Ask how to develop trust in a team and most advice reaches for an away day. Trust in a team is mostly developed somewhere less visible: in the next hundred ordinary exchanges, and in what everyone sees happen to the person who raised a problem.

Why does trust in a team matter?

Because it is linked to how well the team performs, and not only through the leader.

Trust is someone’s confidence in you with something they care about. In a team that confidence runs in two directions: towards the leader, and between team members.

A meta-analysis of 112 studies covering more than 7,700 teams, by De Jong, Dirks and Gillespie, found that trust between team members was positively related to team performance. The link held after taking into account the team’s trust in its leader and how well it had performed before. It also mattered more in some teams than others, depending on how much people depended on each other’s work and on differences in authority and skill within the team.

Trust in the leader matters too. In a study of college basketball teams, trust in the coach was both a result of past performance and a driver of future performance.

Is trust in a team the same as psychological safety?

No, though they often move together.

Psychological safety is a shared belief that the group is safe for taking an interpersonal risk, such as admitting a mistake. Trust is one person’s confidence in another with something they care about. What is the difference between trust and psychological safety? sets out the distinction. Our working model is that behaviours that strengthen confidence in one relationship can, repeated across a team, contribute to a safer group climate. That is the Trust Leader model, not a settled finding.

How does a leader develop the team’s trust?

By remembering that the whole team is watching how each person is treated.

The 20 behaviours that strengthen trust are interpersonal: each one happens between two people. In a team, though, almost nothing a leader does with one person stays private for long. How they respond to one person’s bad news teaches everyone else whether to bring theirs.

Four behaviours carry particular weight in a team, in their exact wording:

    1. Communicate consistently with different people on the same issue.
    1. Apply the same standards in tone, decisions and communication across people and situations.
    1. Involve people in decisions that affect them.
    1. Explain the reasoning behind decisions that impact others.

The first two answer a question every team member is asking about the others: does everyone get the same version of this leader?

Here is how it looks. A team leader has a favourite, and everyone knows. When that person misses a deadline, the leader lets it go. When anyone else does, there’s a conversation. Nobody says anything, and the next time a deadline slips, nobody tells her until it’s too late. Applying the same standard to the favourite first would do more for the team’s trust than any team-building session.

How do you develop trust between team members?

The leader can’t do it for them, but can make it easier and model it.

The same behaviours apply between colleagues as between a leader and a team. Between peers, these often matter most:

    1. Set and confirm clear expectations before work begins.
    1. Give updates on progress and raise issues early when there are risks or delays.
    1. Address issues directly with the person involved.
    1. Give credit to others for their contribution.

Hand-offs are where they show up. When one person’s work depends on another’s, an early warning about a delay, or a clear agreement about what “done” means, is exactly the evidence a colleague needs to rely on them. Talking about a problem with everyone except the person involved is the fastest way to lose it.

A leader can help by setting the expectation that problems go to the person first, and then doing it themselves.

What erodes trust in a team, and can it be repaired?

The opposites of the same behaviours. The behaviours that erode trust pair one to one with the twenty that strengthen it: mixed messages, uneven standards, talking about people rather than to them.

When trust in a team has been damaged, start with How do you repair trust once you’ve broken it?. If the damage came from a change the team didn’t want, How do managers repair trust with a team after a difficult change? takes that case.

What can L&D or a team leader do?

Start with individuals, because trust is developed between people. Ask each team member, the leader included, to pick one working relationship in the team and one behaviour that would help it, and to practise it in real work.

The Trust Leader Hub supports that for a group. When a cohort or leadership team shares a gap, they can be given the playlists that fit, and the person supporting them can follow what they practise and report. A Cohort Impact Report gives a group-level view of what was practised and reported, with names removed. All of it is what participants report, not an independent measure of the team.

For the bigger picture, see What is trust in leadership, and why does it matter? and What makes someone a trusted leader?.