Jesse James Garrett

It is an old management truism that building trust is necessary for success. Without trust from our partners, team members, and leaders, we simply can’t accomplish anything, whether as individuals or as entire teams. For leaders, the challenge is twofold: building the trust that people invest in yourself as a leader while also building the trust that people invest in your team.

It can be a challenging balancing act, as Zalando VP and Head of Design Anne Pascual talked about in the latest episode of our design leadership podcast Finding Our Way. So much of the daily work of the design leader relies on personal rapport and personal relationships: with your partners, your executive leaders, your stakeholders, and your team. But if you can’t transfer that trust to the rest of your team, you can’t truly set them up for success.

Building trust outside the team starts with building trust within it. Fractious teams continually run the risk of their internal conflicts surfacing in disruptive ways when they engage with partners and stakeholders. As leader, you are mediator of all the interpersonal connections within your team.

You’ve got to give trust to get it. Leaders must model trust-building behaviors for their teams—but that’s impossible if you as the leader are operating from a stance of mistrust. Partners, too, need to see you extend trust towards your team if you expect them to invest that team with trust of their own. That means elevating team members at key moments that allow them to project credibility and trustworthiness.

Trust is contextual and situational. Which means trust always has its boundaries. A surgeon, a priest, an auto mechanic, and a mathematician all perform roles that require deep expertise and problem-solving skills. Whom you trust in what moment depends very much on what’s going on. Especially in cases of managers managing managers, leadership breakdowns often happen when leaders are out of alignment on where they are most trusted and where they are expected to pull back.

One of my most important roles as a coach is helping my clients lead more intentionally, so they can take control of their circumstances rather than be knocked around by them. Intentionally investing in trust building work is one the ways my clients gain the leverage to take that control.