The Way of Control, the Way of Trust

Leading, two ways

Here’s my reductive claim to start your morning: There’s only really two ways to lead. Let’s give ‘em cool Daoist-sounding names so it feels official.

The first way is to tell people what to do, monitor their activities and then enforce compliance. Call this The Way of Control.

The second way is to co-design boundaries, accountabilities, and learning loops with people, then allow them to work freely and joyfully. Call this The Way of Trust.

If your environment is tightly controlled and predictable, The Way of Control makes sense.

If uncertainty is sweetly baked in to your world, then The Way of Trust makes sense.

If you’re living in 2026, my guess is you’re in the latter camp. If so, follow me.

Trust sucks and it’s hard

(MC Hammer impersonation) Stop: Confession time.

As I’ve gotten busier this year (yay!) I have had to hand over near-full control of my theatre company, Only the Human, to my Operations Manager Don. My job these days is just to de-bottleneck Don, be his sounding board and do bank stuff.

This total loss of control has caused me no shortage of sticky sweat.

I had to confess to Don last week that I didn’t trust him (yet). I find myself constantly wanting to intervene and needing to pull back. Only the Human is my baby!

We’re only a few months in to the experiment, and Don offered some sagacious wisdom. He made the point that I had no reason to trust him. He hadn’t shown he could work that independently yet. Instead, he asked for something different to trust: He asked for faith.

(My Dao metaphors have taken a suddenly Christian turn. Strap in, we’re going full SYNCRETIC!)

Faith, we could say, is trust without the runs on the board.

Faith first, trust second

There are a lot of team leaders hanging at the edge of The Way of Trust, unwilling to take the plunge.

They want evidence that a less directive leadership style will actually work before they try it.

This is an understandable but rather silly wish: They want to be in control of the process of letting go of control.

You see this in leadership teams who will often opine that their teams should be more accountable, own the work more, and so on. However, a senior leader must then be willing to ask themselves a more confronting question: “What accountabilities am I willing *to let go of*?”

(The amount of accountability in a system is fixed. How you spread the marmite, however, is up to you!)

You’ve removed the training wheels. You’ve got your hands on their shoulders. It might be time to let go. Watch ‘em wobble, maybe scrape their knees.

Before trust, faith.