up evidence against somebody, you sit down and say:
“I want to talk about email. I’m usually looking for a response within about four hours. Is that doable for you?”
Then you wait. Because it’s a conversation, not an edict.
They might say, “Oh, sure.” Or they might say, “Four hours is tough when I’m in back-to-back meetings, but I can definitely get you something complete by end of day. Would that work?” And it goes from there until you land somewhere you both actually agreed to.
Either way, look what you just got. Clarity on the expectation. Clarity on what’s actually in the way. And an agreement neither of you had five minutes ago.
Does this sound like a lot of work?
It is. This is a deeper level of self-awareness than most of us ever get asked for.
But run the numbers on the alternative. Right now you’re spending energy working around people you’ve quietly written off. Rewriting somebody’s deck at 11pm instead of telling them what “done” looks like to you.
That’s not cheaper. It’s just spread out thin enough that you can’t see the bill.
And honestly? You’re asking people to figure out what you need before you’ve figured it out yourself.
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