What this post covers
Trust is the invisible infrastructure behind every high-performing company. This post breaks down the 8 elements of trust in business, drawn from David Horsager’s research. For each element, you’ll get the principle, what it looks like in practice at scale, and what happens when it’s missing.
The short answer
The 8 elements of trust in business are clarity, compassion, character, competency, commitment, connection, contribution, and consistency. Companies that build all eight create cultures where people give discretionary effort, customers stay loyal, and the founder can step back without everything falling apart. Miss even one and trust erodes faster than it was built.
You’re losing more than you think.
Every rule you’ve introduced because someone once abused the system. Every sign-off process that exists because you stopped trusting your team to make good calls. Every talented person who left because they felt micromanaged. That’s what low trust costs a scaling company.
Paul Zak’s research, published in Harvard Business Review, found that people at high-trust companies report 50% higher productivity, 76% more engagement, and 106% more energy at work compared to people at low-trust companies. They also experience 40% less burnout. That’s not a marginal gap. It’s the difference between a company that scales and one that stalls.
This isn’t new. During the Industrial Revolution, employers treated workers as units of output. Clock in, clock out, get paid per piece. No need to know you, like you, or care about you. A few enlightened employers tried something different. Cadbury’s built housing for their workers. William Hesketh Lever created Port Sunlight Village. But mostly, the attitude was: I don’t trust you, so I’ll only pay you when you prove you’ve done what you’re told.
That mindset has permeated through to today. How many companies still require a doctor’s note for two days off sick? How many track toilet breaks or lock down web access? That’s Industrial Revolution thinking with a Wi-Fi connection.
The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer found that business is the only institution viewed as both ethical and competent globally. 78% of employees trust their employer to do what is right. But that trust sits with “my employer,” not “business in general.” Inside your company, trust is personal. It’s built or broken one interaction at a time.
So what actually creates it?
In my coaching, I use a three-legged stool. Trust sits on three legs: care, competence, and character. Do you care about me and the company? Can you actually do the job you’re being paid to do? And is your say-do ratio close to 100%? If any one of those legs is missing, the stool falls over. Communication collapses. People stop talking to each other because they don’t trust each other enough to be honest.
Human beings run on the power of three. Those three legs are what I talk about with clients every week. But when I sat down with David Horsager for the Scale to Win podcast, he opened up a more detailed map. His book, The Trusted Leader, identifies eight pillars that all start with C. My three legs are in there. But Horsager’s model gives you eight specific things you can audit and improve. Here’s how each one works in practice.
What are the 8 elements of trust in business?
Before going deep on each element, here’s the overview.
| Element | What it means | What it looks like in practice |
|---|---|---|
| Clarity | Be clear, not clever | Marketing that speaks customer language, not corporate jargon |
| Compassion | Care beyond yourself | Purpose-led decisions that prioritise people over short-term profit |
| Character | Do the right thing when it’s hard | Owning failures instead of blaming suppliers |
| Competency | Prove you can deliver | Client video testimonials over polished case studies |
| Commitment | Stay the course through adversity | Sticking to a cause when it stops being fashionable |
| Connection | Collaborate, don’t compete | A-Players who work together, not lone mavericks |
| Contribution | Show results, don’t talk about them | OKRs and KPIs that make performance visible |
| Consistency | Same thing, every day, without fail | Publishing, delivering, showing up reliably for years |
Why is clarity the foundation of trust?
People don’t trust the complicated or the ambiguous. They trust the simple and straightforward. And yet so many companies create marketing messages that are unclear. Sometimes they’re total gibberish. Not rooted in the way the customer thinks. Based on how the company sees itself.
Here’s an example. We worked with a distribution client using Alex Osterwalder’s Value Proposition Canvas. They’d been talking about “24/7 support” in all their marketing. Sounds reasonable. But their customers didn’t care about 24/7 support. Their customers lay awake at night wondering where their goods were. When we reframed the message as “Know where your goods are, 24/7,” the response changed completely. Same service. Different words. Entirely different level of trust.
