Trust at Work Is Built With Process, Not Willpower
Chelsea Ryckis tried repeating "it's good" about her team, until visible deadlines and ownership let her body stop reacting.
Women Under Pressure · How To Pursue Ambition with Intention, with Chelsea RyckisChelsea Ryckis, the co-founder and president of employee benefits firm Ethos Benefits, had tried to talk herself into trusting her team. Before she built solid internal processes, she said, her trust in them was basically blind.
She kept repeating to herself, "It's good. It's good. It's good." It did not work, she said, because her body was still reacting, even when no one around her could see it.
What changed was what she calls operationalizing trust, by which she means running trust through a system people can see, with clear ownership, deadlines, and accountability. As she put it, "Trust without accountability, without a process, without a structure will make you feel okay until somebody inevitably breaks it."
What she meant was visibility, not control. Instead of asking employees every day how a project was going, she built ways to see the work itself, with responses and due dates she could track. She could look at a task and think, that item has been outstanding for 15 days, and decide what to do. That transparency, she said, was when her body responded. She did not need to control the process, she just needed to see that her team had it.
For her, she said, focusing on process rather than hovering over people gave her space to breathe. With that structure in place, she said she felt she could grow the business fast and hard. And, she added, "I'm not going to break my body in the process."
Questions people ask
How do I start operationalizing trust on a small team?
Start with one piece of work you currently check on by asking for updates. Give it a named owner, a clear next step, and a due date in a shared tracker, then agree on when you will review it. You are replacing daily check-ins with a place you can look and see progress.
Does managing the process instead of people mean more micromanagement?
No. The point, as Ryckis describes it, is that process supports autonomy by making expectations and progress visible. People still solve problems themselves, but the leader can see ownership and deadlines without hovering or interrogating.