Trust as currency, your most valuable leadership asset

Good morning. Take a moment to think about the leaders you've trusted most in your career.

Chances are, you didn't consciously decide to trust them. It built up slowly, through small moments, consistent behaviour, and the way they showed up when things got hard.

Now think about the moment that trust cracked. If it happened, you probably remember it precisely. A broken promise. A public contradiction. A moment where their actions didn't match their words.

Trust is not a soft concept. It is the operating currency of leadership. And like any currency, its value is determined not by what you declare, but by what the market, the people around you, decides it's worth.

Most leaders know trust matters. Fewer have a clear map for how to build it, or what might be eroding it.

The research is pretty consistent on this. Trust rests on three things. All three need to be present. A gap in any one creates doubt, even if the other two are strong.

Competence, do they believe you know what you’re doing?

This isn’t about being the smartest person in the room. It’s about demonstrating good judgement, making sound calls, and being honest when you get it wrong. People don’t need you to be infallible. They need to know you can handle what’s in front of you, and that you’ll own it when you can’t.

Reliability, do they believe you’ll do what you say?

This is where a lot of leaders quietly lose trust without realising it. Not through big broken promises, through the small ones. The email you said you’d send. The conversation you said you’d have. The follow-up that never came. Reliability isn’t about big gestures. It’s about being the kind of person people can predict. Consistent. Dependable. Someone who does the small things.

Care, do they believe you have their interests at heart?

This is the one most leaders underestimate. People are watching to see whether you’re in it for them or for yourself. Do you advocate for your team when it’s uncomfortable? Do you tell them the truth even when it’s not what they want to hear? Do you actually know what’s going on for them as people? Care isn’t softness. It’s one of the most visible leadership signals there is.

Here’s what most conversations about trust leave out.

You can be competent, reliable, and genuinely caring, and still erode trust. It happens when people sense that, underneath everything, your decisions are ultimately about you. Your reputation. Your position. Your comfort. That’s self-orientation, and it acts like a slow leak.

It shows up in ways that are easy to miss:

David Maister, Charles Green, and Robert Galford wrote about this in The Trusted Advisor. Their argument: self-orientation doesn’t just sit alongside trust, it divides it. The more visibly self-focused a leader is, the more it erodes whatever competence, reliability, and care they’ve built. It’s not additive. It’s corrosive.

The honest question is: when things get difficult, whose interests actually come first?

The data on why this matters is striking. Paul Zak’s research, published in the Harvard Business Review, found that people in high-trust organisations report 74% less stress, 106% more energy at work, and 50% higher productivity than those in low-trust environments.

That’s not a marginal difference. High trust is a direct driver of how well teams perform, and self-oriented leadership is one of its most reliable killers.

Trust accumulates slowly and depletes fast. Every time someone extends trust to you as a leader, they’re taking a risk. Your job is to make that risk feel worth it, repeatedly, not just once.

It builds through:

It erodes through:

Every leader damages trust at some point. The question isn’t whether it will happen, it’s whether you notice, and whether you’re willing to address it directly.

Research shows that the leaders who repair trust most effectively are the ones who name what happened clearly, acknowledge the impact, and then visibly change their behaviour. The repair itself, done honestly, can become evidence of character. The people who do this well often come out with more trust than they had before.

What doesn’t work: minimising, over-explaining, or waiting for it to blow over. Trust gaps that aren’t addressed don’t quietly close. They harden into cynicism.

If you need to repair trust, keep it simple:

Trust isn’t something you have. It’s something you’re constantly earning, or spending. It's worth knowing which one you’re doing.