A letter, sealed in an oilskin pouch and strapped over a man’s heart.
That’s the image at the centre of A Message to Garcia, an essay Elbert Hubbard wrote in 1899. By his own account he wrote it one evening after supper, in a single hour, and thought so little of it that it went into his magazine without a heading. Orders for extra copies started coming in, a railway company asked to print it by the hundred thousand, and by Hubbard’s count it was reprinted in over two hundred magazines and newspapers.
The story, as Hubbard tells it, is simple. When war broke out between Spain and the United States, the President needed to reach General Garcia, the leader of the insurgents, who was somewhere in the mountains of Cuba. Nobody knew where. A man called Rowan was given a letter for him. He landed by night from an open boat, crossed the island on foot and delivered it.
The point that I wish to make is this: McKinley gave Rowan a letter to be delivered to Garcia; Rowan took the letter and did not ask, “Where is he at?”
Elbert Hubbard, A Message to Garcia (1899)
I’ll be honest, parts of the essay haven’t aged well. Hubbard is harsh about ordinary workers, and you may well disagree with his tone. The idea at the heart of it still lands in any business, though. Some people you can hand a job to and stop thinking about it.
You can’t trust someone you don’t know
On stage, with clients, on Zoom calls, webinars and podcasts, I find myself talking more and more about know, like and trust. You’ve probably heard the phrase. I put them in a different order: know, trust, like.
Think about it seriously for a moment. If I don’t know who you are, can I ever like you or trust you? It’s impossible. So the first job is to be known, and for your business to be known, so you can attract the right people. Your team needs to know who you are as well. The bigger the business, the easier it is to become distant from the people working in it.
It works both ways. You need to take the time to get to know other people and truly understand them. That’s what builds trust.
Even in Hubbard’s story, Rowan didn’t come out of nowhere. Somebody said to the President, “There is a fellow by the name of Rowan will find Garcia for you, if anybody can.” Somebody knew him.
Trust first, like later
If I trust you to get the job done, I don’t have to like you. Don’t get me wrong, if you’re working with someone long term, liking them matters. It’s part of what builds the relationship, and part of what makes the work fun. When trust is gone, though, everything’s gone.
If I don’t feel safe around you, or I can’t count on the things we agree actually happening, the relationship will always be difficult. Nobody needed Rowan to be good company. They needed to know the letter would get there.
To be trusted, trust first
I believe the way you earn trust is to give trust. It’s paradoxical, I know.
Micromanage people and they’ll never feel trusted by you, so they’ll never take the initiative to do their best. Talk to them, coach them, let them prove themselves. Give them space, and the freedom to make mistakes as long as they’re learning from them. That builds more trust than any amount of checking up ever will.
So there are two jobs in this story. One is to be the person people can hand the letter to. The other is to build a team you can hand letters to, which means letting go of the letter once you have.
Time is the one thing none of us ever gets more of. Trust is what lets you make the most of it, because every job you can hand over and stop thinking about gives you some of that time back.
If you’re working out who to let in, and when, I wrote about Seneca’s take on it in Judge First, Then Trust Fully.
Who in your business could you hand a letter to tomorrow, and stop thinking about it?
