Early in my management career, I inherited a team that had been through a rough patch. Their previous lead had been technically brilliant but unpredictable, generous with praise one week, dismissive the next. Decisions were made behind closed doors and communicated as faits accomplis. By the time I arrived, the team had learned a very rational behaviour: keep your head down, don’t volunteer ideas, and never be the one to deliver bad news.

It took me months to understand that the problem wasn’t motivation, skill, or process. It was trust. It had been systematically eroded, and no amount of free lunches or team-building exercises was going to fix it. That experience shaped how I think about leadership more than almost anything else, and it’s why I keep coming back to this topic.

Seth Dobbs put it well: the thing that drives durable results isn’t fear, and it isn’t love, it’s trust. Trust that you have the team’s best interests in mind. Trust that they can speak up without consequence. Trust that you’re reliable. When I read that framing, it crystallised something I’d been feeling for years but hadn’t articulated cleanly. Trust isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the currency that makes everything else possible.

Why Trust Matters More Than You Think

Google’s Project Aristotle research found that psychological safety was the single most important factor in high-performing teams. But what underpins psychological safety? When you dig into the research, it comes back to dependability, genuine intentions, accountability, sound thinking, and consistent contribution. In other words, trust.

I’ve worked in environments where trust was high and environments where it was low, from scrappy start-ups where everyone knew everyone to large corporates where your skip-level was a name on an org chart. The pattern is remarkably consistent. When trust is present, teams move faster. They raise problems earlier. They take sensible risks. They give each other honest feedback. When trust is absent, everything slows down. People hedge. They duplicate work because they don’t trust the handoff. They sit on concerns until they become crises.

The interesting thing is that most leaders I’ve spoken to would say they value trust. Very few would say they’ve thought carefully about how they build it, or how they might be eroding it without realising.

How Trust Gets Built

Closing the Loop

Duretti Hirpa’s observation on this has stuck with me: every closed loop builds trust, and every missed one teaches unreliability. It sounds almost too simple, but the more I’ve paid attention to it, the more I’ve seen it play out.

Someone mentions a concern in a one-to-one. You say you’ll look into it. If you come back the following week with an answer, even if the answer is “I looked into it and there’s nothing I can do right now, here’s why”, you’ve built a small deposit of trust. If you forget about it entirely, you’ve made a small withdrawal. Neither feels significant in the moment. But these transactions compound.

I started keeping a simple list of things I’d committed to in conversations. Not a project tracker, just a running note. The difference it made was disproportionate to the effort. People started saying things like “I appreciate that you actually followed up on that.” The bar, it turns out, is not especially high. Most leaders aren’t unreliable because they don’t care, they’re unreliable because they’re busy and they don’t have a system for tracking the small promises they make in passing.

Consistency Over Grand Gestures

Trust isn’t built through big moments. It’s built through boring repetition. Showing up to one-to-ones on time. Giving the same message in public that you give in private. Applying the same standards to everyone on the team, including the high performers you’d rather not have a difficult conversation with.

When I researched what the literature says about trust in organisational settings, the consistency theme came up repeatedly. Will Larson makes the point that trust comes with time, specifically, from doing what you say you will, which inherently takes time. There’s no shortcut. You can’t accelerate trust-building with a single act of radical transparency or a heartfelt all-hands speech. You earn it through accumulated evidence.

This was a hard lesson for me. When I took over that struggling team I mentioned earlier, I wanted to fix things quickly. I made big promises about how things would be different. What actually moved the needle was much quieter: consistently protecting their time from unnecessary meetings, reliably passing along context from leadership discussions, and never once throwing them under the bus when things went wrong. It took about six months before the team started behaving differently. Trust has a long time constant.

Transparency That Actually Means Something

Seth Dobbs makes an important distinction that I think gets overlooked: transparency takes more than an open door. Saying “my door is always open” puts the burden on the other person to walk through it. Real transparency means actively seeking feedback, building relationships before you need them, and being open about your own mistakes.

I’ve found the mistakes part particularly powerful. Early on, I thought admitting errors would undermine my authority. The opposite turned out to be true. When I told my team “I got that prioritisation wrong last sprint, here’s what I’ve learned,” it gave them permission to be honest about their own missteps. It also demonstrated that I trusted them enough to be vulnerable, and trust, it turns out, tends to be reciprocal.

