Summary: How do you build trust on a team or across an organization? In this article, Mark S. Kenny explains why trust isn’t built directly, but accumulated through the small, everyday interactions between people.

 

We all know how important it is to build trust. Without it, teams lose the ability to execute together, unnecessary friction and turbulence become all-consuming, and great ideas and solutions get lost.

But you can’t actually “build trust” directly. What I mean is that you can’t walk out of your office thinking “I’m going to spend time building trust today.”

You can host an offsite. You can conduct a team-building activity. You can create more opportunities for people to connect. Those things can help.

But none of them builds trust on its own. It’s what people give each other while they’re there that matters.

Trust isn’t built directly. Trust is accumulated through thousands of small interactions.

I think of those interactions as passes: small moments when we choose what we will give to one another and what we will withhold.

Trust is built when we give someone our presence, stepping into their world, without trying to fix them.

Trust is built when we are willing to share important truth with healthy candor and courage. It’s built when we invite truth in the form of feedback, and respond to truth with vulnerability instead of defensiveness when it shows up.

Trust is built when we decide not to let past wrongs run future interactions.

Trust is built when we believe in someone by setting clear expectations and giving them room to figure it out themselves, without hovering and overcorrecting too quickly.

All of these are small interactions that happen every day when we choose what we will give to each other and what we will withhold from each other. It’s the result of those choices, in the thousands of interactions we experience, that build trust.

So instead of heading into your day trying to “build trust,” pay attention to the interactions in front of you.

Give someone your presence. Tell an important truth. Extend grace. Show someone you believe in them.

You don’t build trust all at once. You build it one pass at a time.

Even great teams eventually come to an end. This is happening right now here in Tennessee.

Across Tennessee state government, executive leadership teams are preparing for a transition. After this fall’s gubernatorial election, many agencies will welcome entirely new leadership teams.

It’s a unique season, but it’s not unique to government. Every organization eventually experiences the same thing: CEOs retire, organizations merge, leaders move on.

Every leadership team is temporary. Someday, the organization you inherited will become someone else’s responsibility.

The question isn’t whether your team will someday end. The question is what condition you’ll leave the organization in when it does.

The greatest temptation during a known transition is to begin leading for yourself instead of leading for the organization.

It’s natural and completely human. We become more protective. We postpone. We begin thinking about what’s next.

Without even realizing it:

• Tough decisions get postponed for the next team.
• Investing in future leaders becomes less urgent.
• Stewardship slowly gives way to self-preservation.

Without intending to, we stop investing in the people and the organization we’ll eventually leave behind.

Great leaders don’t serve because they’ll be here. They serve because the organization will be here.

Before your team hands the organization to the next leadership team, ask yourselves these six questions:

1. What conversations need to happen before the team disbands?
2. Who in the organization do we need to invest in?
3. Where is grace needed so that the organization doesn’t let the past run the future?
4. What decisions are we putting off just because it’s easier, when the organization needs clarity now?
5. Who needs our encouragement and praise?
6. How could we infuse belief and confidence into others that carries into the next team?

Your legacy isn’t what you accomplish before leaving. It’s the condition of the people and the organization you leave behind. Leave the next leadership team a legacy they can build on.

Every executive wants an organization that keeps performing year after year.

It’s easy to assume that if execution is strong, the organization is in good shape. But results can be deceptive. Current execution is a lagging indicator. The condition of the organization is a leading indicator. Today’s results can hide tomorrow’s risk.

For example, people are delivering, customers are happy, and revenue is good. Meanwhile:

• Trust is declining
• Teams are drifting apart
• Leaders are exhausted
• People are burning out
• Difficult conversations are avoided
• Cross-functional collaboration is waning

Execution can hide fragmentation, allowing even the best teams to become disconnected.

And nothing may look broken until something significant inevitably changes:

• A key leader leaves
• A major initiative fails
• Growth exposes the cracks

And suddenly the organization discovers the condition it was actually in all along.

If you’re wondering if execution is hiding fragmentation, here’s a favorite diagnostic:

Audit what people are withholding.

