Trust is not a feeling. It is a conclusion people reach after watching what you do. I have spent twenty years on basketball courts and corporate stages studying the same question.
Why do some teams pull together under pressure while others fall apart in adversity?
The answer almost always comes down to trust.
Not talent. Not strategy. Trust.
And trust is not built the way most people think. It is not a switch you flip after a certain number of meetings or a certain length of time working together. Trust is built the same way a three legged stool holds weight. Through three specific, observable supports working together. Remove one leg and the whole thing wobbles. Remove two and it falls.
But here is the part most trust advice leaves out, and it is the part that actually changes how you should think about your role in this. There are two different things happening every time you try to earn someone’s trust.
One is entirely in your control.
The other is not, and pretending otherwise will frustrate you and confuse your leadership.
The Three Things You Can Control
Every relationship, whether it is a sales conversation, a coaching relationship, a new hire’s first ninety days, or a marriage, rests on the same three legs.
Leg One: Competence in Your Role
Before anyone trusts you with their business, their team, or their confidence, they need evidence that you are good at what you are being asked to do.
A mechanic earns trust by fixing the car correctly. A point guard earns trust by making the right read under pressure. A new manager earns trust by showing they understand the actual work their people do every day, not just the org chart above it.
This is the leg people notice first and judge fastest. If you cannot demonstrate competence early, the other two legs will not matter, because you will never get the chance to show them.
How to strengthen this leg:
Keep learning in public. Take the certification, attend the training, read the book that is relevant to your role, and let your team see you doing it. Competence that stays hidden does not build trust. Competence that shows up in conversation and decision making does.
Ask for feedback before someone has to give it to you. Waiting for a performance review to find out where you are falling short signals the opposite of competence. Asking a colleague or a direct report “where do you see me missing something” signals confidence and self awareness, which reads as competence even when you are still developing.
Let your results speak, but say them out loud occasionally. Sharing a win in a team meeting is not bragging when it is framed around what the team accomplished together. It reinforces that the group is being led by someone who delivers.
Leg Two: Concern for Others
Competence alone builds respect. It does not build trust. I have coached and worked alongside plenty of talented people nobody wanted on their team, because talent wrapped in selfishness reads as a threat, not an asset.
The second leg is whether you are demonstrably interested in the success of the people around you, not just your own advancement. Are you asking about their goals. Are you noticing when someone is struggling before they have to ask for help. Are you willing to slow down and listen even when you are busy.
This is the leg that gets tested in the small moments nobody is grading you on. The hallway conversation. The text back after hours. The way you respond when someone brings you a problem instead of a solution.
How to strengthen this leg:
Practice listening that shows up in your response, not just your face. Paraphrase what someone told you before you respond to it. “So what I am hearing is” is not a corporate script, it is proof that you were actually processing their words instead of waiting for your turn to talk.
Check in before there is a reason to. The manager who only reaches out when there is a problem trains their team to dread hearing from them. The manager who checks in when things are going fine builds a different kind of relationship entirely.
Remember what matters to people and bring it up later. If someone mentions their daughter’s recital or a health scare with a parent, following up two weeks later communicates something no amount of professional competence can replicate.
Leg Three: Commitments You Keep
The third leg is the simplest to describe and the hardest to sustain. Do what you say you will do.
Some commitments get made and kept in a matter of minutes. Others take months or years. What matters is not the size of the promise, it is the consistency of the follow through. Every kept commitment, even a small one, deposits a small amount of trust. Every broken one, even a small one, withdraws far more than it deposited.
This is the leg that compounds fastest, in both directions.
How to strengthen this leg:
Build a system for tracking what you have promised. Most broken commitments are not broken out of dishonesty, they are broken because the promise got lost in the noise of a busy week. A simple, consistent way of tracking your commitments protects your credibility.
Communicate the moment you know you are going to miss a deadline. Silence destroys trust faster than a late delivery does. A heads up with a revised timeline preserves trust even when the news is disappointing.
Underpromise slightly and then deliver early when you can. This is not about lowering your standards. It is about making sure your word consistently lands ahead of the expectation instead of behind it.
The Part of Trust You Do Not Control
Here is where I want to push back on how this topic usually gets taught, including in some of my own earlier material.
Trust is a positive assumption based on previous actions.
That sentence is true, but people almost always assume it means previous actions with you. It does not. It means previous actions in general, often long before you ever walked into the room.
The person sitting across from you in a negotiation, the new hire on your team, the client who seems guarded on the first call, all of them are carrying a trust history that has nothing to do with you. A leader who burned them. A vendor who overpromised. A coach who played favorites. That history shapes how quickly they are willing to extend trust to the next person who shows up, regardless of how competent, concerned, and reliable that next person actually is.
This is what I call trust willingness.
And it is a completely different variable than trustworthiness.
You control your trustworthiness through the three legs. You do not control someone’s trust willingness, because it was shaped by experiences that happened before you ever met them.
This distinction matters because leaders and salespeople who do not understand it burn themselves out trying to force trust that simply needs time, or they misread a slow to trust teammate as a difficult one, when the real explanation is a history you were never part of.
The practical implication is patience without lowering your standard.
Keep demonstrating all three legs consistently. Do not take a slow to trust teammate personally, and do not use their caution as an excuse to let up on your own competence, concern, or follow through. Trust willingness can shift. It shifts when someone accumulates enough new evidence that the old pattern does not have to repeat with you. Your job is to keep providing that evidence, not to demand they hand over their guard on your timeline instead of theirs.
Why Trust Matters More Than Most Leaders Realize
According to the 2023 Edelman Trust Barometer, employees trust their own employer more than any other institution, outpacing trust in government and media by a wide margin.
That is a remarkable amount of goodwill sitting inside most organizations.
It also means the leaders and managers inside that organization are the ones who either spend that trust wisely or squander it through inconsistency.
I would treat any other specific statistic on this topic with caution unless it is traceable to a named, current, primary source. Too much of what circulates online about trust and leadership gets repeated because it sounds convincing, not because anyone checked it. If you want the real evidence for why this framework works, look at your own team.
Watch what happens to communication, initiative, and accountability in the weeks after a leader starts visibly demonstrating all three legs.
You will not need a statistic to see the shift.
Putting the Stool Back Together
A stool with one broken leg will not hold weight, no matter how strong the other two are.
The same is true for you.
You can be the most competent person in the room and still lose your team if they believe you do not care about them. You can care deeply about your people and still lose their confidence if you consistently miss what you promised. And you can check every one of these boxes and still meet someone who takes longer to trust you, not because you failed, but because of a history that started long before you arrived.
Your job is not to control that history.
Your job is to keep building all three legs, consistently, in front of the people who are watching whether you notice or not.
That is how trust gets built. Not overnight, and not by accident.
One demonstrated leg at a time.
If you want to bring this framework to your team as a live session, with real assessment and real conversation instead of just a read, that is exactly the kind of work I do in keynotes and team building events.
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Sean Glaze delivers engaging conference teamwork keynotes and interactive team building events that help healthcare and education leaders build more positive
and profitable cultures.
Sean is also an author, and each of his books, Rapid Teamwork, The 10 Commandments of Winning Teammates, and Staying Coachable, are entertaining parables with powerful take-aways for team growth and leadership!
What issues are YOU dealing with that would disappear if you could build a team culture that inspired connection, accountability, and a team-first attitude?