We often talk about trust as an object that you either own or don’t. But in working with executive teams over the last two decades, I’ve discovered that trust is a verb. It’s something earned as others judge your everyday acts. It’s the foundation that makes every other high-performance behavior possible. Without it, we can’t have honest feedback, care, challenge, creative risk-taking, or productive conflict. Ultimately, it allows for growth and shared success.
So, how can leaders build trust across their teams and as a foundation for a strong culture?
What and Why Trust
The cover picture for this article offers two frameworks for building and assessing trust, and two for turning trust into high performance:
Brené Brown’s BRAVING offers behaviors that create trust: Boundaries, Reliability, Accountability, Vault (confidentiality), Integrity, Nonjudgment, and Generosity. Chalmers Brothers adds: Sincerity (similar to Integrity), Competence, Reliability (also in BRAVING), and Care.
Patrick Lencioni emphasizes psychological safety that allows team members to admit mistakes, acknowledge weaknesses, and ask for help without repercussion. This is the foundation for embracing and correcting his other 4 dysfunctions of teams. At Vistage, we’ve organized core values into a simple sequence: Trust, Caring, Challenge, and Growth. After building Trust, there’s a strong foundation for Caring about each other to build the safety to Challenge one another toward Growth (or engage in the constructive Conflict in Lencioni’s model). Growth and Results then reinforce trust in a powerful flywheel.
The Care-Challenge Paradox
I repeatedly see leaders who worry that pushing back, questioning decisions, or demanding higher standards will damage trust. So they stay quiet. They let mediocre work pass or avoid difficult conversations.
They care deeply, but struggle to challenge effectively. As a result, they create the opposite of what they intend. Team members sense the kid gloves. They wonder what’s being said behind closed doors and lose confidence in their leader’s honest assessment. Trust erodes because challenge is absent and growth stalls.
In reality, challenge without care is Brutal; while care without challenge is Nice, but negligent. With trust, leaders can be Kind by demonstrating both care and challenge. This is the spiral upward from trust outlined in the Vistage and Lencioni frameworks.
Putting it Together for Trust-Based Leadership
Let’s walk through how to systematically build and maintain trust, integrating insights from all these frameworks:
1. Build Vulnerability First
Lencioni is right: trust begins with vulnerability. Leaders must model the courage to say “I screwed up,” “I need help,” or “I don’t know.” This demonstrates integrity/sincerity (you mean what you say) and reliability (you take responsibility for what you say).
When you’re vulnerable first, you create psychological safety for others.
2. Create a Safe Space with Generous Interpretation
The highest-performing teams are explicit about boundaries so that people can say what they really think without fear of judgment or retribution. It means challenging agreement and embracing constructive conflict. It enforces curiosity without judgment and disagreement with respect. Leaders who model these boundaries create safe spaces and show the self-awareness that challenge is valued and expected.
These high-performing teams also embrace most-generous intent. Before concluding someone dropped the ball because they don’t care, get curious. What else might be true? What pressures might they face? This generosity creates space for people to ask for what they need, admit uncertainty, and bring their full thinking to the table. Together, these create the safe space that enables the vulnerability Lencioni emphasizes and the productive challenge/conflict that drives better results.
3. Competence Meters Commitment
Chalmers Brothers reminds us that people assess trust based on your competence (ability to deliver). Build competence by acknowledging what you do and don’t know and developing expertise where it matters. Don’t make promises unless you can deliver on the intent and letter of your commitments.
4. Care and Challenge
Show care by understanding what matters to people on your team, not just what concerns you. What are their stories, needs, and aspirations? When care is present, challenge becomes possible. With challenge, you hold people accountable to high standards and demonstrate that you care about their growth and team success.
“I know you’re capable of better than this, and I want to help you get there,” is both confrontation and care. It works when you’ve already established that you’re sincerely invested in personal success. When you create space for accountability without blame or shame, it ripples outward.
5. Keep the Vault
Confidentiality and sincerity are linked. The vault is built on faith in your integrity: confidence that your words reflect your actual beliefs and intent, and that you’ll act in others’ best interests. When you tell someone their confidence is safe, your actions must match your words. And when you share your thoughts, they must be genuine. Neglecting either can put vulnerability at risk. No one is always perfect. So, if you fall short, own your mistakes and make genuine amends.
6. Be Relentlessly Reliable
Reliability is the most visible dimension of trust. Make only the commitments you can keep. Be consistent in delivering what and when you promise. If that becomes impossible, adjust expectations as soon as possible with transparent reasons for changes. As leaders, we teach others what is acceptable by our actions. The leader who is consistently late to meetings teaches that they are not reliable. The leader who remembers to ask about last week’s presentation shows they care. Your team is always watching. What are you teaching them?
Putting it All Together
When you integrate these frameworks, it becomes clear that trust is foundational, and sequential, and compounding. Vulnerability-based trust enables genuine caring. Caring creates safety for challenge. Challenge drives growth. And growth reinforces trust in others’ competence and sincerity. Trust allows for care, conflict, commitment, accountability, growth, and results.
This is how you build a culture where people push each other toward excellence while genuinely caring about success. It’s not soft, and it’s not harsh. It’s rigorous, disciplined, and compassionate.
This week, audit yourself using these frameworks. Be self-reflective. Can you be genuinely vulnerable about mistakes and limitations? Do you demonstrate competence and care? Do you create nonjudgmental space while assuming generous intent? Are you sincerely invested in others’ interests? Do you follow through reliably?
Pick one dimension where you’re falling short. One that makes you uncomfortable. Use it as a leverage point for strengthening the system. Trust is built through consistent, daily choices to show up with both vulnerability and strength, both challenge and care. Your team is watching. What are you teaching them about what trust looks like? Where do you see the biggest gaps between challenge and care in your business? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.