This is the value of segmentation and niching. You can go deep into a customer’s lived experience to understand their problems. When I look at clients who are growing like weeds, they all have clarity around their core customer. They know they serve that customer better than anyone else in their market. The customer doesn’t have to work out whether they’re selling something they need. It’s crystal clear. And they trust them more for it.
Clarity extends to your employees too. They need clarity of expectation. The first question of the Gallup Q12 measure of staff engagement is “I know what’s expected of me at work.” Get this right and you’ll avoid half your difficult conversations.
How does compassion build trust beyond transactions?
This maps to the first leg of the stool: care. Do you care about me? Do you care about the company? If you sense someone doesn’t care about you, you won’t trust them. Full stop.
There’s been some great research into the most successful commanders in Afghanistan. The army units with the highest levels of trust were the ones commanded by leaders who cared about the welfare of their troops. Not the most tactically brilliant. Not the most experienced. The ones who cared. That single variable of leadership made a massive difference.
From a business perspective, this shows up in the rise of purpose-led companies. Take TOMS footwear: they donate a pair of shoes to disadvantaged children for every pair bought. That compassionate approach drove exponential growth. One of our clients, Pax8, deliberately locates offices in cities where they know they’ll positively impact the local economy. Innovation is a key driver for them, but so is rejuvenation.
Don’t hide it if you’re doing good, socially responsible work. Some clients seem embarrassed to talk about it. It’s not bragging. Sharing what’s important to you and why you do it, in a matter-of-fact way, builds a foundation for trust with customers and employees alike.
What role does character play when things go wrong?
Character is the third leg of the stool, and my definition is simple: integrity. Is your say-do ratio close to 100%? Do you do the things you say you’re going to do? Politicians are a textbook example of how not to do this. The Ipsos Veracity Index 2025 found that only 9% of Britons trust politicians to tell the truth, their joint lowest score since records began in 1983. Only social media influencers score worse, at 6%. Why so low? Politicians repeatedly duck responsibility. Resignation-level failings get brushed under the carpet. Leaders cling to power. Trust erodes.
When I was MD of IT Lab, we hired people who’d worked at other managed service providers. Their worst habit when they arrived was blaming BT when there was a service failure. “It’s not our fault. BT let us down.” It used to drive me nuts. Our clients didn’t care whose fault it was. Their contract was with us, not BT.
If you encourage your employees to cover up failure, you create a culture of distrust. There’s a fear that admitting mistakes makes you look incapable. But if you build a culture of lies, don’t be surprised when people start stealing from the stationery cupboard. At the core of your business is a lack of character.
Conversely, companies that take a stand increase respect and loyalty. Refusing to work with certain industries, even when it would be profitable, is a sign of character. These ethical decisions build trust that lasts.
“I scaled Rackspace UK from 4 to 150 people and Peer 1 Hosting from 0 to 120, taking both to a £30m annual run rate. In every case, trust was the thing that either accelerated growth or held it back. When care, competence, and character are in place, communication flows. When any one of them breaks, people stop talking to each other. And once communication dies, everything else follows.”
Dominic Monkhouse, founder of Monkhouse & Company, coach to 200+ founder-CEOs
Why is competency not enough on its own?
If you can demonstrate competency in what you say you can do, people will trust you. But competency alone is only one leg of the stool.
This is the second leg of the three I mentioned earlier. Not “are you doing your job?” but “can you do your job?” Do I believe you have the competency to deliver what you’re being paid to deliver? That’s a different question, and it matters. A brilliant performer who doesn’t care and has questionable character won’t earn lasting trust. A person of sterling character who can’t actually deliver won’t either. You need all three legs.
How do you demonstrate competency externally?
I see companies pour resources into white papers and polished case studies to showcase their credentials. That works, but it’s time-consuming. And it sometimes comes across as corporate nonsense. A raw, uncut video of a client saying “This was my problem, this is how they solved it” is worth ten glossy PDFs. Video works better than the written word for one reason: it’s harder to fake.
What about internal competency?
This ties back to hiring. Are the people on your team all A-Players? We need to know the people we work with, and work for, are the best. We need to trust they can do the thing they say they’ll do.
