You Can't Give Away Trust You Don't Have

Plus: It's not what you think — and it's not really about employees.

Years ago, I was one of several coaches assigned to individual members of an executive team, while another coach worked with the team as a whole. What surfaced fast: no one on that team fully trusted their CEO to be consistent — or to actually stand behind the ideas he'd championed the week before. Underneath that, something worse: the executives didn't know how to build trust with each other. The CEO, without ever meaning to, was quietly pulling his own team apart — encouraging everyone's separate ideas instead of helping them build toward one shared, cohesive one.

We coached the individual leaders on communication, relationship-building, and asking better clarifying questions before an idea hardened into a decision. It helped. It wasn't enough. Within the next two years, most of that C-suite had left.

What stayed with me: those leaders needed more than one-on-one coaching. They needed a room of peers to practice earning each other's trust in —something no amount of individual work could manufacture on its own, and something the CEO, without a peer room of his own, had no model for giving them.

A stat that's been circulating recently says almost exactly this, at scale: nearly 8 in 10 employees say they DO trust their employer. Yet, fewer than 2 in 10 say they trust their CEO.

The easy read is that leaders are failing their people. The harder, truer read is different: most leaders are trying to build trust they've never personally experienced. You can't broker something you don't have access to yourself.

Here's what's telling — new research tracking over 10 million workplace interactions found that people who regularly give recognition to their peers are trusted roughly 9 times more than people who don't. Trust isn't handed down from the top. It's built sideways, in relationships between equals, long before it ever reaches a title.

Which raises the real question for anyone leading right now: who's building your trust, sideways? Who's in your corner, at your level, telling you the truth and having your back — not because they report to you, and not because you sign their check?

If the honest answer is "no one," that's not a personal failing. It's structural. Most leadership roles are built to strip peer relationships away the moment you get promoted into them. Which means the trust you're being asked to create for everyone below you has to come from somewhere — and it starts with the room you choose to be in.

"You can't hand your team a kind of trust you've never been given yourself."

If this landed, two quick things:

1.     Know a peer navigating the same gap — leading people who don't quite trust leadership, while feeling a little untrusted themselves? Forward this email, or paste this:

"This names something I don't think I've heard said out loud before. Worth the read."

2.     Have someone you lead who's stepping into more leadership and could use a room of peers doing this with them — not for them? That's the room I built. Send them this:

"This is the kind of support I think you're going to need soon. Wanted you to see it before you're in the deep end!"

Frequently Asked Questions

Isn't a trust gap between employees and their CEO just a communication problem? Not usually. Communication assumes the information is the missing piece. Trust gaps are usually relational — built or eroded through consistency and follow-through over time, not through a better-worded message.

Our team already does regular one-on-ones and feedback sessions. Isn't that enough? It helps, but it's not the same as peers building trust with each other. One-on-ones flow up and down a hierarchy. Trust that actually holds a team together tends to form sideways, between people at a similar level.

What if the CEO or senior leader isn't willing to change? You often can't wait for that, and you frequently can't remove them either. The move that actually works is building trust and cohesion among the people around that leader — so the team can operate well regardless of what the person at the top does or doesn't do.

Is this really different from just building a strong team culture? Related, but more specific. Culture is broad and slow to shift. Trust is a narrower, faster-moving thing — usually anchored in a small number of specific relationships. You can have a "good culture" on paper and still have almost no real trust at the leadership level.