How Leaders Earn or Lose Trust
When you interact with people, a lot depends on trust - from how comfortable people feel to how effectively they work together.
In a work context, when people trust each other, there’s psychological safety to express concerns and challenge each other, helping the team find the best course of action. There’s effective collaboration, where people trust one another to do their part, build on each other’s ideas and help each other as needed. They are not distracted by mind games, accusations, suspicion or anxiety that drains their energy.
For leaders, it’s important to build trust within their teams, across the organisation they lead, and with the people they work with. It’s especially important when starting a new job. Recently, I’ve been observing what makes people gain or lose trust in leaders, and I was able to identify a number of things at play.
Decisions
To gain trust, leaders should make decisions and difficult choices. I’m not talking about the top-down approach of telling everyone what to do. I’m talking about making decisions at a high level that define what to strive for, what to invest effort in and what to say “no” to.
Should we migrate to a different cloud provider? Should we focus on cost optimisation or scalability improvements?
When leaders don’t make decisions and let things take their course, they create uncertainty, sometimes even conflict, and lose trust.
Consistency
If you say one thing today and contradict yourself tomorrow, who’s going to trust you?
People look to leaders for context, guidance and reassurance. If you lead others, what you say carries more weight. Be careful with your words. Don’t promise what you cannot deliver. Stay consistent with the direction you set, unless there’s a good reason to change it and you can explain why.
Transparency
One of the important jobs of a leader is to be a conductor of the information that flows across the organisation.
If the people you lead hear important news through informal channels, or learn context relevant to their work too late, they may stop trusting that you have their best interests in mind.
To prevent this, make an explicit effort to share relevant information and provide context in a timely way.
Some information can be difficult to share, especially when it has a negative impact. But believe me - bad news is better than silence.
Being in their corner
This was one of the more surprising pieces of positive feedback I received a couple of times. Thinking about it now, I want to add it to the list.
People you lead expect you to stand up for them when it counts. You are in conversations with stakeholders or other managers when they are not. You speak on their behalf. You represent them, and sometimes you are the strongest voice they have in the room.
They will trust you more if they know you have their back.
Blame
There’s a difference between holding people accountable and blaming them for their mistakes.
There’s a reason why post-mortems and retrospectives should be “blameless”. If people fear making mistakes, they won’t learn and grow. And nobody enjoys working in an environment driven by fear.
As a leader, you should still hold people accountable. You are responsible for performance management. You do that by setting clear expectations, identifying gaps and supporting people to improve.
But when you say, “It’s your fault that…”, you damage trust.
Humility
I think this one is underrated. Leaders are often depicted as confident people who can answer any question thrown at them.
In practice, because of the breadth of their role, leaders are often more removed from the day-to-day work and less proficient in specific areas. The natural result is that they don’t have answers to everything. Nor should they.
Get comfortable asking questions, even the ones that might seem dumb. Don’t pretend you know when you don’t. It’s much better to show genuine curiosity and try to learn and understand than to pretend you already know everything.
And if you make a mistake, admit it (and apologise if needed).
Respect
Would you trust somebody who doesn’t respect you? I know I wouldn’t.
Respect means valuing and recognising others, being open to their opinions and being sensitive to their concerns. That creates a strong basis for trust.
This seems obvious to me, but I still want to make it explicit. To me, respect underpins any other effort to build trust.
The human side
For many people, knowing someone personally is an important part of building trust.
Have some conversations about things outside work with the people you work with. You don’t have to share everything about your family if you don’t want to. Perhaps you can talk about a personal project, or something you enjoy doing in your free time - something that gives others a glimpse of your personality and helps them understand you better.
And try to do the same in return: see and understand the human you are working with.
Conclusion
This is already a fairly long list, and I’m sure it’s not exhaustive. If I thought about it for longer, I would probably come up with more things to add.
But from my recent observations and personal experience, these are the ones that stood out most.
My hope is that this gives you something to reflect on and helps you find ways to build stronger trust with the people you work with, making the experience more enjoyable for everyone involved.