When Liz Wiseman came on the podcast, she shared research from her book Multipliers showing that 70% of people unknowingly diminish those around them. That may be unintentional, but it boils down to a lack of trust, confidence, and understanding. Your job as the founder is to spot it and address it.
How does commitment separate trusted leaders?
Are you committed in the face of adversity? Can you show you stay the course, doing the right thing over a long period?
Committing to a cause, whether that’s climate change, educational poverty, or increasing diversity, makes your business more trustworthy. It’s different from compassion. Commitment means you’re dedicated to something beyond yourself that you care passionately about. And you stick with it when it stops being fashionable.
On a personal level, when I think about the people I’ve hired, they’re often members of sports teams. Not because sport is relevant to their job. Because they show commitment beyond themselves. They turn up every Tuesday and Thursday through rain and snow to practice. If they didn’t show up, there would be no league. Their commitment is to the whole idea of the sport and what it represents.
I scaled two companies to £30m. Every week, I'll show you how.
Why does connection matter more as you scale?
When I think about the companies I’ve run and the clients I coach, they go through an evolutionary arc. Initial success is down to the heroic efforts of individuals. The lone maverick in sales who wins the deals. But as you start to scale, that model breaks. To grow, companies need A-Players who can connect and collaborate. Individually talented, yes. But more importantly, they can work together and trust each other.
The reason homo sapiens out-muscled the Neanderthals wasn’t because they were stronger or had bigger brains. It was social organisation and the sharing of knowledge. They were better together.
What does Dunbar’s Number tell us about trust at scale?
Robin Dunbar, the anthropologist, proposed a limit on the number of people we can maintain strong social relationships with: around 150. WL Gore, the company behind Gore-Tex, takes this seriously. As Malcolm Gladwell documented in The Tipping Point, they cap their factories at 150 employees with exactly 150 parking spaces. When the car park is full, they build a new factory. I had John Housego, the UK general manager of WL Gore, on the podcast, and the culture inside that company is remarkable. They understood that trust breaks down when groups get too large, and they designed the whole organisation around that insight.
What did Google’s Project Aristotle reveal about trust?
Google’s Project Aristotle studied 180 teams and confirmed this from a different angle. They found that psychological safety was the single strongest predictor of team effectiveness. Not location. Not seniority. Not individual talent. Whether people trusted each other enough to take risks, speak up, and admit mistakes. That was the variable that mattered.
This connection, or lack of it, is one of the biggest impacts of remote work. We’ve lost the random interactions that happen in the office. The serendipitous connections that drive collaboration. Humans aren’t designed to be apart. Building trust remotely is harder. It requires deliberate effort.
How do you prove contribution without bragging?
If you deliver results, you’re trusted. But the evidence needs to be specific.
Too many companies take the “we do everything for everybody” approach. You can’t evidence results in that context. This is about being precise: “We get these results for companies that look like yours.” That specificity builds trust.
How do you make contribution visible internally?
You need to make it easy for employees to evidence their performance. OKRs and KPIs are invaluable here. If people know they’re working towards one or two targets weekly, they’ll feel a sense of achievement when they hit them. That builds trust in their ability and makes them happier. Create a framework so your employees can demonstrate their success.
What does trust look like operationally?
Here’s where trust becomes practical. How many companies offer unlimited holidays? Still very few. When I ran Peer 1, we gave people that freedom. Not because we didn’t care about output. Because we trusted them to manage their own time. We stopped tracking hours and started tracking outcomes. The result was that people worked harder, not less. When you trust your team with their time, they trust you with their effort.
The same applies to flexible working. As long as employees are hitting targets and making a contribution, should it matter where they sit? When Google studied what makes effective teams, they found effectiveness wasn’t impacted by location. We just need to trust people to do what they say they will.
Why is consistency the ultimate trust multiplier?
It seems boring. But doing the same thing, day in, day out, is what actually builds trust. Consistency is the only way to build a brand and a customer base.
