A VC in Vacationland

Trust in others often goes against the basic principles of being a founder, especially a single one. You have the idea, you work hard on developing a business model, crafting a basic solution, sell a few customers on the product. And then what…you realize that you can't do it all yourself and you need to bring people on the team.

Trusting your newly hired professionals does not come easy, and the primary urge is to nerd patrol their work, probably until they tell you to leave them alone, or quit.  Here's a few ideas on how to build trust in your team:

• Start slowly–I've seen both extremes: founders giving new hires a complete free reign to do what they think is best and founders who want to approve going to the bathroom. Start small if you are not comfortable with delegating authority and give specific tasks/deadlines for a few moths until you are comfortable that they know what they are doing.
• Ask; don't tell–avoid delineating tasks right away. Ask the new hire what they think they should do (after all, you hired an expert in their field, right?) and go with the flow, making small course corrections as necessary.
• Respect disagreement–often, founders do not like their baby to be called ugly. But it may be. Take a deep breath and listen to what your employee is saying. It's probably true…

The most successful people have learned the simple lesson of making it in business–hiring people that are smarter than you, giving them the responsibility and resources to succeed and holding them to their agreed-upon goals. 

To finish, check out this neat video on trust by Fred Wilson and Jerry Colonna.