Trust can be easy to build, easy to break, and hard as h*ll to rebuild as that cycle goes on. It builds momentum or it kills progress. Trust is up to you to prioritize. In today’s world of AI-enabled businesses, Trust is an Operating Condition Requirement, not an emotional word that makes us feel good about our team or teammates.
Series: Getting Quality Work Done at Scale — Article 5 of 10
In a High Performing Team - Trust is Speed
In the setting of a high performance team, trust is about speed. Lack thereof kills momentum. There are numerous books written on the topic of Trust — how to build it, its impact, what it is, why and how we — as humans — either earn it or lose it. This post is not meant to go deep into each of those items, albeit they are included in the mix a bit later on. Rather, today, I’m writing about how Trust is a maker or breaker of speed in high performing teams.
Stephen M.R. Covey called trust “the one thing that changes everything.” If you haven’t read his book, The Speed of Trust — you should. He’s right. Short summary is that Covey meant it as an economic argument: high-trust organizations move faster and cost less.
Paul Zak’s neuroscience research at Claremont Graduate University put numbers on it: employees in the highest-trust organizations reported 106% more energy, 76% higher engagement, and 50% higher productivity than those in low-trust environments.⁴
In today’s accelerating environment, demonstrated through millions of examples of how AI impacts us daily (and is only getting better, and faster at doing so), speed is no longer a bonus or moat creator. Speed is survival.A true story from a past time… Five months before a company I was at nearly went bankrupt, I ran an investor engagement survey. The normal things - asking shareholders what frequency of updates they wanted, what areas they believed they could help with, whether they’d visited the facilities, or if they’d like to. I wasn’t doing it because I needed something. I was doing it because our team treated capital partners the way we treated operating partners: as people who deserved the full picture.
In the quarters after, our board saw every number — including the ugly ones. A monthly profitability threshold that we weren’t hitting. A cash position that made the path forward narrow. No sanitized version. No spin. The ugly math was the real math, as it always had been.
Then the crisis hit. Short-term debt was choking the company. We sent a full-disclosure email — every number, every sub-optimal path forward and the ones that were the best options to right-size and grow again.
Over 50% of shareholders committed to bridge financing within 24 hours.
That speed didn’t come from the pitch. It came from the fact that no one had to wonder whether the numbers were real. They’d been seeing the real numbers for years. They’d been invited to the facility. They’d been asked for input when things were fine, not just when we needed money. When the crisis hit, the trust was already pre-built. The velocity of the commitment was a direct function of trust that had been compounding through consistent transparency.
Low-trust organizations not only don’t move like that, but they simply can’t move like that. Every update gets questioned. Every number gets rechecked. Every conversation becomes a negotiation over what’s true before anyone can even discuss or decide what to do about it. That doesn’t work in crisis. It also doesn’t work in rapid-scale growth periods when capital is needed to fuel expansion opportunities that land in front of you. Rapid-growth requires taking advantage of those, and years later when there was an opportunity to exit… that same speed was there in the organization.
If your team can’t make a critical decision in 24 hours (when the situation requires that speed), the problem might not be the decision framework. It might be the lack of trust.
Trust Is Designed, Not Hoped For
I’ve heard a crazy metaphor — some people treat things like trust like weather. Something that happens to you. I’ve never believed that. Those that know me know I echo the saying… “there’s no bad weather, there’s just bad gear.” That can be a parallel here as well.
In today’s world — especially the business world - trust is a core component of building your operating infrastructure. It is built the same way you build any other operating system: deliberately, with mechanisms that make it repeatable. If you are not thinking of it with this level of importance, you are doing your team, your stakeholders, your customers, and yourself a massive disservice.
Another quick real-life example of this… A new operations lead joined one of our manufacturing teams during a difficult transition. Second shift startup, new processes being developed, a team still finding its footing. In the individual’s first week, leadership asked him to rate the operation on a scale of 1 to 10.
The answer… 6.