Simply ask yourself: What are people no longer giving each other?

Fragmentation doesn’t start with process or structure. It starts when people stop giving one another what they need to succeed.

For example: Are people speaking honestly? Asking for help? Sharing information freely? Coaching instead of just solving problems? Encouraging one another? Believing in one another? Giving grace?

It doesn’t require another survey or dashboard. It simply requires leaders to pause, become curious, and notice.

The strongest organizations don’t just measure what gets done. They pay attention to what people are giving one another while the work is getting done.

At least once a quarter ask: “What are we quietly withholding from one another that would help us work better together?”

The answers rarely show up on a dashboard.

But they often determine whether the dashboard still looks good a year from now.

 

Every executive I know is trying to accomplish something bigger than simply delivering results.

They’re trying to create an organization where leaders, departments, teams, and individuals genuinely share ownership of the mission instead of working at cross-purposes or creating unnecessary friction.

Creating shared ownership isn’t something you can assign. It requires something much deeper.

We spend enormous energy improving communication, strengthening processes, running better projects, and developing strong strategic plans. And we should. But far less attention is paid to what people are actually giving one another inside those meetings.

People are constantly giving—or withholding—gifts like attention, honesty, encouragement, confidence, and grace.

Collaboration isn’t primarily what we do together. It’s what we intentionally give one another while we’re doing the work.

The quality of our collaboration is determined less by what’s written on the agenda than by what’s passed between people.

Leaders experience this every day.

Whether you’re a CEO, executive, department leader, manager, or individual contributor, much of your success depends on people you influence as much as people you manage. That’s why what we give one another matters so much.

This simple idea became the foundation for what I call the Four Collaboration Passes.

Here’s one practice you can use immediately.

If collaboration is built by what people give one another, the first step is discovering what people actually need.

Before your next leadership meeting, project kickoff, planning session, team meeting, or when your team feels stuck, try something different.

Before jumping into the agenda, go around the room and ask one simple question:

“What’s one thing you need from this group in order to succeed?”

You might hear:

• “I need people to speak up sooner.”
• “I need more context.”
• “I need data and tools.”
• “I need help.”
• “I need to know it’s okay to disagree.”
• “I need to feel like I’m not carrying this alone.”

Some groups will answer this question immediately. Others may hesitate. That’s natural. People are more willing to answer honestly when they’ve seen that the group genuinely wants to help them succeed.

What you’ve done is shift the conversation from just “What do we need to get done?” to “How can we help each other succeed?”

Shared ownership isn’t built through agendas or assignments. It’s built one interaction at a time, as people intentionally give one another what they need to succeed.

That’s the idea behind Uncommon Collaboration™.

 

Every leader wants a team that isn’t just working hard but doing the best work they’ve ever done together. They want people who take initiative, own problems, bring great ideas, collaborate across boundaries, make good decisions, and move the organization forward together.

To achieve that, leaders naturally tend to focus on goals, metrics, accountability, systems, and processes. Goals, metrics, accountability, systems, and processes all matter. They help leaders manage the work.

But the best leaders manage something even more fundamental: the environment in which the work happens.

Your primary job as a leader isn’t producing great work. It’s creating the conditions where great work becomes the natural result.

So what does it mean to manage the environment instead of just the work?

We often think of leadership as directing people. In reality, much of leadership is giving people what they need to succeed. Sometimes that’s clarity. Sometimes it’s honest feedback. Sometimes it’s encouragement. Sometimes it’s the grace to learn from a mistake. Sometimes it’s simply your full attention.

I recently coached a leader whose team struggled with cohesion and alignment. We didn’t spend our time redesigning workflows. Instead, he began consistently connecting with his team, addressing difficult conversations instead of avoiding them, and establishing clear behavioral expectations.

Whereas before the team felt frustrated, unheard, and cautious, these new behaviors gradually changed the environment. People became more willing to speak up, take ownership, solve problems together, and move the work forward. They felt heard, appreciated, and relieved.

