“The way to make people trust-worthy is to trust them.”
— Ernest Hemingway
We’re All Building Something
A lot of folks I coach show up asking the same kinds of questions:
“What platform should we be using?”
“Is there a better tool for team comms?”
“Should we roll out EOS or OKRs or something else with an acronym?”
Fair questions. But if I’m honest, they’re rarely the real ones. Behind all those questions about systems and strategy and optimization lies something more human:
“Do we trust each other enough to move forward together?”
“Are we safe enough to say what we really mean?”
“Can this team weather hard things without falling apart?”
Culture is not a tech stack. It’s a nervous system. You can’t debug it from the outside. You have to attend to the internal signals.
A Tale of Two Organizations
It was the tech of times, it was the trust of times.
One organization had optimized everything but conversation. The other had sticky notes and scattered docs—but somehow, a shared sense of direction.
I had the chance to work with both this past year, and the contrast was... instructive.
Org One was optimized within an inch of its life. Imagine a stunning Miro board for everything. Notion dashboards that could run NASA. Every process diagrammed, color-coded, and “owned.” You could track any task from brainstorm to launch as if FedEx was transporting. Honestly? It was kind of beautiful. The operations nerd in me almost wept.
But, even the best systems can’t force a shared mental model. Systems organize externals and establish parameters. They can’t saturate a team’s soul with the kind of relational glue that brings mission to life.
And that was their problem.
Beneath the surface-level clarity, things got…quiet. Not peaceful quiet. Unsettling quiet. Fewer questions. More polite nods. A creeping sense of hesitation, like everyone was tiptoeing around invisible eggshells.
Leadership started to feel it too. Felt it not as an implosion, but as a slow leak. Engagement dipped. Accountability blurred. People stopped leading and started checking boxes.
Turns out, systems don’t build culture. People do.
And when trust thins out, even the slickest workflow can’t save you. What the tech couldn’t show was exactly what it was quietly covering up: low psychological safety, shallow communication, and a kind of performance posture that looked efficient but felt empty.
The systems weren’t broken. They also didn’t solve the problem behind the problem.
A Notion board can’t teach you to speak truth in love. A Miro template can’t rebuild what gets lost when people stop being real. And a shared mental model doesn’t live in SOPs (though they help).
Org Two, in their own words, ran on “organized chaos.”
No sleek dashboards. No acronyms. Just a haphazard constellation of Google Docs, sticky notes with half-erased checkboxes, and Slack channels with emoji names no one could decipher (still not sure what 🐙🌪️📌 was supposed to be… maybe “tentacle tornado pinboard”?).
Here’s the thing, the moment I stepped into their (very imperfect) hybrid team meeting, the vibe was electric.
It pulsed with presence. Not buttoned-up. Barely on time. But people showed up (like, really showed up). Cameras on. Eyebrows raised. Jokes flying. Notes scribbled in margins.
People weren’t waiting for their turn to speak, they were actively listening and building on the conversation..
Disagreements happened. Someone pitched a half-baked idea, and instead of shutting it down, the team poked at it, stretched it, and made it better. A junior staffer pushed back on a director’s assumption. The director smiled and said, “That’s a fair call. I hadn’t thought of it that way.”
No defensiveness. No eggshells to dodge. Just mutual respect wrapped in human messiness.
Their systems weren’t beautiful. But their culture thrived. Trust lived in the gaps.
They didn’t need perfect documentation to move forward. They had each other.
When external pressure came—reorgs, budget cuts, the kind of disruption that makes Slack go quiet for a beat—the team didn’t crumble. They flexed. They rallied. They got scrappy and got closer.
Where Org One had built efficiency, Org Two had built resilience. Where Org One had perfect process maps, Org Two had psychological safety.
In the long run, which wins?
It’d be great to have both, of course. Beautiful systems and deep trust? Chef’s kiss. But if I could only choose one? I’d take trust over tech every day of the week—and twice on Sunday.
When the pressure hits—and it will—it’s not your Notion template that will show up for your team. It’s the trust you’ve built in the messy middle.
Trust Is a Human Superpower
Most leaders talk a lot about trust. They also call it a soft skill. If that’s true, soft is the new orange. Trust isn’t soft. It’s relational infrastructure. It holds everything else up when the unexpected hits.
Amy Edmondson, the Harvard researcher who coined the term psychological safety, found that teams with high trust—where people believe they can take interpersonal risks without fear of punishment—consistently outperform those with low trust, regardless of resources, talent, or even leadership style.
Paul Zak’s neuroeconomic research shows the same. In high-trust companies, employees are:
74% less stressed
50% more productive
76% more engaged
This isn’t magic. It’s chemistry.
In low-trust environments, cortisol floods the brain which narrows focus, limits creativity, and shrinks our relational capacity. In high-trust environments, oxytocin rises which encourages openness, bonding, and mutual support.
Trust changes how your brain processes feedback, how your team navigates uncertainty, and how your culture endures under pressure.
Trust before HR Manuals
Let’s rewind a millennia or two.
In early tribal communities, trust wasn’t optional. Survival literally depended on it. If the hunt failed or the weather turned, your life hinged on someone else showing up.
How did they build trust?
Shared hardship | Rituals, hunts, and rites of passage created deep bonds.
Daily presence | You weren’t behind screens, you were side-by-side every day.
Storytelling and memory | Communities passed down who could be trusted and why. This wasn’t gossip. It was survival intelligence.
Monastic orders understood this too.
