Do we trust each other less in society? I think without a doubt we inherently are more suspicious of each other, our neighbors, and more. In the various places I've lived, I see less kids out playing, less people saying hi or talking to each other in neighborhoods, more people locking their doors all the time, and more. It's a little sad to see this, at least to me, but these are reasonable precautions for people to take since we constantly hear in the news about "normal" people that suddenly commit assault, robbery, or something worse.
I was flipping around the Internet and ran into this blog post on trust. It's short and at first I didn't really think much of it, but as I reread the second paragraph it struck me that this person is upset with the apparent decline of western civilization. I think this person is the minority, or at least I hope so, but it started me thinking about the way we trust each other in business.
It does seem like we constantly add more and more rules, regulations, laws, and more that cater to the lowest common denominator. We don't "trust" workers to do their jobs, giving them even a little autonomy in many cases. There's a desire to control how every process should flow, and in the last few years, a huge amount of effort devoted to then auditing processes to ensure that things were performed properly.
I think auditing is the best way to handle things, or rather, the best way to detect issues. Give people some autonomy, some freedom, and then when things do wrong, or there's an issue, catch it with auditing and then handle things administratively. Talk to them, explain things, get their reasoning and decide upon how they should act in the future. Don't create another rule.
Trust them.
Steve Jones
The Voice of the DBA Podcasts
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