Some trust is actually proximity.
Trust can feel effortless when leaders are close to the work. Growth reveals how much of that trust was supported by proximity.
One of the strange things about growth is that leaders can start trusting the same people less without those people doing anything to lose their trust.
What changes is often much simpler: leaders can no longer see as much for themselves.
In a small team, you don't only see the decisions people make. You see how they arrive at them. You hear the questions they ask. You notice how they respond when something goes wrong.
Over time, you build confidence in someone's judgment through hundreds of interactions you barely notice.
It feels like trust because it is trust.
But proximity is doing more of the work than we might realize.
Growth reveals that.
At some point, leaders simply can't see everything anymore. Decisions happen without them. Problems are solved before they hear about them. People make calls they might once have discussed together.
The people haven't necessarily become less trustworthy.
The distance has simply introduced something that wasn't there before: uncertainty.
And uncertainty can make involvement feel reasonable.
A leader asks to be included in a few more decisions. An approval appears where a conversation used to be enough. Another update makes it easier to know what's happening.
None of this looks like mistrust.
But there is a subtle difference between wanting visibility and needing to remain close enough to feel comfortable with a decision.
Visibility and control are not the same thing.
Growth doesn't only create distance. It exposes what proximity was quietly doing for the organization.
What happens when we can no longer see for ourselves tells us much more about the trust we've built.