That was not what we strived for and when it was said, we all knew it. But… Nobody flinched. Nobody got defensive. The CEO used it as a baseline. Not a problem to fix, but a starting point to build from. It was good news. The environment was open enough for a new team member to speak up right away with the truth.
That moment didn’t happen by accident. Someone created the channel. Someone asked the question. Someone designed a culture where honesty wasn’t just tolerated but expected and encouraged. And the new lead tested it with a number that wasn’t flattering. Nothing bad happened.
That’s a simple example of building trust as infrastructure. It’s not about hoping people will be honest. It’s about building the systems where honesty is the chosen path.
Earning Trust When You’re the Outsider
Let’s shift for a moment. There’s a harder version of this problem: what happens when you’re leading in a domain or industry where you don’t have the expertise?
This has been the story of my professional, and personal, life. My first real business was helping start a cat bed and breakfast named Catopia. Yup. Still running btw. Think I knew how to build that business? Nope. Later in life, I came into manufacturing without a manufacturing background. No engineering degree. No decades on a production floor. Every person we hired on the production line knew more about the actual work than I did — and they knew that I knew it. Same holds true today — our team members at MRCA are experts in their craft and have knowledge learned over decades that I couldn’t even fathom to fully grasp.
Taiichi Ohno, the architect of the Toyota Production System, had a practice called genchi genbutsu, which translates to “actual place. actual thing.” or “go and see for yourself.” He would literally draw a chalk circle on the factory floor and make managers stand in it. Not to inspect. Not to give orders. To observe. To learn. The principle was simple: you cannot lead what you haven’t seen, and you cannot earn the trust of people whose work you don’t understand.
I never knew there was such a wonderful playbook that they put together. Yet my unsatisfied curiosity continues to drive me forward willingly, and honestly.
When I first helped stand up a manufacturing facility, I didn’t draw chalk circles. But I did the equivalent. Walked the floor. Every time I was in the building. I asked questions I genuinely didn’t know the answers to. Watched processes run. When something didn’t make sense to me, I said so. Not as a criticism, but as a learner. Edgar Schein called this “umble inquiry”: the practice of asking questions from a position of genuine curiosity rather than authority. It’s the opposite of the leadership instinct to walk in with answers.
At one point I told my Co-CEO of a company: “I’m too far removed from the daily flow to offer any real good input from an on-the-ground standpoint.” In the same conversation, I admitted I’d forgotten we’d bought a piece of equipment. Later team members told me that most CEOs would never say that. It would feel like admitting incompetence. To me it was just the truth.
They paused me though after I tried to move past it to explain what actually happened: that admission made our operations leader more willing to share ground-level reality, not less. When the CO-CEO says “I don’t have enough context, or know enough to be helpful right now” the healthy team heard: “This person isn’t going to override my judgment with uninformed opinions and they actually care and want to help.” The gap in my knowledge became the opening for their expertise.
They stopped me because afterwards, we quickly built infrastructure to close the gap for myself and others. My role in leadership was to redesign the daily standup to focus on removing roadblocks and working on process, not status reports about what was done yesterday. And we set one rule for information flow: don’t filter what reaches me or anyone on our leadership team unless it’s outright profane. I wanted the raw signal.What this has led to, not just in manufacturing but in every role I’ve taken on, is that expertise isn’t the only path to trust. Presence, humility, and unfiltered truth… consistently… is.
As many much smarter leaders than myself knew at that phase in their career - the team didn’t need me to know how to run a CNC machine. They needed to know I’d been on the floor, that I’d seen the constraints they worked under, and that when I made a decision about their operation, it was grounded in reality, not a spreadsheet I’d read in a conference room.
Charles Feltman, in “The Thin Book of Trust,” breaks trustworthiness into four components: sincerity, reliability, competence, and care. His key insight is that care is the multiplier — people extend broad trust only when they believe you hold their interests alongside your own. Going to the gemba isn’t about demonstrating competence. It’s about demonstrating care. It says: your work matters enough for me to come see it myself and be there with you hand in hand, side by side, day by day.
