Five Ways Leaders (Accidentally) Erode Trust

Author: Ron Carucci

As a manager, your top priority is establishing trust with your team. Your direct reports must have confidence in your ability to make decisions, communicate effectively, and help them grow in order to perform to the best of their abilities.

But establishing trust takes time, and the natural stressors of being a people leader can make it even harder. If you’re not careful, your efforts to prove yourself as a capable leader may end up eroding, rather than strengthening, the foundation of trust you aim to build. And depending on how you arrived in your new role—promoted from within the team, brought in from another department, or hired from outside the company—you may face unique circumstances that make this process even more challenging.

Here are five common ways leaders unwittingly erode trust and how to avoid them.

Using Your Expertise to Coach or Help

One of the hardest things to do as a manager is to let go of the expertise and work that set you apart as an individual contributor. This is especially precarious when you are promoted from within your team or organization.

When leading people who do the work that you once did, it’s easy to want to hold them to the standard you performed at. Your ability to do this work well is likely how you distinguished yourself and got your promotion. You may fear that if your direct reports aren’t able to do the work as well as you did, it will reflect poorly on your leadership. In addition, the intangible aspects of leadership may make you unconsciously miss the tasks that you once found deeply gratifying—and that your team members are now responsible for.

As a result, you may be tempted to handhold, over-coach, or even do the work for them to demonstrate what you’re looking for. But others rarely experience this as helpful. It can instead make them feel inadequate or see you as a micromanager. Once your team believes that you don’t trust them with their work, they’ll struggle to trust you with their growth and learning.

What to do instead

Help your direct reports master their tasks and projects in their own way. Assess their abilities against yours when you started doing the work—when you were first learning. Use your expertise judiciously, avoiding comparisons or being overly corrective. You can say something like, “Tell me how I can best use my experience in this work to help you grow.”

Be clear about your expectations around deliverables, key performance indicators, and deadlines. Agree on the outcomes you both believe they can achieve, and the approach they feel most comfortable taking (versus mimicking yours). Then, let them figure out how to achieve the goals you set, leveraging your guidance when they need it.

Trying to Build Rapport and a Sense of Egalitarianism

Many leaders struggle with the resulting power differential that occurs when they become a manager. This can be even more challenging if you’re promoted from within your team and your former peers are now your direct reports. It can create a feeling of awkwardness and distance with individuals you previously felt close to.

To combat the discomfort, many leaders go out of their way to retain the same sense of rapport they once enjoyed as peers. This creates challenges later when you suddenly have to exercise your authority. Trying to pretend that things haven’t changed that much won’t help you build trust.

The hard truth is that once you become a leader, the relational boundaries with your former peers must shift. Similarly, if you were hired from the outside, you must set appropriate boundaries with your new team members. Your ability to socialize with them, what information you share with them, and what information they share with you must be carefully thought through.

What you can do instead

If you were promoted from within your company, having a proactive conversation with each person with whom your relationship has changed will enable you to clarify what they can expect from you as their leader. It also curtails the natural temptation they may have to curry favor with you or to leverage your past relationship for their personal gain. You might say something like, “I don’t want the fact that we now share a reporting relationship to be awkward for us. But the reality is that some things must shift between us for us both to be successful. Let’s talk about what parts of our relationship can stay intact and what parts we’ll need to adapt.”

If you were hired from the outside or are managing entirely new team members, start with a conversation that sets mutual expectations. You might begin with something like, “In new relationships, I find it helpful to share my expectations of others and to clarify their expectations of me as their leader. That way, we can do our best to help each other be successful.”

Trying to Build Confidence by Looking Confident

Plenty of research shows that people are drawn to confidence in a leader. Many new leaders try to mask their insecurities by donning a leadership persona to appear confident. They speak in more declarative sentences, are overtly positive, and offer reassurances in the face of uncertainties.

