Fast Teams Move on Trust, Not Permission
Why speed is a system outcome, not a personality trait or a mandate.
🧠 This post is Part 2 of a 3-part series on how high-performing teams make faster, sharper decisions without chaos.
Part 1: On Making Better Decisions Together
Introduces a systems-first approach to decision-making.Part 2: Fast Teams Move on Trust, Not Permission (this post)
How trust drives execution speed and removes second-guessing.Part 3 (next week): The Clarity Stack
How great teams scale alignment without meetings or micromanagement.
It was the start of the COVID pandemic. The world was getting flipped upside down.
Like every other company, at Shopify, we were rethinking everything, growth roadmaps included.
Our filter became brutally simple:
If it helps the merchant right in this moment, it’s a go.
I didn’t wait for the formal ask. I saw what was coming.
I called an emergency brainstorm with my team, shelved our lifecycle roadmap, and pulled our leadership team into a live session to come up with a new one.
Nobody paused. Nobody asked, "Are we allowed to do this?"
We didn’t need permission. We had the mission, and trust.
📍 By 9 a.m., I made the call.
📍 By 10 a.m., we were moving.
📍 By end of day, we had a new roadmap.
This new roadmap was grounded in what merchants needed most given the lockdowns, some of it backed by qual research, some of it just informed hunches.
The next day, our senior leadership team held a town hall.
They formally asked all teams for the same thing.
We were a day ahead, already shipping from the new roadmap.
That early clarity drove impact fast. And that impact created momentum, the kind that compounds into bigger wins.
Speed Doesn’t Come from Hustle Alone.
It Comes from Trust.
People think fast teams run on adrenaline. On non-stop energy. On late nights.
In my experience, and the data backs this up, fast teams run on something else entirely: trust.
Fast teams aren’t reckless.
1/ They’re aligned.
2/ They’re trusted.
3/ They’re clear on the mission and empowered to move.
When trust is built into the operating system, speed becomes the default.
The Velocity Loop:
Trust → Autonomy → Speed → Momentum → Trust
Here’s what I’ve consistently seen separate top 1% teams from the rest:
It’s not tools, headcount, or rituals. It’s a self-reinforcing loop where trust begets speed, and speed compounds.
And it shows up everywhere: in how decisions get made, how risks get framed, and how teams move, even when no one’s watching.
Trust creates autonomy.
Autonomy unlocks speed.
Speed builds momentum.
Momentum reinforces trust.
This isn’t philosophy. It’s physics. I call it decision physics.
Teams don’t slow down because they lack skill or a better sprint template.
They slow down because they don’t trust each other enough to act.
And in 2025, trust is in freefall.
Since January, 332 tech companies have laid off over 77,000 people, that’s 501 per day (source). Layer that on top of hundreds of thousands more in the past two years.
What’s left behind isn’t just leaner orgs, it’s teams running on fear.
The result: permission paralysis.
Even top-performing ICs are hesitating. Not because they lack skill, but because the environment no longer feels safe to act.
What Low-Trust Looks Like
Trust erosion is rarely loud. It shows up quietly, in friction and hesitation.
It sounds like:
“We should schedule a sync.”
“Can someone else review before we ship?”
“Let’s get more buy-in first.”
These aren’t bad habits. They’re adaptive responses.
They signal fear of blame, murky ownership, or baggage from past escalations.
This happens when people stop believing the system has their back.
It’s not just about reorgs. It’s about tone.
About the slack message that never got a reply.
The postmortem that felt like finger-pointing.
Trust doesn’t mean being nice. It means removing second-guessing.
And removing second-guessing means:
People know what “good” looks like.
They know who owns a decision.
They know they won’t be punished for reasonable action taken in good faith.
They trust that escalation isn’t a trap, it’s a safety net.
Why this Matters
In low-trust teams, people hesitate not because they lack talent, but because the cost of getting it wrong feels higher than the reward of moving fast.
Removing second-guessing unlocks:
1/ Faster decisions: No waiting for green lights.
2/ Less emotional drag: No exhausting mental loops about whether you’ll be blamed.
3/ Higher engagement: People feel like owners, not just executors.
How High-Trust Teams Move Fast
(While Building More Trust)
High-trust doesn’t mean hands-off. It means clarity built into the process.
The fastest teams I’ve led didn’t rush. They decided better, faster because the conditions were already built for action.
What that looked like:
Clear decision ownership: One person accountable. (DRI model.)
