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Trust doesn't come in one email or an inspirational poster. It comes in the small, repeatable moments that resonate long after the meeting room has emptied. If you run teams in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane or anywhere in Australia for that matter, the stark reality is talent moves and patience wears thin.

"There's going to be leaders that only use policies and they're looking at trust melting away. The Organisations that thrive, not just survive, are those that think of trust as a discipline, not a program. I've worked with teams on both the public and private sides for more than a decade and a half, and the patterns are frustratingly persistent.

Why it matters

Just 21% of employees are engaged at work, according to Gallup's State of the Global Workplace report. That's not just a cultural problem; it's a revenue and safety issue. Low engagement leads to higher turnover, less discretionary effort and increased risk of mistakes going unreported. Trust is the axis of engagement, and engagement is the axis of high performance.

Three brutal facts right up front:

Trust is frail. It's a lot easier to chip away at than it is to build up from scratch.
Trust is mutual. To expect it without being in it is insane and expensive.
Trust needs an environment: You are the environment of trust or you are not! Warm words aren't enough.

Begin with communication, and be judicious about it

Open communication is the bedrock of faith, but "open" does not equate with "transparent about all things." Radical transparency sounds noble. In practice it can introduce confusion, freeze decision making and leak sensitive information.

My opinion, and, yes, some readers will disagree, is that transparency needs to be metered: Share the why; the constraints; the trade offs. People value candour. They don't need to see every spreadsheet.

Common sense rule: tell use Martin Act to explain intent and object. If a decision impacts people's roles or workloads, explain the thinking and what comes next. If for legal, safety or commercial reasons you need to hold back details, say so and explain the limitations. That alone builds credibility through <a href="https://paramounttraining.com.au/training/communication-training/">effective communication training</a>.

Create safe spaces, then police them

Psychological safety is not some fluffy HR concept. It's a measurable workplace condition that has a big impact on whether the people in your Organisation are willing to speak up about mistakes or problems, take risks or bring their best work forward.

Leaders set the tone. But tone alone is not enough. You need rituals and rules. The simple stuff works: a standard issue "what's worrying you?" check ins, anonymous idea connect boxes that someone actually reads and structured project debriefs. In our workshops we have quick, facilitated meetings with the agenda "what went wrong?" and "what did we learn?" That normalises vulnerability and transforms blame into improvement.

Active listening is also underrated

A manager once said to me, "My team says I don't listen, but I do, I just give solutions." That's the classic trap. Listening is not the space between speaking, it's a practice. Active listening is about paraphrasing, checking assumptions and responding to emotion as well as fact.

Empathy isn't about agreement. It's recognising the person in front of you. People contribute more when they feel heard. They also forgive mistakes faster.

Reliability and competence, the double currency

Trust has a two storey structure: behavioural and epistemic. Behavioural trust is really about representing, showing up, keeping commitments, meeting deadlines, being honest. Epistemic trust is about competence, being in fact knowledgeable, knowing what you are doing and admitting when you don't.

Both matter. A high performing team member who is reliable but treats others poorly? You've got a reliability problem covered in putrefaction. By contrast, a great idea from someone known for missing deadlines immediately introduces doubt. The best teams are reliable and good, and they exemplify both.

Share consistency in the follow through is obvious and easy to understand. Do less, and do it well.

Feedback, recognition and development

Feedback should be timely, specific, balanced. The old periodic performance review as a mystery bundle, which contains good and bad news in equal measures, is dead, we never should have believed in it to start with.

But, hot take, annual reviews also have a useful role to play when they function as an honest report card in conjunction with a tangible development plan. They want to know where they stand. Not all will agree, but when combined with regular informal check ins, those summative conversations then have a place.

Recognition is often neglected. Publicly acknowledging effort reinforces the behaviour you want to see more of. Private coaching helps people to improve. Both are trust accelerants.