Take my coaching business. We’ve written close to 500 blog posts. We’re approaching 400 episodes of the podcast. We’ve launched a YouTube channel. Every week, we put out content. It doesn’t matter what day. It’s just that every week, without fail, we create something that tries to help people. That’s what we do. This is how you build a reputation. Not through a single brilliant piece of content, but through showing up reliably for years.
David Horsager made a great observation when we discussed this. He said people will even trust someone who is late, as long as they are consistently late. This made me smile. One of my clients is reliably 10 minutes late to our meetings. I know I can make a cup of tea and a sandwich while waiting. So when he turned up on time last week, it was quite unnerving.
As Ernest Hemingway put it: “The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.” Consistency is how you prove you’re worth that trust.
Frequently asked questions about trust in business
Trust in business is the confidence that colleagues, leaders, and partners will do what they say they’ll do. It reduces friction, speeds up decisions, and creates the psychological safety needed for teams to take risks and perform at their best.
Without trust, founders can’t delegate. Every decision bottlenecks at the top. Paul Zak’s research in Harvard Business Review found that high-trust companies see 50% higher productivity. Trust is what lets a founder step back from day-to-day operations without the business falling apart.
Remote trust requires deliberate effort. Regular check-ins, visible contribution through OKRs, consistent communication rhythms, and giving people autonomy over their work. Google’s Project Aristotle found that psychological safety, not location, predicts team effectiveness.
Inconsistency. Saying one thing and doing another. Ducking responsibility when things go wrong. Introducing rules that punish everyone for one person’s mistake. Any gap between what leaders say and what they do erodes trust faster than it was built.
No. You will occasionally be disappointed by someone letting you down. But the cost of that is far lower than the cost of building a low-trust culture where nobody takes initiative, nobody speaks up, and your best people leave for somewhere that treats them like adults.
Trust compounds through consistency. There is no shortcut. A single gesture won’t do it. Showing up reliably, keeping promises, and owning mistakes over months and years is what builds lasting trust. One broken promise can undo years of work.
Trust is the foundation of culture, not the other way around. You can’t build a strong culture on a foundation of distrust. When trust exists, people share information freely, challenge each other constructively, and commit to collective goals rather than protecting their own position.
Three ways I can help (ranked by impact, and by how much effort it requires from you)
- Book a call. If trust is the thing holding your team back from scaling, a 30-minute conversation will tell us whether coaching can fix it. No obligation, no pitch. We’ll establish quickly whether what I do is right for where you are.
- Grab the book. Mind Your F**king Business covers how I built trust-first cultures at Rackspace and Peer 1, and what I’ve learned coaching 200+ founder-CEOs through the same challenge.
- Subscribe to the newsletter. Free framework every week. Practical tools for building trust, delegation, and team performance at scale.
Your move. Pick one element from the eight that you know is weakest in your business. Talk to your leadership team about it this week. Not in a meeting. Over coffee. See what they say.
About the author
Dominic Monkhouse scaled Rackspace UK and Peer 1 Hosting as Managing Director, taking both to a £30m annual run rate. He is the founder of Monkhouse & Company.
What should you do next?
If this post has annoyed you slightly, good. The issue is probably not effort. It is design. The business is asking you to carry decisions, standards and exceptions that should now belong inside the team.
The goal is not to disappear. The goal is to build a company where your best work is not dragged back into every operational tangle.
That is the point. Scaling is not adding more people around the same bottleneck. It is rebuilding the business so the bottleneck is removed.
Four ways to take this further
- Book a call. If growth is now making the company slower, heavier or more dependent on you, I can help you decide whether the constraint is people, strategy, execution, cash or your role as founder. No obligation, no pitch. You will know quickly whether this is the right kind of help.
- Grab the book. F**k Plan B covers these principles in more depth, with the practical founder lessons behind customer obsession, honest communication, hiring, small teams and managers who coach.
- Watch the £30m scaling video. Start there if you want the founder-level version of these principles, using Rackspace and Peer 1 as the proof base.
- Subscribe to the newsletter. Get direct, practical thinking on scaling, founder bottlenecks, leadership rhythm and building a company that can run without you in every room.
Your move. Open Slack, Teams or your inbox. Find the decision that should not have come to you this week. That is where the scaling work starts.