But overconfidence can sometimes have the opposite effect, diluting trust by coming across as overly self-reliant, inauthentic, and out of touch. Yes, those you lead need to know you have confidence in yourself. But they also need to trust that you have confidence in them by acknowledging the areas where you aren’t as strong and will need their help.

What you can do instead

Your confidence, in appropriate measure, is only one characteristic of leadership that will strengthen trust. If you rely on it excessively, you risk losing that trust when tough conditions make confidence impossible. You must balance confidence with humility, authenticity, and vulnerability so that the trust you earn is well-rounded and grounded in your full humanity. In the face of uncertainties—sudden strategic pivots, budget shortfalls, project setbacks—your team needs to know you are comfortable not having all the answers.

For example, one newly appointed leader I coached inherited a project that was way behind and had ballooned in scope. The team was frustrated, as was her boss. Feeling the pressure to get things on track quickly and reestablish the team’s confidence, she was tempted to step in and start directing people on what to do. I urged her to instead consider that the team might find it more confidence-building if she acknowledged how tough things had been and engaged the team in coming up with solutions. This helped reestablish their self-confidence while also making them trust that she could listen and learn.

Checking In to Make Sure Everyone Is OK

If you tend to be a people-pleaser, you will be especially prone to this misstep. As you build relationships with your direct reports, checking in with them to see how they are adapting to your leadership and if you have to make any adjustments is a good idea. It’s a great way to calibrate and demonstrate you are willing to modify if needed. It will build trust in your commitment to putting their needs first.

But in excess, these check-ins can begin to erode trust among your team members, particularly if you get defensive or don’t act on their feedback. They may start to see your inquiries as manipulative and self-serving. When this happens, they may try to accommodate you by saying things are fine, further eroding their trust in your ability to make improvements.

What to do instead

Before seeking feedback from your team members, ask yourself if you’re motivated by an actual desire to learn and adjust, or an unconscious need for validation and reassurance. While it’s a good idea to invite feedback, you also want to empower your direct reports to initiate feedback conversations with you when they are feeling frustrated. This builds trust in your openness to their feedback by both soliciting it and inviting them to initiate it.

If you sense that someone you lead is feeling frustrated or unsatisfied, be specific in your inquiry and keep it focused on them. You might say something like, “I sense that something is frustrating you. Is there any way I can be helpful?” If they respond with a curt “No, I’m fine,” then leave it with a simple “OK, I understand. But please know that, if something changes, I hope you’ll let me know.”

Too many new leaders, anxious to keep things harmonious, jump right to questions like, “Have I done something to upset you?” with the assumption that whatever’s bothering the person is about them. This risks eroding trust by conveying that you are overly self-involved rather than genuinely concerned about them.

Building Credibility Through Past Successes

As a leader, you need to build credibility. You may be tempted to rely on your track record of positive results to make people trust your decision-making and leadership abilities. But overly relying on your past usually backfires. Leaders who have been hired from outside their current organization should be hyperaware of this mishap.

Resist starting sentences with, “Well, when I was at XYZ company, we approached this …” People will accept one or two mentions of your past experiences because they know you don’t have any other frame of reference. But after a while, they may start to hear it as an indictment of their approach and ideas. It can erode trust in your ability to adapt and work with others in this new context to find suitable solutions.

What to do instead

Whether you were promoted from within the organization or hired from outside, avoid leaning too much on your past successes. A better source of credibility and, therefore, trust is your curiosity. Ask your team questions about how they’ve tried to address current challenges or what ideas they’ve felt haven’t been heard before. This gives you a body of knowledge that you can build on with your experience and enables you to contextualize past successes in the current situation. By demonstrating your willingness to adapt your ideas while learning from your team, you’re more likely to build trust.

Building and maintaining trust with your team is a long process. While you may be anxious about performing well in your role, it’s important not to rush things. Listen to your feelings of anxiety and self-doubt, but don’t let them weaken trust on your team. Stay focused on your larger goal of genuinely earning trust over time with your full humanity, experience, and desire to make your direct reports as successful as they can be.