Trust or bust: Stop pretending your team trust each other

Let’s start with the bit you don’t want to hear: you say you trust each other. You don’t. You say it in board packs and value decks and company-wide calls. Then you get in a room and play nice while the real opinions leak later in the car park, down the pub, or back at home into the ear of an incredulous partner: ‘The strategy is shite, the boss is an idiot, he won’t listen to reason so it’s pointless trying.’ That’s not trust. That’s cowardice with calendar sync.

Most exec meetings are theatre. Everyone presents for 20 minutes, nobody gets pressed, there’s no time for questions, and you all leave feeling vaguely pleased with yourselves – until the debrief in the car: “what a load of bollocks.” That gap between what you say (“we’re a high-trust team”) and what you do (fake harmony, no challenge, no consequences) is killing your chances of success. If this stings, good. Pain is a message. You don’t have a “communication issue” or a “process gap”. You have a trust problem masquerading as everything else.

The restaurant dilemma

Being British doesn’t help. If you’ve nothing nice to say, say nothing – and if you do have something to say, sandwich it between fluff so no-one even knows you’re moaning. It’s like when you go out for dinner and your meal is horrible but the idea of telling the waiter brings you out in a sweat. It actually happened to me the other week – while I make a career calling out poor performance in business, I was served a meal that tasted shite, so I left it. Didn’t say a word, just pushed it to one side. The waiter cleared the table and when the bill came, my meal had been removed and I got an apology for the fact I clearly hadn’t liked it. It totally changed my perception of the place (and made me determined to complain next time I get a bad meal).

Andrew McAfee calls it the liars’ club in The Geek Way: people insist they want a high-performing team, but their meetings tell a different story. The unspoken pact is “let the CEO do the bollocking”. Peers don’t call each other out; they wait for Mum or Dad to do it. That’s not a team – that’s seven-year-olds playing football: “I scored two, Mum!” Team lost 5–2, champ.

And spare me the “we’re above average” delusion. In every domain that matters, the top 1% aren’t 5% better – they’re 10× better. Most firms have no idea what good looks like. A story I share with most of my clients is that I used to race boats with a couple of mates. We were shite, always at the back of the pack despite working our arses off.

One time, I was invited to race with a team that regularly won the races we competed in. It was only by watching them from their boat that I saw where we were going wrong. They were doing things better than us that I could never have identified from our position in last place. From the back of the fleet, you cannot imagine the front. That’s why you hire a coach: to show you what excellent looks like.

What real trust looks like (and why you haven’t got it)

Trust isn’t vibes. It’s a contract people can feel. My mental model is a three-legged stool where trust is the seat. Holding it in place are:

• Competence – I trust that you can actually do the job. Not title-good. Output-good.
• Character – I trust you as a human. You act with integrity – you make promises and keep them; you don’t throw team-mates under the bus; you do what’s right when it’s hard.
• Care – I trust that you give a damn: about me, the team, the customer, the mission. Not performatively; demonstrably.

The stool needs all three legs for it to stay standing. As soon as one is compromised, the whole thing comes crashing down. You can’t roll out OKRs or KPIs if leaders don’t keep promises. If a VP’s say–do ratio is trash, their whole function will mirror it. Don’t push OKRs downstream until the leadership team’s integrity is boringly reliable. (If you want a simple way to operationalise this, I’ve written about running a visible say–do scoreboard in weekly exec meetings – it’s brutal and it works.

Psychological safety is the cornerstone

You don’t get healthy conflict without vulnerability. And you don’t get vulnerability without psychological safety – the sense that “I can speak up without being punished”. I’ve written more on how to build it (and why it’s vital to growth). If you’ve ever read Lencioni’s Five Dysfunctions, you’ll know he puts vulnerability-based trust at the base of the pyramid. No trust, no conflict; no conflict, no commitment; no commitment, no accountability; no accountability, no results. (If this is news, start here and then make it your operating system.

Vulnerability is contagious. So is bullshit. Choose one and spread it.

Why your “debate” is dead on arrival

You don’t have healthy conflict because you’ve trained people that conflict is dangerous. Your lot chose disappearance over debate. You can feel it in the room: polite nods, careful words, zero heat. The outcome is predictable: decisions that please everyone in the moment and satisfy no one in reality.

So make conflict safe, not optional.

Firstly, teach the how. If you want challenge without carnage, nick a page from Radical Candor: care personally, challenge directly. If you need scripts and reps, Karen Hurt & David Dye’s Powerful Phrases is practical as hell.

Next up, practise out loud. Don’t wait for quarterly crises to learn to speak plainly. Run conflict drills. Pair people and have them deliver the uncomfortable sentence they’ve been avoiding. Then swap. Then do it for real.

And the one rule that changes everything? No triangulation. We did this at Peer 1 and it was an absolute game-changer for resolving difficult situations. No-one was allowed to talk about anyone who wasn’t in the room. That stops Louise moaning to you about Mark behind Mark’s back in an attempt to make it your problem. If she does, you tell Louise that she has 72 hours to raise the issue with Mark directly, or you’ll tell him yourself. Now the onus is back where it belongs – on the adult who has the problem to have the bloody conversation. I’ve written about it a few times; the short version is that triangulation is cultural cancer – kill it or it kills speed, trust and accountability.

