You can only control, what you make yourself dependent on, what you allow yourself to be controlled by. Ultimately, this means that one can only control oneself, but this, in turn, can only be done by taking a detour via others and others. (Dirk Baecker, Postheroisches Management, Merve Verlag Berlin, 1994, p.54 ff)
Testimony: “People must first earn their trust with me. I first look at how they do the work. If that works out to some extent, good. Things have to work out over a longer period of time, though. So I will I have an eye on it. So simply trust…nope, that does not work for me.”
And already, as a manager, I make myself dependent on my mistrust and thus on the need for control. I control others so that I have the feeling of control and my basic approach of distrust proves to be right. This approach will always be right because another person never performs a task the way you do. So in the worst case – when I think that only my way is the right way – I have to rework. Thus the misbelief of the right way and the sheer presence of the other in an environment with tasks that lie within my area of responsibility controls me. Exhausting! An alternative: trust. But how does that work? Can a person consciously influence his working environment towards mutual trust? In any case, if one were able to do this, one would have less control and would therefore be less dependent on time.