Trust Is What You Need When Things Go Wrong AND When They Are Going Right
Sure, trust shows up differently in crisis than it does in calm. From experience, leading a billion-dollar enterprise’s customer and community response team – it’s definitely a non-negotiable in those times. And yes, most leadership writing focuses on the crisis side. But the deposits made during the good times are what make the crisis withdrawals possible.
When I first began to introduce AI tools to our team way back in the day, I didn’t send a memo or mandate a rollout. I shared my own experiment in a team channel: I’d tested having AI draft something and me revise it, and it worked well. Same day, a team member responded: “I love this! I feel like AI really helps me get unstuck.” Within weeks, paid accounts were rolled out to the full team. In a low-trust organization, AI introduction triggers “is this replacing me?” In ours, the response was curiosity. That adoption speed — experiment to enterprise in weeks — is a trust dividend.
Early in my career, I was fortunate to be part of a great team that co-founded a five-day crowdfunding festival for creators called One Spark. It ended up being the size and scale of a Superbowl coming to town, wild. Before we had proof of anything, a respected prominent executive and leader committed significant capital in the first year to something that didn’t exist yet, in a city with no startup reputation. Two thousand volunteers showed up year after year — not because anyone paid them, but because they trusted that we were doing all we could to further the mission and make a positive impact in the community. City and county government handed the keys to downtown for a week — street closures, public safety, infrastructure at municipal scale. Pause for a moment… think about how risk-averse and slow to move Government is all around us. They don’t partner with new organizations and they don’t move fast. They did in this instance and for the years ahead. It was trust as a growth engine — every deposit made compounding into the next.When we found a rare talent for our operations team at another rapidly growing, cash-strapped startup, I didn’t hide the reality. I told the candidate: “We have 8 weeks of runway and no solution to it right now.” He joined anyway. In a low-trust recruiting process, the company hides the risk and the candidate discovers it in month two and leaves. Radical honesty was the recruiting advantage.
You make deposits when you don’t need them. The withdrawal comes later as the balance is built.
Trust also shows up in the small, fast moments. An operations leader once said “we need to spend $11K on equipment right now.” It was slightly above our guardrail for the project which was $10k. No issue - I said yes. No drawn-out business case, no committee, no escalation chain. The trust was earned and built over the years prior and it was quick to move forward. They framed it well, in a 50 or less word email and on we went. That speed is what trust looks like when things are going well — the system doesn’t need the leader in the room for every call.
Of course, trust also has to hold when things break.
I’ve watched a near identical pattern play out numerous times (all in the same organization) — three different failure modes, same response every time. An employee (not the same one) violated trust and crossed a clear line. Instead of termination and damages, the leader chose a structured separation — support, severance, a path forward. Someone walked out of a production meeting under pressure. The response: transition support, documented handoff, dignity intact. A critical team member hit a personal wall. The response: listen first, flexible arrangements, professional support. The person stayed.
Amy Edmondson’s research at Harvard found that the highest-performing hospital teams reported more errors than lower-performing ones. They weren’t making more mistakes. They felt safe enough to surface them.⁸ In manufacturing we live and breathe daily where people can be severely harmed by equipment – many teams struggle to get safety meetings to be more than just a quick “all good.” – that’s not a healthy trust-based environment.
The opposite is exactly what happened in each of these situations. After the team watched leadership respond to failure with structure instead of destruction, problems started surfacing earlier. The consistency of the response IS part of the trust infrastructure. The team doesn’t need to guess how leadership will react. They already know. Over the following year, voluntary turnover stayed under 15% in an industry where 78% of manufacturers report voluntary hourly turnover above 10%.³
Trust isn’t just what saves you. It’s what helps you move with speed.
The Cost of Low, or No, Trust
Low trust doesn’t announce itself loudly. I mean, sometimes it does. I once told someone at a lunch that I flat out didn’t trust them. That same person worked to push me out of a board just months later (that’s a story for another time).
