You start with a vision — clear, ambitious, and yours alone. At first, it feels like you’re building momentum. Then you realize you’ve become the point person for every decision, every task, every problem. The same drive that launched your venture is now holding it back.
This isn’t just a time management issue. It’s a trust issue. According to PwC’s 2024 Trust Survey, only 60% of employees say they trust their company — yet 87% of executives believe they are trusted. That 27-point perception gap is more than a disconnect; it’s a drag on performance, innovation, and retention. When trust is low, teams hesitate. When it’s high, they move.
If you’re looking to scale your business without stalling its culture, trust needs to be your operating system.
Trust Is Your Growth Engine
Trust isn’t just a cultural value — it’s a business advantage. Without it, decisions slow down, creativity dries up, and the founder becomes the bottleneck. But with it, teams move faster, own more, and innovate with confidence.
According to Edelman’s 2024 Trust at Work report, employees are nearly twice as likely to trust their coworkers over their CEO. That imbalance reveals a real challenge for founders: if your team doesn’t trust leadership — or doesn’t feel trusted by leadership — they won’t lean in. They’ll hold back. And in a growing business, hesitation is expensive.
Gloria St. Martin-Lowry, president of HPWP Group, helps founders flip that dynamic. “You stop seeing delegation as a risk or gamble,” she says, “and start seeing it as the trust and performance builder it is. Your role changes to one of setting expectations, clearing the path and then getting out of the way.”
This shift isn’t about stepping back. It’s about stepping differently. Founders who lead with clarity and confidence create space for their people to lead, too. That’s what turns trust from a soft skill into a scale strategy.
Positive Intent Builds Resilient Culture
When things go sideways — and they will — your response as a leader sets the tone. Do you meet mistakes with control and blame, or with curiosity and belief in your people?
My advice here is simple: when the pressure’s on, loosen your grip. Ask questions. Lead with the belief that your team wants to do good work, even when something’s gone wrong. Those moments of stress are where culture is either fractured or strengthened.
That’s how you build a culture where people raise their hand early, offer solutions, and stay engaged even when it’s hard. That’s how you build a team that can bend without breaking.
Empowerment Is the Ultimate Force Multiplier
Once trust and intent are in place, empowerment becomes your biggest accelerator. But let’s be real — empowerment isn’t just about handing things off. It’s about high expectations, paired with high support.
Forbes’s research shows what’s at stake: when empowerment is low, only 4% of employees go above and beyond. When it’s high, that number jumps to 67%. That’s the difference between a team that waits for direction and one that leads from within.
Gloria frames it like this: “When you really believe in people you see what they’re capable of — you don’t need to hand hold or micromanage. Be clear with the expectation and then support them with coaching, not control.”
That’s where you shift from being the doer to being the builder. You’re no longer solving every problem; you’re developing people who can.
From Bottleneck to Builder
If you’re building something that needs to last — something that moves fast and holds up under pressure — you can’t afford to lead by force. The answer isn’t more control. It’s more clarity, more curiosity, and more belief in the people you’ve hired.
Start by choosing just one thing you’re currently holding too tightly. Hand it off with clear expectations and real support and then watch. Chances are that your team will show you exactly why you trusted them in the first place.
That’s how founders scale. That’s how resilient, high-performing teams get built. And that’s how your vision becomes something more than a sprint. It becomes something built to last.