Want more trust on your team? Stop working on trust.

Trust can be a heavy topic. It touches our identity. We all carry wounds and insecurities about our worth and our safety, and we all want to be seen as reliable and good. We can confuse trust with perfection. So when trust comes up, most of us brace for judgment or rejection.

When someone questions our trustworthiness, it doesn’t feel like feedback on a behavior. It feels like an attack on our character. “How can I not be trustworthy?” quickly becomes “Am I not a good person?” No wonder teams avoid the conversation, even when they know trust is what’s holding them back.

But trust isn’t a fixed trait. It’s built through behavior. It can be repaired. And it’s shared. That opens up a better question. Instead of “Am I trustworthy?” ask, “Was there a breakdown in expectations, clarity, or communication we can learn from?”

Why trust matters most when things are changing

Trust and relationships are the foundation for team performance, and they set the tone for everything else in an organization. When they’re strong, they make good communication, innovation, and collaboration possible. When they’re weak, it can feel impossible to work together, no matter how compelling the vision or how good the processes.

They matter even more in moments of acute change: forming a new organization, merging teams, or evolving the strategy. And that’s exactly when they’re hardest to maintain, because of all the complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity around us.

Trust gets easier to work on when you see its building blocks

The definition we teach comes from Trium, in their work on organizational trust. Trust is a continuous series of conscious and unconscious assessments we make about someone’s:

Don’t work on trust. Work on its building blocks.

“I don’t trust you” is almost impossible to work on. It’s too big, too personal, and too vague. But trust rarely breaks down on all three building blocks at once. Usually one is unstable while the other two are solid. Find that one, understand why, and you have something specific and workable.

Naming the building block also takes the sting out. Telling a colleague “I’m not sure I can count on the timeline” is a conversation people can have. Telling them “I don’t trust you” usually isn’t. And each building block points to different, practical steps.

What transparency really means

Motive is the building block people most often disagree about, because “be transparent” can mean very different things to different people. Here’s how we define it with teams. Transparency looks like communicating the context and rationale behind decisions and actions; communicating honestly and openly, even when it causes discomfort; and being clear about what can and can’t be shared, and why. It is not necessarily open access to everything anyone might want to know.

Communication runs through all of it

Communication cuts across every building block. Competence goes unseen if no one shares their progress. Reliability erodes when expectations were never said out loud. Motive stays murky when people don’t explain the why behind their decisions.

One of the most practical shifts is moving from expectations to agreements. An expectation is implied, unspoken, or assumed. It leads to disappointment and resentment, because the other person often doesn’t know what’s expected, or disagrees with it. An agreement is explicit, co-created, and mutual, so everyone understands what’s been committed to, and by when. (We first learned this distinction from Steve Chandler’s Crazy Good.)

Building trust also takes a particular kind of communication. Drawing on Richard Francisco’s five levels of interpersonal communication, most workplace talk lives at the lower levels: pleasantries, small talk, and conversation about tasks and projects. Those lower levels matter. They build familiarity and a baseline of safety at low risk. But the conversations that strengthen the building blocks of trust, and repair it when it ruptures, happen at the higher levels, where people talk about their own experience and about the working relationship itself.

Level five is where the real team performance conversations happen. They’re the hardest, and the most worthwhile. The building blocks give teams a shared language for having them.

Repairing trust when it ruptures

Pinpoint the issue

Which building block is unstable: competence, reliability, or motive?

Focus on the situation, not the person

Talk about what happened and its effect, not about someone’s character.

Be careful of assumptions

Especially about motive. Ask before you conclude.

Discuss the source and the repair

Name what caused the rupture together, and what would help rebuild it.

Give it time and space

Allow for reflection, keep working at it, and come back to the conversation.

Trust is hard to work on head-on. Its building blocks aren’t. Start there, and the heavy conversation becomes a practical one.