When Should You Trust But Verify?

The project manager serves as an interface between the project team and stakeholders. Being given this task, one should recognize that you’re probably not going to be able to look at each individual data point and validate. Despite this, you might hear that you’re supposed to ‘trust but verify’.

Starting off my career, I didn’t understand exactly what this meant. It seemed contradictory. If you’re trusting someone, why would you go through the effort of verifying that their efforts have been fruitful? Wouldn’t it make more sense to either avoid trust and verify everything, or to trust and proceed? Kind of. Trust but verify is an early-step in understanding a project team’s capacity and competence.

Early on, you want to be more involved in understanding whether the work is being done is high-quality. As you get further into your project, you can focus more on coaching the people who don’t live up to this standard, and helping high performers reach the next level by focusing on different relevant behaviors, and meeting people where they are at.

The book, The One Minute Manager can help understand this framework. Instead of micro-managing people, we should let people self-manage. As a manager, you want to help people set goals on what good behavior is. You want to praise people when they do well, and reprimand them when they do poorly, but remind people that you still appreciate them.

Starting off, you should closely scrutinize work to let people know that their work is being done well. Once this is established, you can back off the specifics and use built up trust to focus on more abstract goals.

If work is not being done well, you should let the employee know immediately, give specific examples, and let the person feel uncomfortable before reaffirming that you value them and think well of them, ending the reprimand.

There’s some debate about who to focus on, the higher or the lower performing people. Generally, the higher performing people do better with coaching, as they may be more receptive, but since you are also responsible for the lower performing people, it’s important to help motivate them as well.

Depending on the quality of the low-performer’s work, you may need to do more spot-checks to verify work is of satisfactory quality. When it is, praise them. When it’s poor, continue to express the reprimands, and see if there’s any reasons they have for not producing quality work. Determine if there is a mismatch, and if you can help them out. Spending the time to help people improve benefits morale in general, and builds loyalty.

The amount of verification you need to do is in large part contingent on the baseline quality of work. The better it is, the less often you need to spot check and vice versa. After the introductory period, it may be helpful to decrease checking work, and instead focus on other goals.