Diversity, inclusion and the difficult work of listening

Teams that truly value diverse perspectives make better choices. That's not a platitude. Variety of inputs mitigate groupthink and unearth risks earlier. But diversity doesn't occur by mere happenstance. This requires people to be invited to speak and, significantly, acted upon when they do.

One small, behavioural change: Rotate meeting chair people. It makes conversation be structured by divergent voices, rather than being dominated by a small subset of the loud and sure. Another: adopt "no interrupt" rules. They are just simple, measurable changes that make inclusion happen in reality.

You are going to disagree, do it fairly

Few things can erode trust faster than unresolved conflict. But conflict handled well can actually deepen relationships through proper <a href="https://paramounttraining.com.au/training/conflict-resolution-training/">conflict resolution training</a>. The process matters. Otherwise, neutrality, clear protocols and follow up are what make the fair resolution of conflict credible.

When you have conflict, focus first on the facts, then on consequences and finally on repairing the working relationship. Leaders need to stay neutral arbiters, and, yes, that means sometimes extinguishing the influence of a team member when he or she tries to carry favour as way of dodging responsibility. Hard, but necessary.

Ethics, values and authenticity

A common set of ethics. The basis for confidence is a shared set of ethical standards. Values posted on the wall of a corporation are worthless unless they inform daily decision making. Leaders who demonstrate integrity, even when doing so comes at a cost, generate outsized credibility.

We switch to authenticity: Humans can smell virtue signalling a mile away. There's dignity, too, in acknowledging that you don't have all the answers. As you know, vulnerability is a leadership super power when it's used judiciously. It encourages others to contribute rather than run and hide.

Practical trust building habits (do these)

Start meetings with a "what I need from you" and "what's worrying me" round. It orients the room.
Use short, written commitments after the meeting so everyone is clear on who had doing what by when.
Have a monthly "what worked, what didn't" retro in your team. No blame, just facts and improvements.
Build a scoreboard that tracks not only outcome but also the work it got there (eg. delivery on time; peer review scores; incidence of reported safety concerns).
Offer a simple development allowance everyone can spend, choice and control over your learning builds psychological safety plus shows investment in people.

A couple of opinions that I'll wear in public

I believe some micromanagement has a place for high risk, high learning environments. If you are orienting a surgeon or an early career aircraft maintenance tech, paying extra attention and drawing up explicit protocols are not trust killers, they're safety enablers. Not everyone will agree. Fine.
I still value performance ratings structured when they are coupled with good coaching. Ratings summarise, coaching improves. It's not either/or.

Measure it, because love doesn't scale

If you want to make trust better, measure the components of it. Pulse surveys, engagement scores, psychological safety indexes and qualitative interviews will inform you where the pressure points are. Go beyond the tick box; don't treat them as a one off. Keep track of trends and relate against churn, Customer satisfaction and safety issues.

And here's something small teams might forget: trust is a bottom line issue. When people work together more effectively, decisions get made faster, mistakes are caught quicker and innovation is more likely to surface. We witness evidence of this in workshops conducted in Sydney and Melbourne, teams willing to have simple rituals report increased delivery rates within a matter of months. It's not magic. It's disciplined practice.

When trust breaks down, and it will at some point, move quickly to confront, transparently and humbly. The fastest path to healing is accountability. A leader that admits to having made a mistake, outlines what they will do to put it right and then follows through with their promise can rebuild credibility much quicker than a leader who doubles down on excuses. Fair processes, reparative actions and steadfast follow through repair the foundation.

A closing, blunt but true

Trust is not a soft add on. It's infrastructure. Without them, systems break gently and expensively. With it, teams are durable and adaptable, they deal with change and produce value. When such trust is developed among teams, a positive influence inevitably extends within the organisational culture and therefore to profit level.

If you are serious about your team's growth, begin by performing an audit of your everyday interactions. Cut the noise. Keep the rituals. Measure. And don't be surprised if you are judged by what you do next.

A final thought. Create it with purpose, because destiny is not a plan.