Is Trust an alternative to Transparency ?

As a leader of leaders you always are out of detailed insights on all work streams / initiatives  / projects within your organization yourself and you lean on your next level leaders to take care of things. However, as a review mechanism to ensure the team is headed in the right direction and has the right level of support, we time to time review the progress, ask of details, challenge things etc. One of the things i have struggled at times is teams / leaders being offended to be introspected, asked for details and pushed to retrospect;  

A common element in all of this has come in my two decades of experience, i.e. "Demand for Transparency is perceived as a sign of Distrust"; I have asked this question to myself multiple times when i have experienced this and today i have this question for you, Is Trust an alternative to Transparency ?

So, is really trust an alternative to transparency and if you trust your team, you should not ask questions and audit things; Well i don't think really trust can be a alternative to transparency, rather transparency is a road which will leads you to build trust; And this works both ways, there are some common pitfalls leaders themselves fall into where their teams find themselves not trusted -

Observing and managing closely multiple leaders now, i have found some  common mistakes made by leaders when they ask for information which leads to be perceived by their leaders as distrust -

• Not building enough context of why details are asked, which also partly is because of not having clear expectation setting 
• Asking question more from a position of authority rather than a position of curiosity
• "Pretending" to be out of ground reality; At times leaders know the reality of why things are the way they are, but still chose to ask the "right" question;  
• Blaming team / leaders if things don't look clear are not progressing as expected
• Not spending enough time to help the team fix for transparency. Let them know what is really needed; Setting clear expectations;

Over 20 years of experience and with last 10 years managing leaders, i have found leaders who embrace transparency and proactive about sharing info even when things might entail tough conversations being trusted a lot more than leaders who believe in only indexing on an update of the end result; So if you are leader of a team and / or manage a large org, be comfortable sharing information; Create processes which gives top leadership, partner teams self serve ways to always be able to review things and suggest changes; The more you do, the more you would be valued as a leader and trusted;