It's easy to say you trust someone. It's harder to put it into practice.

Let's say to assign a task to someone on your team. When the teammate flags that task as complete, do you trust her to have completed it, or do you go behind her back and check it? 

While there are tasks that should be double-checked (after all, this is why there is code review and sofware testing!), many tasks do not require to be rechecked after they are completed. Trusting your team means taking the risk that, once in a while, a task will need to be reopened. This is the price of empowering your team.

Jason from 37signals made a very good point in this post: "When you trust people to make a reasonable decision, they’ll usually make one. When you require everything someone writes to go through an approval process they’ll probably write less and be less interesting. We don’t want people to be afraid to write or afraid to think."

The question is: can you afford not to trust your team? A team that is not trusted will loose a lot of its creativity, proactive attitude and overall dynamics. It condemns the team to be average.

What's so great about being average?