Lack of trust often shows up in all sorts of ways though that we can recognize. Here are a few below — love to know what others you’ve seen as well.
Meetings that should be emails, because people don’t trust written communication to carry nuance.
Decisions that take weeks instead of hours, because every stakeholder needs to re-validate what they’ve been told.
Leaders who can’t let go of decisions they’ve formally delegated, because they don’t trust the system they designed.
Information hoarding, because sharing what you know feels like giving away leverage instead of building capability.
The most expensive version: problems that hide until they’re crises. A 6 out of 10 caught in week one is a calibration exercise. A 6 out of 10 discovered in month six is a restructuring.
Covey calls this the “low-trust tax.” When trust goes down, speed goes down and cost goes up. Watson Wyatt’s research found that high-trust organizations outperform low-trust organizations by 286% in total return to shareholders.¹ Gallup puts the annual cost of disengagement at $250 to $300 billion² (and I bet that number is going to grow much faster in the AI-age). These symptoms look like process problems. Most of them are trust problems.
Building Trust Infrastructure
If trust is infrastructure, then we can build it. Not overnight, but deliberately.
The mechanisms I’ve seen work are specific and can be built.
Share the real numbers. Share the truth. Even when it’s scary. Not the version that makes you look in control. The version that’s true. Do it consistently, and people stop wondering what you’re hiding. And yes, this may cause turnover and a weeding out of team members. It may also demonstrate gaps in leadership and the true issues that a team, division, or business is facing. It’s also the only way to get full alignment with your team.There is a necessary distinction here. Transparency doesn’t mean broadcasting everything to everyone at all times. Not what I’m saying or what I mean. There will always be moments that call for discretion and discernment: sensitive personnel matters, negotiations in progress, information that is someone else’s story to tell and many more. Knowing when to hold information close isn’t the opposite of transparency, it’s a wise approach to life and part of earning the trust that makes transparency work. The difference is intent. Are you withholding because it protects others, or because it protects your image or something else like that? Discretion in service of people is wisdom. Secrecy in service of ego is the tax I’m talking about here.
Build pathways to help honesty be easy. “My door is always open” is not a real pathway — especially in a corporate setting. “Rate us/me/this 1-10 right now” is. The difference is that one requires courage from the person walking through the door, and the other builds the expectation of candor into the system itself. The two are not the same.
Respond to failure the same way every time. People don’t remember the values deck or the brand statement or culture paragraph in a handbook. They remember what happened when someone crossed a line, when money got tight, when the building filled with smoke. I’ve watched trust compound over months because a single crisis response showed the team that transparency wouldn’t be punished — and I’ve watched it evaporate overnight when the opposite happened. The pattern matters more than any individual moment. And yes, there’s more talk about trust in crisis, because that’s when it’s needed the most… and when it’s easiest to get it wrong… or right.
Invest in people even when the spreadsheet says don’t. There are always ways to invest in your team. It can be time. It can be teaching. It can be listening. It can be incentives. It can be celebrating them. It can be through giving them the opportunity to step up and show they are comfortable with the same ambiguity that you, as a leader, are facing. Any of these can be the move that earns trust. Not transactional trust built on competence, but the deeper kind built on the belief that leadership actually holds your team members’ interests alongside the company’s.
Teach your team to resolve conflict directly. This isn’t easy. It is worth it.
One framework I’ve learned to use across organizations (from a great friend and co-founder): if someone has offended you, or you’ve offended someone, the person who did the offending starts the process of reconciliation. They say what they did, how they’d feel if it was done to them, and what they’d do differently next time. Then they ask: will you forgive me? And they stay quiet until the offended person is done talking. Forgiveness is the first step.
Reconciliation happens when the offender demonstrates the behavior change the next time the same situation comes up. This teaches people to go to each other first — not to the boss, not to HR, not to Slack. It builds the muscle of direct resolution. When the team knows the framework, most conflicts resolve without escalation. When they don’t, the leader steps in as mediator and coach, not judge. The framework isn’t about being soft. It’s about being structured.I’m human. I’ve broken trust too. Many times. And it will happen again.