Reversion rights: Act now, escalate if needed.
One-way vs. two-way door framing: Not every choice needs a consensus.
Lightweight decision logs: Not for control — for transparency.
Language that enables action: Phrases like “Assume it’s a go unless flagged” or “Ship it, we’ll course-correct if needed” signal permission, not pause.
You can read more on language and how to leverage it in your team in this post.
And behind all of it?
A concept we used often at Shopify: the trust battery. One of my favourite concepts.
Every teammate walks in with theirs partially charged. Each moment of clarity, ownership, and follow-through recharges it. Each ambiguity, micromanagement, or letdown drains it.
Fast teams don’t just preserve trust, they keep building it.
With every decision made cleanly and every moment of autonomy earned, the battery recharges, creating a compounding loop of trust → action → momentum → more trust.
When autonomy is the default, trust becomes operational.
Make Trust a System, Not a Slogan
We often hear leaders say, “we trust our teams.” But trust isn’t something you declare. It’s something you design for, and reinforce every day through systems, rituals, and defaults.
In high-performing environments, trust isn’t left to chance or charisma. It’s intentionally baked into how the organization runs.
Let’s break it down:
Rituals: Async updates that assume competence, not control
In high-trust teams, updates are for awareness, not oversight.
There’s no pressure to justify every move or wrap decisions in disclaimers.
Leaders read updates and respond with curiosity or help, not micromanagement.
Example: A daily Slack thread where team members post what they shipped, no approvals needed, just transparency by design.
Artifacts: SOPs that clarify ownership, not who to blame
Clear documentation signals: We trust you to own this — and here’s how you know it’s yours.
Instead of postmortems that feel punitive, teams have living documents that support better future decisions.
Example: A playbook that names the DRI (Directly Responsible Individual) for each decision type — with clear escalation paths if needed.
Language: Framing that shows belief in people, not fear of failure
High-trust teams use language that encourages agency, not approval-seeking.
Phrases like “Let’s try it” or “It’s your call” reinforce belief in team members’ judgment.
Example: Instead of “Are you sure this is okay?”, leaders say, “What do you need to move forward confidently?”
Why This Matters
Without systems, “trust” is just a slogan that buckles under pressure. When conflict hits or stakes get high, teams default to their operational reality, not their cultural posters.
But when trust is structured into the work:
1/ People move faster.
2/ Teams collaborate with less friction.
3/ Mistakes become learnings, not liabilities.
For remote leaders especially, this is non-negotiable.
Recent surveys show 85% of execs struggle to trust remote productivity. But surveillance won’t solve that. Clear systems and trust will.
Don’t Wait for Permission
Fast teams don’t wait.
Most teams miss deadlines because they’re stuck waiting: for approvals, for consensus, for someone more senior to say “yes.”
High-velocity teams don’t wait because they don’t have to. Their systems are designed so that waiting isn’t necessary.
They move fast because they know what good looks like
High-trust teams have shared standards, success criteria, and decision principles.
There’s clarity on what “done” means and what “good enough to ship” looks like.
No one’s guessing whether their work is aligned, they’ve internalized it.
They move fast because the system lets them
Structure matters. If your team needs a 5-step sign-off for every change, no amount of trust will create speed.
The right guardrails, not gatekeepers, enable action.
Fast teams operate within frameworks that support forward movement, not constant approval-seeking.
They move fast because they are trusted, and they trust themselves
External trust is powerful. Internal confidence is the unlock.
When people feel trusted, they start trusting themselves, which leads to better judgment, faster learning, and more boldness.
It's not bravado; it’s earned autonomy.
The Real Impact
Teams who don’t wait:
1/ Move faster.
2/ Iterate more often.
3/ Spot and respond to reality sooner.
Permission cultures slow you down. Clarity and trust speed you up.
Design for trust, and speed becomes the operating norm and high impact.
Thanks for reading, and I hope it was valuable to you.
If this resonated. Consider sharing it with a leader, operator, or teammate who’s navigating trust, speed, or autonomy in their org.
Sometimes, a shift in framing is all it takes to unlock motion.
Very cool to hear about your experience at Shopify. I've always worked with small teams of no more than a dozen, and have been fortunate to have this type of trust and autonomy baked in (I've never wanted to work with larger companies for that exact reason - that it seems harder).
I think this will be even more critical in the years to come with how fast AI is improving as well. Nice piece my friend, looking forward to reading more.