# Leadership in a distributed world: trust by default

- **Episode:** [167](https://agents.truthliesandwork.com/episodes/167.md) (2025-01-30)
- **Type:** interview
- **Tags:** leadership, distributed work, trust
- **Time:** 16:54–20:22 (start 1014s)
- **Listen:** [https://truthliesandwork.com/167?t=1014](https://truthliesandwork.com/167?t=1014)

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[16:54] Tony Jamous: It is less about the managerial skills because How you supervise somebody, how you manage somebody, support somebody can be transferable between office and remote. What is really critical is to change the chip of the leader and default to assuming best intent as a strategy to build trust. So you don't want the person to feel your employees trust them because— and then what happens when they feel that you don't trust them if they don't show up? You're gonna have a culture full of real-time meetings that is unproductive and lead people to burnout. And you're going to have a culture where people are anxious when they are like, they wanna show up sometimes unnecessarily to be able to feed you with data that they can be trusted. So you have, you wanna remove that problem by defaulting to assuming best intent
[17:56] Al Elliott: Yeah
[17:56] Tony Jamous: And trust people absolutely by default. That should be your energy system. Secondly, at least for me, what I had to do is I had to kind of manage my energy system as we talked earlier so that when I show up at work, I'm clean. Like I don't have reactivity. And when I don't have, when I manage my reactivity, I become more thoughtful. I become more present to my team
[18:22] Leanne Elliott: Yeah
[18:23] Tony Jamous: This is how you become non-reactive. And as a result, you create a culture based on trust. And actually it makes you more successful because if you're less reactive, then you're conserving your energy levels, right? So you can, you can really be much more effective by burning out less
[18:42] Al Elliott: So if we default to assuming best intent, not everyone will have the best intentions. So how do you reconcile assuming best intent with also ensuring that someone's not gonna screw up a project or say they've done work and not done it?
[19:00] Tony Jamous: Well, let me tell you the truth. Thought that you get that somebody might screw up on a project will be most probably responsible for that person not to succeed in that project because you're having this thought and you're gonna start seeing that person making mistakes instead of seeing that person making wins and successes, right? So you have to pro— you have to delete from your mind the intention category. It's not something you ask yourself about anymore. You manage yourself, you manage how you show up, you manage how you interact. But these thoughts that you're getting about maybe these people the best intention are in the way for that relationship to be based on trust. And they are in the way of your mental health because you're going to be caught into it. You're going to be caught in, and you know, you can have millions of these thoughts a day. Like there's no limit to how much negative thoughts your brain is able to generate about people around. So these thoughts are like bringing your energy down. So you have to delete them and start operating without them
[20:11] Al Elliott: So let's talk about building relationships. So we've got— you trust your people implicitly, you use Oyster, or one uses Oyster to manage the outcomes. Everything's ticking