When someone calls in sick, I never check

There's a specific hesitation before you send the "not feeling well today" text, even when it's completely true. You reread it. You wonder if it sounds convincing enough, which is a strange thing to wonder about a sentence that isn't a lie.

Someone on my team sends that text every few months, same as anyone. Nobody replies asking what's wrong. Nobody tracks it against a pattern. It just gets a thumbs up and the day moves on without them.

I've never once asked anyone for a doctor's note. Not as a policy I landed on — it's closer to the default setting I run everything on. I assume people are telling me the truth because assuming otherwise is a worse way to run a company and a worse way to be around people. I was doing a rough version of this for years before I found out there's a name for the split — something like Theory X and Theory Y, one side assuming people need to be watched to work, the other assuming they mostly want to. I read that and recognized my own operating manual instead of getting handed a new one.

Here's the part I haven't solved. Trusting by default means I have no early warning system. If someone is taking me for a ride, I don't find out early — I find out late, usually after it's already cost something, and usually because someone else noticed the pattern before I did. I don't watch for it. I don't build in the checkpoint that would catch it sooner. That's not a virtue, that's a blind spot, and I know it's a blind spot and still haven't fixed it.

The one time trust broke on my team, I was the last person in the room to see it. Everyone else had noticed weeks before. I felt slow, not betrayed — slow is the part that stuck with me.

I don't think the answer is watching people closer. I think the answer is admitting I need someone whose job is partly to notice things I won't, and I haven't built that well either.

If you run a team that tracks sick days more closely than I do, what are you actually trying to catch — and has it ever caught something you'd have missed otherwise?