My grandfather's brother-in-law worked (as did my grandfather) for the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad. One of his favorite stories involved a problem up the line one day when his immediate supervisor was out of the office. My great uncle fixed the problem and, when the supervisor returned to the office, reported what he had done. The supervisor commented that my uncle had done exactly the right thing in a timely and necessary fashion, possibly even saving lives in the process. Then the supervisor spoke the phrase that my great uncle said had been hanging over his head all day long, and for which the supervisor was notorious up and down the line: "Yes, you did the right thing, you saved the company a lot of trouble and money . . . but why didn't you do it MY way?"
Far too many owners and managers are uncomfortable trusting the people who work for or with them. Nothing, in their opinion, can ever be right unless they do it themselves, or unless they stand over the other people every moment. Sometimes this urge to micromanage becomes an obsession to the point that the manager or owner can't complete or even start his or her own work, to the detriment of the company as a whole.
This general mistrust seems to be rooted in an unfortunate elitism. It helps convince people "in charge" that those dumbos on the line or in the office can't possibly be as smart or as competent as someone with the manager's or owner's life experience and education. (This can also go the other way. A manager or owner who made his or her way in the world educated by the "school of hard knocks" in many cases gives in to the temptation to hold college-educated people in contempt, thinly-veiled or otherwise.)
One CEO of the elitist, mistrustful school got the surprise of his life many years ago. He related in an interview for a magazine article (that I have, unfortunately, lost in the intervening years) that he had formerly been in the habit of taking regular strolls through the office, looking (literally) over people's shoulders as they tried to work, making certain everybody was busy, and verifying that the work in process was up to his personal standards.
Then one day, completely by chance, he discovered that one of the office staff was an expert in some field in which the CEO had a passing interest; it was grand opera or sky-diving or something, it doesn't matter. He was so intrigued by this discovery that, out of curiosity, he took an informal poll of the staff . . . and found out, much to his surprise, that several of them actually appeared to be more intelligent than he, and almost all of them had what in many cases was an expert competence in something that he found either baffling or difficult.
Being a reasonable man, he at once implemented a new system of office management based on trust that allowed everyone more freedom with much less micro-supervision. He reported that productivity soared, morale improved, and he actually made a few new friends out of people whom he had, essentially, previously considered faceless blobs.
The CEO, however, did not take the ultimate step and share ownership (and the rights of ownership) with the workers. Evidently he trusted them more, but not completely. Ownership sharing, when combined with the rights of ownership (such as a pro rata dividend payment) and "participatory management" (that is, input into decisions directly affecting their jobs, not management by committee or collective action or voting on every decision) builds the greatest amount of trust in the workplace. More obviously, ownership sharing along these lines results in monetary rewards in excess of what would otherwise be expected. The National Center for Employee Ownership in Berkeley, California, for example, reports that when worker-owned companies have profit sharing programs and participatory management, they out-perform otherwise comparable firms by a factor of 1.5.
The bottom line in trusting your co-workers to the extent of going the whole way and sharing ownership and the rights of ownership is thus . . . the bottom line. Not only are morale and efficiency improved, everybody benefits monetarily.