Some time back I had this training from my organization. This was not necessarily the training I like to attend. But this was kind of a different training in a crazy way. It was really a lotus eaters delight. And as I am one such nut case, I really liked it.
Here are some thoughts on it 
I definitely agree to the maxim that speed travels faster than light. If there is any thing that is going to cause a huge jump in productivity, it is basically trust that gets us to jump multiple levels in productivity. In software business, it is the next thing to the smart design and work allocation and tracking.
The training was by Franklin Covey institute and they have a book also along with it. I do not want to break their copyright by giving excerpts of their work here. So there are just some random musings inspired by the book and training. I am not even saying that you should go for that training or should buy that book. None of these two things have ever worked for me. Even if I am a self confessed self-help book junkie, the books that affect me most are the ones which are not written for doing so. So here is the divorce from the training and the book.
I think there is an interesting perspective of looking at trust, trust can be both directions, outward and inward. trust in others and trust in yourselves to achieve the desired goals. First thing that needs to be done when you want to trust some one is that you should build up that trust in others. It is a strange thing that comes back as much as you give it out.
The training really brings up this fact completely. Building trust is a very lengthy process. Losing it may not be. There are scientific steps which can be taken to build up trust. It needs the relationship to go through a set of levels before trust is built. It needs both the parties to be mature and winning. There is a high chance that trust can be broken and then it takes you down a very bad slippery slope. Inherently trust means that you would not have spent time building alternate solutions. If that happens, then once your trust-party fails you, you can never recover.
If this has to be a “fail-safe scenario” , this means that there is another angle to trust. It is of interdependence. There is another angle of making your dependencies soft. If your dependencies are soft, this means that you can still survive when everything else fails. And if every thing succeeds, you are at the pinnacle of success.
Trusting some one also means that the person you are dealing with should not have any exterior motives about your failure. If some one is fully inclined to make you a failure, it is very difficult to trust him. That's why trusting people is an issue in case of an environment where you are competing for survival. In an environment where you are losing ten percent of people annually you will be most probably collaborating with, it is really difficult not to think about stabbing people in the back when the opportunity provides. Some one trying to build trust is exactly giving the same opportunity to your competitors.
But in the long run, trust is the best way to achieve some semblance of justice in all this process is to be yourselves and ensure that people are always supported and helped. Working towards a greater goal and benefits of the collective may look like a day dream. but people have been achieving this even in case of worse situations than this. There are proofs of such behavior in extreme situations like the concentration camps. Then it should not so difficult to put it to use in normal office scenarios. You need not be a saint to reach there. As man is a social animal, soft power has been built by normal people and more competitive scenarios tackled effectively.
So we are just being our natural self when we behave in a collaborative manner. Only people with a deep sense of lack of confidence in their own abilities can rule this out. What is done is always more important than what is seen. If you do really stellar work, it can not be kept in cage because of just incompetence.
As a leader, the lead should ensure that the same thing happens in the team as well. Being the lead of my team, I am the owner of the direction, culture and success of it. My success should be measured with the ease with which I setup the culture of initiative, ownership, belonging and achievement in my team. In that sense, every team member should be like one to me. This is again some thing that is contradictory. How can I behave exactly same with all the reportees if I am the one who is going to differentiate between these two times a year. Or as the thing goes, I may be asking some of these to leave. but that is completely different track and I should be able to behave independently in both these situations. I think I need to do a bunch of stuff to track these things.
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