I’ve moved too fast, communicated too little, tried to be too perfect, didn’t give credit where it was due proactively, made calls that left people feeling unheard and likely many other things I’m not even aware of. That’s the fact of being a human being – we’re not perfect. I took extra time this week in the evenings to write this because I’ve been on both sides of the equation, and the framework above – taught to me by a great friend and co-founder – is what I’ve learned can be successful when you’re willing to do the work without ego.
Sometimes the fastest way to build trust is the simplest. Saying “I don’t know the view is worth the climb or, No - I disagree” during a board meeting, or “I’m too far removed to weigh in on this, what do you think?” Schein would call that humble inquiry. I’d call it common sense that some leaders forget the moment they get a title. It signals that being right matters more than looking right. When leaders flip that — when looking right becomes the priority — trust erodes fast.
A Little Self-Test
A few questions for you, and your team… Answer honestly:
When was the last time you shared information with your team that made you look bad?
If a new hire rated your operation a 6 out of 10, would you use it as a baseline or treat it as a problem?
Do your people escalate decisions they’re authorized to make — and if so, is it a decision rights issue or a trust issue?
When someone on your team fails, does the rest of the team feel safer or less safe afterward?
Can your organization make a critical decision in 24 hours? If not, what’s actually slowing it down?
When was the last time you went to where the work actually happens — not to inspect, but to learn?
Does your team know how you’ll respond to the next failure — because they’ve watched you respond to the last three the same way?
Someone I greatly respect made the point recently that you can’t build trust with others until you know what you trust yourself. What’s your foundation? For me, it starts and ends with Faith. Not faith as a business strategy — but as the bedrock underneath everything else. The principles in this series work regardless of what your foundation is. But I’d be dishonest if I didn’t name mine.
Trust isn’t soft. At scale, it’s the hardest infrastructure to build and the easiest to destroy. Without it, every other system you design is at risk.
I wrote a dozen years ago that the answer to entrepreneurial failure is commitment. I still believe that. Through the years, I’ve learned that commitment without trust is just a leader pushing harder into a system that’s pushing back.
Go give someone a high-five randomly today. You might just start earning their trust.
Next in the series: Feedback Loops — because trust without feedback is just assumption.
This is Post 5 of a 10-part series on how to get quality work done at scale. Each post is meant to build on the last. If you’re just joining, start with Post 1: Clarity Is the Strategy.
References
¹ Watson Wyatt, “WorkUSA Survey” — High-trust organizations outperformed low-trust organizations by 286% in total return to shareholders over a multi-year study period.
² Gallup, “State of the American Workplace” — Annual cost of active disengagement estimated at $250–$300 billion in lost productivity.
³ Manufacturers Alliance, “Turnover Trends in Manufacturing” (2023) — 78% of surveyed manufacturing companies reported voluntary hourly turnover rates of 10.1% or higher.
⁴ Paul J. Zak, “The Neuroscience of Trust,” Harvard Business Review, January 2017. Employees in high-trust organizations reported 106% more energy, 76% more engagement, and 50% higher productivity.
⁵ Stephen M.R. Covey, The Speed of Trust: The One Thing That Changes Everything (Free Press, 2006). Trust as an economic function: when trust goes up, speed goes up and cost goes down.
⁶ Taiichi Ohno, Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production (Productivity Press, 1988). Genchi genbutsu: “go and see for yourself.”
⁷ Edgar H. Schein, Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling (Berrett-Koehler, 2013). Building trust through asking questions from genuine curiosity rather than authority.
⁸ Amy C. Edmondson, “Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams,” Administrative Science Quarterly, 1999. Highest-performing teams reported more errors because they felt safe surfacing them.
⁹ Charles Feltman, The Thin Book of Trust: An Essential Primer for Building Trust at Work, 3rd Edition (Thin Book Publishing, 2024). Four components of trustworthiness: sincerity, reliability, competence, and care.