Most leaders get this backwards. They act like parole officers — trust has to be "earned" after a thousand status updates and Jira tickets. Meanwhile, clarity is treated like optional seasoning: a fuzzy goal here, a vague OKR there, and everyone is supposed to "figure it out." That's lazy leadership dressed up as rigor. Flip it: start with trust, and demand ruthless clarity.
1. Assume Trust
- Autonomy isn't a reward — it's the default. You hired professionals, not interns. Stop babysitting them like they'll eat paste if left unsupervised.
- Micromanagement is just insecurity in a hoodie. If you think "visibility" equals "leadership," congratulations — you're running a daycare, not a company.
- Trust ≠ blind faith. It means believing people will operate with competence within clearly defined agreements.
2. Demand Clarity
- Ambiguity is leadership malpractice. If your team can't articulate what success looks like, that's not their failure — it's yours.
- Clarity has three parts:
- Commitment: What are we actually agreeing to do? (e.g., launch the feature by June 1).
- Success Criteria: How will we know it's done? (e.g., code merged, docs published, feature live in prod).
- Ownership: Who's on the hook? Name the person. If everyone's accountable, no one is.
- Without clarity, trust collapses. People start covering their asses instead of doing the work.
3. Example: The Startup That Confused Both
Imagine a seed-stage SaaS startup. The CEO announces: "We need to improve onboarding to increase conversion." Sounds smart, right? Wrong. That's not clarity — it's a hallucination. The PM translates it into a vague Jira epic, engineering "trusts" product knows what's needed, and design makes a shiny Figma prototype. A month later, nothing shippable exists, but hey, lots of effort was logged.
Now reframe it:
- Commitment: "We will launch a new onboarding flow by May 15."
- Success Criteria: "New flow is live for 100% of new users, docs updated, metrics tracking enabled."
- Ownership: "Engineering lead Sam is responsible. Design and product support him."
Notice the shift? With trust assumed, Sam isn't nagged hourly. With clarity demanded, no one's confused about what "done" means.
4. Contrast With Traditional Nonsense
- OKRs: "Objective: Delight customers. Key Result: Increase NPS to 50." Translation: everyone can blame "external factors" when it doesn't happen. No one owns anything.
- Agile Theater: Endless standups and sprint demos to create the illusion of progress. Great for optics, terrible for outcomes.
- Enterprise Bureaucracy: "Alignment meetings" to discuss "initiatives" where clarity is intentionally avoided so no one risks accountability.
These are all just performance art to avoid the hard work of spelling out who, what, and when.
Takeaway: Trust is the soil; clarity is the sunlight. Without both, nothing grows — except politics, excuses, and resentment.
