Trust is earned or lost through how people experience you. You cannot experience yourself. You have your intentions, which are invisible to everybody else, and you have your memory of what you did, which is not the same thing as what landed. The one perspective you can never occupy is the one the verdict is reached from.
Which means a person can be steadily eroding trust, week after week, with no ill intent whatsoever, purely because nobody has told them. The behaviour isn’t hidden. It’s just hidden from them.
The six months that get re-read
There’s a particular version of this that does more damage than the original behaviour ever did.
Someone works alongside you for months. They’re pleasant, they’re friendly, nothing in the interaction suggests a problem. Then a review arrives, or a project ends, or a conversation goes somewhere unplanned, and out comes an honest account of how you’ve actually been experienced. Not unfairly. Accurately.
The immediate sting is the content. The lasting damage is what it does to the previous six months. Every prior interaction gets re-read: were they just being nice? What were they thinking during that meeting? Was any of it real? You can’t unknow it, and you now hold a version of the relationship you can’t verify.
That is silence doing exactly what silence does everywhere else in trust. It doesn’t preserve a relationship while you decide what to say. It lets the damage run, and then poisons the history when it surfaces.
Which makes withholding feedback a trust behaviour
Not a management skill sitting to one side of trust. Part of the thing itself.
If most erosion is unawareness, then feedback isn’t a nice addition to the model. It’s the only mechanism that makes an eroding behaviour visible to the person doing it. Withhold it and you’ve decided, on their behalf, that they’ll carry on without the information. Usually to protect your own comfort in the short conversation you didn’t want to have.
Done properly, feedback is one of the more respectful things available to you. You spend some of your own comfort to give somebody something they cannot get any other way: a view of how they are actually being experienced. That isn’t harshness with honesty attached. The honesty is the necessary part; the harshness is a choice, and generally a lazy one.
The part almost nobody does
There’s a second half to this that’s less comfortable than giving feedback, because it involves not being able to control what comes back.
You can go and ask for it. Including when things went well, which is precisely when nobody volunteers it. After winning the work, after the presentation that landed, after the interview you passed: I know I didn’t score full marks, nobody does. Where was I weaker than I could have been?
Three things happen at once, and only one of them is about the information. You surface something you had no other route to. You demonstrate that you can survive hearing it, which is what makes people willing to tell you the next thing. And you make it slightly less likely that in six months’ time somebody hands you a version of yourself you’ll have to go back and re-read everything against.