Trust is the invisible currency – you don’t notice it until it breaks, but everything runs on it.
When you drive through a green light, you trust oncoming drivers will stop at red. When you deposit money in a bank, you trust it will be there tomorrow. When you take medicine, you trust the label is accurate. None of these require you to double check – you trust the system works and act. Without that trust, every interaction requires enormous effort and vigilance.
Francis Fukuyama pointed out that high-trust societies are dramatically more economically productive — not because people are nicer, but because low trust transaction costs compound across millions of daily interactions. Distrust is expensive.
Trust can’t be demanded, inherited through a job title, or manufactured overnight. Yet without it, even the most technically brilliant among us will find our influence quietly eroding, our team performing below potential, and our relationships with stakeholders resting on sand.
If you want to lead with lasting impact, trust isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the whole game.
These two frameworks show how we can take responsibility for building trust ourselves as individuals as well as create environments for trust to flourish.
What’s clear from both is that trust isn’t a fixed state – it’s a dynamic one. You are always either building it or diminishing it, through every interaction, decision, moment of visibility or absence. And while building trust takes decades; destroying it takes days.
The Trust Equation
The Trust Equation, developed by David Maister in The Trusted Advisor, offers a deceptively simple formula:
Trust = (Credibility + Reliability + Intimacy ÷ Self-Orientation
Let’s break this down.
Credibility is your expertise made visible. It’s not just what you know — it’s whether others believe you know it. For many women in senior roles, credibility has been hard-won and is constantly re-audited in ways their male peers rarely experience. The antidote isn’t louder self-promotion; it’s consistent, clear communication of your thinking, your reasoning, and your track record.
Reliability is the quiet backbone of trust. Do you do what you say you’ll do? Do you show up the same way on a Monday morning as you do in a high-stakes board meeting? Reliability isn’t glamorous, but it is transformative. Every time you follow through, you make a small deposit into your trust account. Every time you don’t, you make a withdrawal — and withdrawals cost more than deposits earn.
Intimacy is perhaps the most undervalued component, particularly in corporate cultures that prize a polished, invulnerable exterior. Intimacy here doesn’t mean oversharing — it means creating the psychological safety for real conversations to happen. It means a colleague feels they can tell you the truth. It means your team brings you the real problem, not the sanitised version. For senior women who have often learned to keep a professional distance as a survival strategy, leaning into appropriate intimacy can feel counterintuitive. But it is precisely where transformational trust is forged.
And then there is the denominator — Self-Orientation — which is the great trust destroyer. The higher your self-orientation, the lower your trust score, regardless of how credible, reliable, or intimate you are. Self-orientation shows up as the leader who turns every conversation back to their own priorities, who listens to respond rather than to understand, who treats relationships as transactions. The fastest way to build trust? Lower the denominator. Get genuinely curious about the person in front of you.
But if an organisation systematically punishes trust-building behaviour and rewards conflict, trust is almost impossible to cultivate.
Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, had to get strangers on the Internet to work together, and to do that they had to trust each other. He argues that trust is the solution to division. The scale of that challenge – and the fact that they succeeded against the odds, make his lessons worth listening to.
These are the principles he outlines in his book The Seven Rules of Trust:
- Make it personal: trust is fundamentally a personal, individual feeling, which requires you to consider the perspective and needs of others to establish it.
- Be positive about people: this rule stems from the belief that most people are decent and trustworthy, advocating for a design that supports community rather than just preventing worst-case scenarios.
- Create a clear purpose: align your team and choices by ensuring your “why” – the mission – is clear and consistent.
- Be trusting: instead of requiring trust to be earned, grant it first. This approach encourages collaboration and accuracy, similar to Wikipedia’s open-editing policy.
- Be civil: civility is crucial for fostering trust, allowing for disagreement without resorting to personal attacks, which is essential for healthy dialogue.
- Be independent: maintaining independence from external pressures (like excessive commercialisation or government influence) is vital for gaining long-term credibility.
- Be transparent: openness about processes, decisions, and failures transforms doubt into dialogue and fosters trust within a community.
The Intersection: Where the Formula Meets the Rules
What strikes me, working at the intersection of these two frameworks with my clients, is how beautifully they complement each other. The Trust Equation tells you what trust is made of. Wales tells you how to build the conditions in which those ingredients can take root.
A Challenge for You
Trust is not built in grand gestures. It accumulates in the small, repeated moments — the follow-through, the honest acknowledgement, the question asked with genuine curiosity, the conversation where you stayed fully present.
Where does your trust score leak? Is your communication credible? Are you reliable – do the promises made in the busyness of a demanding role that quietly go unfulfilled? Is it intimacy — the invisible wall that keeps your team at arm’s length or the fear of voicing concern? Or is it self-orientation — the subtle but corrosive habit of filtering every interaction through your own agenda?
Identify your denominator. And start there. Trust, as Wales reminds us, starts with us — and it’s always within reach.
If this resonated with you, I’d love to hear where you see the biggest trust opportunities in your own leadership. Feel free to get in touch.