How Trust Gets Broken

The Promises You Didn’t Know You Made

This is the subtle one, and it’s worth spending time on. Leaders break trust not just through obvious betrayals, taking credit for someone’s work, lying about a decision, but through implicit promises they never consciously made.

When you say “I’ll fight for more headcount,” the team hears a promise. When you say “we should look at promoting you next cycle,” someone starts planning around that. When you nod along in a one-to-one while someone describes a problem, they often interpret that as agreement that it’s a problem worth solving. If none of these things materialise and you never circle back to explain why, you’ve broken a promise you didn’t realise you’d made.

I’ve been guilty of this. There’s a natural tendency as a manager to be encouraging and optimistic in conversations, and it takes discipline to be precise about what you’re actually committing to versus what you’re acknowledging. I’ve learned to be more careful with language, “I hear you, and I think that’s worth exploring, but I can’t promise anything yet” is less satisfying in the moment but far more trustworthy over time.

The Manager README Problem

Camille Fournier raises a point about Manager READMEs that I found genuinely thought-provoking. The idea of writing a document that says “here’s how I work, here’s my communication style, here are my quirks” sounds reasonable on the surface. But Fournier argues it can actually erode trust, it shortcuts the relationship-building process and, worse, can become a shield for bad behaviour. “I told you in my README that I’m blunt” isn’t an excuse for being unkind.

When I dug into this more, I came to agree. Trust is built through interaction, not documentation. A README might set some useful expectations, but it can’t substitute for the slow, sometimes awkward process of actually getting to know your team and letting them get to know you. The document can become a crutch that lets you avoid the harder work.

Micromanagement: The Trust Tax

Fournier also connects trust directly to delegation: micromanagement stems from a lack of trust. I’d add that it also destroys trust in the other direction. When you check every pull request, attend every standup, and ask for status updates on work that’s clearly on track, you’re communicating, whether you intend to or not, that you don’t trust your team to do their jobs.

Will Larson offers a useful middle ground with the concept of “inspected trust”, trust but verify. You give people autonomy and ownership, but you maintain enough visibility to catch problems early. The key difference from micromanagement is intent and frequency. Inspected trust says “I trust you, and I’m staying close enough to help if you need it.” Micromanagement says “I don’t trust you, so I’m going to watch everything you do.”

Getting this balance right is genuinely hard, and I won’t pretend I’ve always managed it. When I’ve been under pressure from above, tight deadlines, high-stakes launches, my instinct has been to pull control closer. Every time I’ve done that, it’s cost me trust that took weeks to rebuild.

The Unexpected Signal: Complaining as Trust

One observation that surprised me when I first encountered it was Cate Huston’s idea that complaining can be an act of trust. When someone on your team comes to you and grumbles about a process, a colleague, or a decision, they’re trusting you with something vulnerable. They’re showing you their frustration and trusting that you won’t use it against them.

The instinct is often to shut it down, “let’s be solution-oriented”, or to worry that you’re fostering negativity. But I’ve come to see it differently. If people stop complaining to you, that’s not a sign that everything is fine. It’s often a sign that they’ve stopped trusting you with their honest reactions. The goal isn’t to encourage a culture of complaint, but to recognise that someone bringing you their unfiltered thoughts is a signal that trust exists.

Building It Back

The hardest trust challenge I’ve faced was rebuilding it after it had been broken, not by me, but by a predecessor. The team had learned that managers say one thing and do another. They’d learned that “transparency” meant being told about decisions after they were made. They’d learned that raising concerns led to being labelled as negative.

There’s no trick to rebuilding trust in that situation. It’s the same principles, consistency, follow-through, transparency, honesty about mistakes, but applied with more patience and lower expectations. You have to accept that people will test you, sometimes unconsciously. They’ll raise a small concern to see if you actually follow up. They’ll share a mild criticism to see if there are consequences. Every one of those moments is an opportunity to make a deposit.

Fournier writes that “the bedrock of strong teams is human connection, which leads to trust.” I think that’s exactly right. Trust isn’t a process you implement or a value you put on a poster. It’s the accumulated result of hundreds of small human interactions where you demonstrated that you meant what you said.

It’s the most valuable currency a leader holds. And like any currency, it’s far easier to spend than it is to earn.