The Benedictines didn’t just wear habits. They lived them, together. Obedience, stability, and fidelity weren’t abstract values. They were daily practices. Habits of attention. Practices of presence. Rhythms of listening and care.
Those early communities had something we’ve nearly lost in our age of digital notifications, hybrid calendars, Slack fatigue, and leadership TikToks: ritualized togetherness.
They weren’t glued to their screens. They were bound by something stronger: shared rhythms. They weren’t doomscrolling. They were bread-baking. Fire-stoking. Story-sharing.
They weren’t isolating behind carefully curated avatars. They were bumping elbows at the washbasin and asking who forgot to feed the goat.
They weren’t constantly rushing to the next big thing. They were practicing the same small things—together. Day after day. Week after week, until trust grew like moss on a stone (slow, sure, and hard to fake).
In those spaces, trust wasn’t a checkbox or a quarterly KPI. It was the natural result of lived time, shared work, and awkward, holy proximity.
No one was launching a “Trust Initiative,” or falling backwards into the arms of colleagues. They were just doing the dishes. Again. And again. And again. And probably arguing over whose turn it was. And still showing up.
You don’t have to shave your head and take a vow of silence to recover that wisdom. You do have to slow down long enough to remember:
Trust isn’t built in all-hands meetings with slide decks and strategic frameworks.
It’s built over shared fires, shared jokes, shared decisions, and shared disappointments.
Trust roots itself when someone says the hard thing and nobody runs. Or when the awkward gets metabolized, not avoided. Or when the stakes feel real, and no one’s pretending they’ve got it all together.
Trust isn’t flashy. It’s sticky—the quiet glue that holds the room when everything else falls apart.
And once trust ignites?
It burns steady. It warms the whole tent. And it keeps your people coming back—week after week, meeting after meeting, mission after mission.
The Leadership Implication
If you’re a leader, you don’t get to “outsource” trust-building. You can’t automate it. You can’t install Slack or Asana or Miro (or all three) and expect relational magic. You have to live trust. Model trust. Prioritize trust. Protect trust.
When things get busy or hard, trust-building rhythms are usually the first to go. Ironically, those are the moments we need them most. And trying to cash in trust credits in a market crash is near impossible.
As my clients tire of hearing, "Trust grows like roots—you don’t see it until the wind hits."
Six Ways to Build Micro-Trust (Even in Busy Seasons)
Start your 1:1s with humanity.
Not status updates. Ask about life. And listen for real.Schedule shared work, not just shared meetings.
Give your team a meaningful project to struggle through together. Shared struggle builds accelerated trust.Ask for help. Then do it again.
Vulnerability from the top opens the door for authenticity from everyone else.Make feedback normal, not nuclear.
Give short, timely, behavior-based feedback often. And ask for it in return. “Anything I could do—or stop doing—that would help you do your job better?”Celebrate tiny wins.
Most teams are starved for encouragement. Feed them. And do it rigorous specificity.Rebuild ritual.
Whether it’s “Shoutout Fridays,” 10-minute standdowns, or quarterly retreats—put connection on the calendar. Every healthy culture has rhythms. Design yours.
At Home, Too
Trust isn’t just an office thing. It’s a home thing too. A marriage thing. A parenting thing. A “how we do life together” thing.
And just like at work, it doesn’t magically appear between the dishes and the laundry. You build it—slowly, steadily, in the rhythms of real life.
Need ideas? Try this:
A Friday check-in with your spouse.
Not to solve anything. Just to ask: “What’s one thing that went unsaid this week?” It’s amazing what shows up when you make space for it.A Marble Jar moment with your kids.
Ask them: “What helped you feel safe this week?” Then listen like it’s the most important board meeting you’ve ever attended—because it kind of is.A pause before dinner.
Go around the table and have each person name one thing they appreciated about someone else. It might feel awkward the first time. Do it anyway. By the third time, it’ll feel like a ritual you never want to lose.
These are small things. But trust isn’t flashy. It’s built in the ordinary. Over time, these micro-moments form the architecture of a life where people feel seen, safe, and loved.
That’s culture, too. The kind that actually lasts.
Let’s Reflect
Find a quiet moment. Open your journal, your Notes app, or grab the back of a receipt from your glovebox (no judgment). Take a breath and answer, not impress:
Where is trust already growing in your team, your family, your friendships?
Where is trust wearing thin? And what’s underneath that?
What’s one small, human-sized practice you could try this week to deepen trust—at work or at home?
Nothing fancy. Just name it. And try it.
Want to Go Deeper?
If trust feels like the frontier you’re walking right now, I’ve got a couple resources to guide the journey:
Build a Thriving Culture – a story-driven field guide for shaping trust-rich teams. No fluff. Just tools that work.
Clarity + Roadmap – a slow-burn reset on your rhythms, values, and vision. Think of it as a quiet rebellion against drift.
Both are deeply practical, quietly transformative, and anchored in the Waykeeping path.
🧭 Walk the slow road. Root deep. Grow strong.
Explore more → groundedandgrowing.carrd.co
✢ Everyday Formation is for people trying to build trust without becoming a human Slack notification.
If your spiritual life is held together by coffee, calendar reminders, and a vague sense of guilt—welcome. You’re not alone.
This is where we practice sanity-saving habits that fit real life (and occasionally make us snort-laugh while doing it).
Less hustle. More presence. No gold stars, just good growth.
→ Start with Resist Drift—a free guide for the soul-weary.
→ Want to build a life that holds steady? Tools, coaching, and retreats at groundedandgrowing.carrd.co