How to Build Trust as a Leader

During a recent coaching session, my client, a manager, shared a challenge he faced: he had inherited a team of workers with PTSD-like symptoms from past interactions. They were hesitant to take risks, overly cautious, and suspicious of everything—constantly looking for hidden agendas. He believed he could improve their work lives, but there was one critical obstacle: trust.

He asked me, “How does a leader build trust?”

I shared some of my trust rules I’d gained from experience, but he pressed for specifics. He wanted to hear an actual example—a time when I had turned a struggling team around and earned their trust. Here’s the story I told him.

The State of My Team

I once inherited a team where I was the fourth manager in six months – there had been an acquisition and some leaders departed, while others took over management temporarily until they hired someone like me. So the team had skidded around from leader to leader like a hockey puck.

To begin to grasp what I was up against, I assessed the team individually and collectively and gathered insights from other groups they worked with. It became clear within days that the team faced numerous challenges beyond their control:

• Mind-numbing assignments: Their work was tedious, repetitive, and offered no room for growth or creativity.
• Neglect from leadership: They had little guidance or support, which led to low morale and diminished self-worth.
• A “dumping ground” reputation: They were frequently handed messy problems from other teams, with no allowance for or acknowledgment of their own obligations.
• Isolation: With minimal engagement from the rest of the company, they felt undervalued and invisible.
• Perceptions of underperformance: They were seen as slow and error-prone, making them an easy target for layoffs if the company ended up shrinking. The fear of this was constantly present, paralyzing creativity and resulting in desperation to do everything that anyone asked of them as fast as they could.
• Lack of investment: Not really understanding their potential, the company had not thought to provide them with training or resources to improve.

Trust is not the same thing as psychological safety, but they are related, emotional siblings that have a profound influence on each other. What I found in my exploration was that the team had no psychological safety, and a symptom of that was a lack of trust. If I hoped to garner the team’s trust, I first had to establish psychological safety.

What I Did

I started with empathy. How could I serve them if I didn’t understand them? I could see the negative consequences of their situation but that is not the same as learning how to cure the situation. When I was less experienced I might have caved to the urge to interrogate each of them, which feels like fault-finding and sets the stage for blame. But I’d learned that after what they’d endured they deserved empathy from their leader, not an inquisition to assess whether they deserved the jobs they held. There would be time for assessments of their strengths and weaknesses downstream. Empathy is my canonical rule of great leadership. 

Here’s where empathy took me:

• To help them individually I met with each one multiple times each week. I listened and listened. They vented, expressing their frustrations and admitting to traces of despair. It helped them to do it, and it helped me understand how acute each issue was. When they spoke about mistreatment from other teams, I chased down their complaints and brokered new agreements with adjacent teams that were fair compromises. A leader must first protect the team. There is no other path to psychological safety.
• We met once a week to document the week’s expectations. We kept it shallow and near term until we began to understand the speed and breadth of our abilities. Each week we tracked progress against goals, and began adjusting for reality. In truth, every good employee wants accountability. It provides structure and focus, which are necessary for performers to excel. A leader who does not set goals and hold the team accountable is signalling that the team doesn't matter. 

• We met occasionally to play group games and have fun together. I solicited their ideas for having fun together, and for making the work more interesting, faster, and better. Employees are people, and people are more likely to do well when they are supported by each other and encouraged to contribute. 
• I held meetings with leaders of other teams and my team, facilitating so that those leaders could safely articulate their concerns and needs, and my team could practice empathy. We made our position clear on things outside our job scope, and brokered deals to help them through transitions of that breed of work, including training them. Ungoverned assignments from other groups (the dumping ground problem) disrupted the team’s efforts to organize, order, and deliver their own work.
• I enlisted their help to figure out how to automate some aspects of their death-march work and granted them time to educate themselves and experiment. Extending and offering encouragement to share ideas paves the path to mutual trust. 
• I gave each of them side assignments to use as filler when oversaturated with standard work assignments. This gave them opportunities to conquer boredom and for me to get a handle on their strengths. Knowing their individual interests let me better serve them. 
• When someone worked especially hard over the week, I gave them an early start on their weekend. When the team met short-term objectives we celebrated and I made sure everyone got gift cards to coffee or cookies. Leaders must be present to witness and acknowledge performance. 
• I began working with them to conceive of a way to apply AI to contract extraction work, and I sponsored their training in AI prompting and quality oversight so that their roles could morph into something more technical and vital to the company. Hope for the future is a necessary ingredient to high performance.
• Talk from leaders is meaningless without active and visible follow-through. Therefore I kept my own task list public, allowing the team to add to it and inspect it at any time, as well as to hold me accountable for the things I took on. Leaders must share the same standards of visible accountability that are established for the team.

What I Unfailingly Avoided

At no time did I ever: 

• Make a promise or commitment that I could not keep.
• Permit anyone to badmouth the team or treat them as subordinates, not even themselves.
• Permit anyone to take on assignments from anyone outside the group — all such requests had to go through me, and I was diligent at weaving requests into our work queue organically.
• Allow myself or anyone to make judgments on quality or throughput. I reiterated each time what I’d told them at the beginning, which was that the performance of the team was a direct result of all of the ailments that I had diagnosed. No individual could be blamed for what was occurring, since it was a situation that they did not make and would never have made.
• Allow them to distance themselves from group activities or discussions with other team leaders.

The Results

Six months later, the team was unrecognizable. They had transformed into a high-performing, AI-prompting team of data-quality fanatics that loved their jobs and took pride in their work. 

When the manager I was coaching reflected on my story, he remarked, “That sounds really hard.”

I agreed—very hard. Winning and keeping trust is one of the most challenging tasks a leader can undertake. But it’s the job. No one said leadership would be easy. Still, the rewards are correspondingly powerful. I was exceptionally proud of this team. They chose to pick themselves up and plow forward. My contribution was simply to clear their path. I told my client that there’s no greater reward than seeing a team rise to its potential.