Asking “am I trustworthy?” produces one answer and it is always yes. These five produce something you can act on, because each one is a different kind of confidence and they are answered separately.
What are the five Trust Questions?
They are the five things a person is quietly settling about you, in a particular situation.
- Do they believe what I say? — Clarity & Honesty
- Do they believe I’ll do what I said? — Delivery & Consistency
- Do they believe I can handle what’s needed? — Capability & Realism
- Do they feel I really understand them? — Understanding & Connection
- Do they believe I act with their interests in mind? — Fairness & Consideration
The question isn’t whether you’re trustworthy. It’s which of the five they’re quietly unsure about.
Why are they written from your side, about them?
Because that is where the answer lives. Each one begins “do they” rather than “am I”, and the grammar is doing the work.
Trust is someone’s confidence in you with something they care about. It is their judgement, formed from what they have experienced, and you do not get a vote. A question that starts “am I” invites you to check your intentions, which only you can see. A question that starts “do they” points at the evidence they actually have.
That is uncomfortable, and it is the point. You cannot mark your own paper on this.
What is the difference between delivery trust and relational trust?
Questions one to three are delivery trust: I trust you to hit the target. Questions four and five are relational trust: I trust you to have my back.
The two do not substitute for each other, which is what catches capable people out. Being superbly reliable does not make anyone feel understood. Being warm and attentive does not make you capable of the work.
So you get the person who hits every deadline and is never brought a problem until it is already on fire — full marks on one to three, nearly empty on four and five. And you get the colleague everyone confides in who somehow never gets handed the critical piece of delivery, because question three has never quite been answered. Same person, same relationships, different verdicts.
The longer version of that argument is here, with the worked examples.
Which question is the one in doubt?
Usually not the one you are working hardest on.
The practical use of the five is narrowing. Pick one person and one thing you need their confidence for, then ask which of the five is actually unresolved for them, about this. It is rarely all five, and it is rarely the one you would nominate about yourself, because the questions you find easy are the ones you stopped noticing.
Once you have the question, you have a much smaller problem: which behaviour would answer it, with this person, in a way they would actually notice.
Where did the five come from?
The split is supported by research. The five questions are ours.
David McAllister separated trust built on evidence of competence and reliability from trust built on the emotional bond between two people. That distinction has held up for thirty years and it is the outside evidence behind the delivery and relational clusters. How we cut it into five, and which question sits on which side, is Trust Leader’s own work rather than a research finding.
The framing owes a lot to Charles Feltman, who treats trustworthiness as an assessment of observable behaviour rather than a verdict on character. And the underlying definition is drawn against Roger Mayer and colleagues, whose model puts the judgement firmly with the person doing the trusting.
We would rather tell you which part is which than present the whole thing as though a study produced it.
Can you measure them?
Not objectively, and anyone offering you a score should be treated carefully.
What you can do is take a considered view: for this person, on this thing, how important is each of the five, and how often would they say they actually get it from you. That gives you a gap rather than a grade, and a gap is something you can work on. Repeated later, it shows movement.
It is not a psychometric, not a diagnosis and not an objective reading of another person’s mind. It is your structured, dated estimate, and its value is that it is specific enough to be wrong — which means it is specific enough to be corrected.
Do the five ever change?
The wording has been sharpened twice; the five areas have not moved.
We tightened the phrasing in July 2026 and again in August 2026, because several of the questions were longer than they needed to be and one of them collapsed two ideas together. The areas themselves have been stable, and we would not change them lightly: people have answered these questions about real relationships and dated the answers, and a framework that keeps moving cannot be compared with itself over time.
What the five Trust Questions are not
They are not a personality model. Nothing here describes what kind of person you are; every one of them describes what someone else has experienced.
They are not a scoring system for other people either. The questions are asked about yourself, from the other person’s point of view. Turned around and used to grade colleagues, they become labels, and a label is the end of a conversation rather than the start of one.
And they are not a sequence. There is no order to work through. There is one person, one thing they care about, and usually one question that is genuinely unresolved.