The say–do ratio: the simplest trust metric you’re not using

Trust is measurable. Track the percentage of times someone does what they said they’d do when they said they’d do it. Publish it for the leadership team. No excuses, no rounding. Missed promise? Call it. Re-commit with a new date/owner while everyone’s in the room.

I’ve shared multiple ways to build this into your operating rhythm – into weekly exec, into OKR reviews, into one-to-ones. It’s simple, it’s visible, and it builds trust faster than any away day.

Culture you can see: Sweep the sheds

Want a visible trust cue? Pinch one from the All Blacks. Sweep the sheds. You play Twickenham, you win, you still clean the changing room yourselves. Champions doing unglamorous work because nothing – not fame, not results – puts you above the team. James Kerr’s Legacy is the best book on this; I’ve spoken to him about turning a 75% win rate into 86% with values, rituals and humility. If you need a business case for “no dickheads” and servant leadership, start there.

Try it at work. Senior team arrives first, sets up the room, tests the kit, leaves it tidy. Senior leaders write the notes and actions themselves; no “EA will circulate”. Tiny signals, massive meaning: we are not above the work. Trust people who act like that.

Why trust tanks on the S-curve (and how to stop it)

Early-stage: a handful of A-players, high intimacy, high cadence. Trust is a given. Then the S-curve kicks in – growth, chaos, frustration. You add people, layers, process. Someone abuses freedom; you roll out ten policies to punish everyone. Freedom shrinks. Initiative dies. A-players leave; jobsworths stay. You’ve engineered mediocrity. I’ve written recently about the reality of the S-curve – the brick walls and what to do when you hit them. Trust is the thing you must defend on purpose as you scale.

So what do you do? Resist the urge to fix culture with control. Fix it with clarity, coaching, and consequences – for individuals. Don’t install blanket rules because two people took the piss. Hold the two people to account or replace them. Everyone else gets their autonomy back. That’s how you keep speed and standards.

Peers, not parents: move accountability sideways

If accountability only ever comes top-down, your team will never be a team. The real unlock is peer accountability: peers calling each other out in the room. The CEO’s job is to set the tone, go first on vulnerability, then get out of the way. When people know they’ll be challenged by the person next to them – not just the person at the head of the table – behaviour changes fast.

The three Cs in the wild: how character, competence and care show up

Competence. Easy to spot when it’s missing: repeated rework, missed targets, hand-waving. Fix with expectations, support, and if necessary, replacement. No stigma – wrong seat, wrong stage, or wrong company. Your A-players will thank you.

Character. This is your integrity in motion. The say–do ratio lives here. You either keep promises or you don’t. People either can rely on your word or they can’t. Character is built slowly and destroyed quickly – usually by self-protection under pressure. Make it explicit: “In this team, we keep our promises. When we miss, we own it publicly and re-commit.”

Care. The fastest route to trust most leaders ignore. Care is not coddling. It’s protecting people and standards. It’s making time to understand the human, and then telling the truth because you give a damn about their success. I learned this from reading about operations in Afghanistan – the most successful platoons were ones that believed their leaders cared about them as people.

When all three show up together, you can feel the difference. Conversations get shorter and spikier and kinder. Work speeds up. Surprises go down. People stop managing optics and start managing outcomes.

Handle the exceptions like adults (don’t make policy for idiots)

Someone will abuse trust. They always do. Your move decides whether the culture survives:

• Coach once, clearly. Define the miss, the impact, the expectation.
• Consequence next. If character or competence is the blocker and the person won’t do the work, make the change.
• Do not install a new process that punishes everyone for one person’s failure. That’s how you haemorrhage A-players and grow a bureaucracy.

If you need a checklist for spring-cleaning the mess you’ve accumulated – dumb rules, zombie meetings, legacy rituals that create learned helplessness – use this as a nudge. Prioritise the few moves that raise trust and speed at the same time.

What about the data?

You want numbers? Here’s the pattern I point clients to: in complex work (pharma, deep tech, creative), elite teams aren’t a bit better – they’re orders-of-magnitude better. Cycle time, quality, throughput, customer love – the top 1–5% blow the mean out of the water. The mistake average companies make is projecting their own sluggish norms onto everyone else and calling that “realistic”. It’s not. You don’t know what great looks like until you see it, ride with it, and feel the speed.

That’s why we take teams through real operating changes rather than motivational posters: the meeting choreography, the no-triangulation rule, the say–do scoreboard, the conflict drills, the rituals that put humility over ego (sweep the sheds). You can read case notes scattered across my years of writing and podcasting – the story is consistent: raise trust, raise speed, raise results.

The founder’s job (yes, yours)

You go first.

If you won’t be vulnerable, nobody will. If you won’t keep promises, nobody will. If you triangulate, everyone will. If you tolerate dickheads just because they’re good at their job, you’re telling the team that results trump trust – and you’ll pay for it later with speed, talent churn and customer pain.

Your job is to build the team you can win with: character, competence, care – and the courage to say the hard thing in the room.

That’s because trust is not a poster. It’s not a value on your website. It’s not the way you feel after a good off-site. It’s the sum of promises kept, truths spoken, and care shown when it’s hardest – especially by you, the founder. The leader. The boss.

Say less. Promise tighter. Tell the truth sooner. Sweep the sheds.

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Written by business coach and leadership coaching expert Dominic Monkhouse. You can order your free copy of his book, Mind Your F**king Business here.