Most people can name a leader they trusted and one they didn’t. Ask them why, and the answers are rarely about vision or charisma. They’re about whether the leader told them the truth, did what they said, and seemed to have their interests in mind.

What is trust in leadership?

Trust is someone’s confidence in you with something they care about. Trust in leadership is that confidence directed at a leader: the people they lead deciding how far they can rely on them.

Three parts of that definition matter.

It belongs to the other person. A leader can be trustworthy and still not be trusted, because trust is a judgement someone else makes. Roger Mayer and colleagues put it the same way in their model of organisational trust: trust is a willingness to be vulnerable to someone, based on what you expect them to do. The judgement sits with the person doing the trusting.

It is about something specific. People rarely trust a leader with everything. They might trust them to fight for the team’s budget and not to keep a confidence, or the reverse.

It is formed from experience. What people have seen the leader do counts for far more than what the leader intends.

Why does trust in leadership matter?

Because it is linked to how people perform and what they are willing to risk.

A meta-analysis covering four decades of research on trust in leadership found that a person’s direct leader, such as their own supervisor, appears to be a particularly important focus of trust. That puts the issue with every manager, not only the executive team.

A larger meta-analysis of 132 samples, by Colquitt and colleagues, found that trust, and how trustworthy people judged someone to be, were related to people’s willingness to take risks and to their job performance, whether the trust was in a leader or a co-worker. And in a study of college basketball teams, trust in the coach was both a result of past performance and a driver of future performance.

None of these studies says trust is the only thing that matters. What they show is that it is not a soft extra. It is tied to things every leader cares about: how people perform, and whether they’re willing to take a risk on the leader’s word.

Where does trust in a leader come from?

From three places, in the Trust Leader model.

Direct, borrowed and system trust separate confidence that comes from your own experience of a person, confidence lent by their role, title or reputation, and confidence in the structures around them. A new manager starts with some borrowed trust from the role. Whether people keep that confidence depends on what they then experience. Borrowed trust gets you in the room. Direct experience decides whether you stay trusted.

That is also why authority is not trust. People can do what a leader asks without being confident in them.

What are people asking about a leader?

Usually one of five things. The five Trust Questions are what someone is quietly working out before they rely on you:

  1. Do they believe what I say?
  2. Do they believe I’ll do what I said?
  3. Do they believe I can handle what’s needed?
  4. Do they feel I really understand them?
  5. Do they believe I act with their interests in mind?

The first three are about delivery. The last two are relational. A leader can score well on one group and badly on the other, which is why capable, reliable managers are sometimes still not brought the problems that matter.

Which behaviours strengthen trust in a leader?

Trust Leader works from 20 behaviours that strengthen trust, grouped under those five questions. Each is something another person could see a leader do or not do. A few examples, in their exact wording:

    1. Say what is true without using vague or confusing language.
    1. Give updates on progress and raise issues early when there are risks or delays.
    1. Listen and let others finish before responding.
    1. Explain the reasoning behind decisions that impact others.

They are deliberately about direct trust between people. They don’t replace a leadership model. How do the 20 trust behaviours fit the leadership model you already teach? shows how they sit underneath the ones most organisations use.

Can leaders develop trust?

Yes, through practice rather than intention, because practice is what people see.

The most useful starting point is narrow: one relationship, one thing that person needs to rely on you for, and one behaviour that would answer the question they’re unsure about. How do you choose one behaviour to practise? walks through that choice.

Purpose matters here too. Trust Leader puts it this way: purpose is the anchor, the Trust Map is the application, and practice builds the evidence. A leader who knows what they stand for has something to be consistent about.

For a starting point in a leader’s own view, the Self-Assessment asks how often, over the last 30 days, they did each of the 20 behaviours. For trust within a whole team, see How do you develop trust in a team?, and for what people look for in a leader they rely on, What makes someone a trusted leader?.