The biggest change wasn’t the process or structure. It was his daily choice to intentionally create a better environment for his team.

The work changed because the environment changed.

Great teams don’t emerge because leaders manage the work perfectly. They emerge because leaders consistently create an environment where people give each other what they need to succeed. When leaders intentionally create that kind of environment, people don’t just work harder. They do their best work together. That is Uncommon Collaboration™.

Most leaders want projects to get done faster, issues to be resolved quicker, and outcomes to be realized sooner. They want faster execution. Who doesn’t?

The reality is that many times projects stall, issues get escalated, people wait, meetings multiply, and outcomes lag.

The culprits we often point out are accountability, communication, and even a lack of urgency.

But there is a deeper reason that often gets overlooked: people don’t believe they’re allowed to carry the ball themselves.

How can you tell this is happening?

• Every disagreement gets escalated
• People ask permission for routine decisions
• Meetings become approval-seeking exercises
• Managers become traffic cops
• Leaders complain they’re overwhelmed while simultaneously requiring every decision to come through them

These conditions often emerge when leaders:

• Reverse decisions
• Step in and take over too quickly
• Solve problems and issues without giving people time to resolve them themselves
• Criticize decisions that didn’t work out

The problem isn’t always accountability, communication, or a lack of urgency. Sometimes, it’s that people haven’t been given what they need to carry the ball confidently.

What they need is Belief, one of the Four Collaboration Passes.

Belief is the confidence that someone can carry responsibility, make decisions, solve problems, and move work forward.

Without Belief, people will hesitate to make decisions, escalate more than they should, and schedule more meetings to build consensus instead of clarity.

Passing belief means behaving in ways that give them confidence to carry the ball forward.

Here is what it looks like practically:

• Saying out loud that you believe in and trust them, not just in your head.
• Not taking the ball back too quickly when something goes awry.
• Not rescuing people from issues and disagreements too quickly, giving them space to work through them themselves.
• Formally telling them you trust them to make decisions.
• Standing by them after mistakes or decisions that didn’t work out, treating them as learning opportunities instead of confidence-degraders.

Belief doesn’t mean abandoning clarity. In fact, clarity is a required ingredient. People move faster when they know the outcomes they’re responsible for, the decisions they own, and where the boundaries are. Belief works best when paired with clarity.

When people know what they’re responsible for and believe they’re trusted to act, execution accelerates.

Faster execution doesn’t happen when leaders make more decisions. It happens when more people are confident carrying the ball forward.

The fastest organizations aren’t dependent on a few people. They’re filled with people who know they’re trusted to carry the ball forward.

And when that happens, teams don’t just move faster. They move forward as one team.

We all want a team where leaders trust each other, work well together, and are moving in the same direction. It’s much more productive, not to mention more enjoyable.

Most of us have also been on teams where two or more people couldn’t seem to work together, meetings were tense, and the friction affected everyone else.

How do we create a leadership team that gets along better?

Leadership teams don’t become cohesive simply because they spend more time together. They become cohesive because they intentionally change how they work together.

One clarification: the goal is not a tension-free team. Healthy tension produces honest conversations, better decisions, and stronger commitment. A team can experience tension without losing trust or productivity. A team doesn’t even have to “get along” all the time. They do have to be cohesive and productive.

What we really want is to eliminate unhealthy tension: when it gets personal, when people just can’t seem to get along, and it’s pulling the whole team down.

With that out of the way, here are four steps to solve the problem:

1. Set standards of behavior

Most teams haven’t clarified how they will act with each other. How can we expect them to behave when we haven’t set the standards of how we will behave?

An example of a standard is that we debate ideas but don’t attack people.

I worked with a leadership team at a real estate organization who laid down simple expectations of how they would behave in the room when they disagreed with each other, encapsulated in a team playbook. Just like the example above. That clarity and practical playbook began to change the team dynamic.

Often it’s the leader who needs to set these standards. I’m reminded of Alan Mulally, who turned around Ford Motor Company, creating a business card-sized short list of how they would interact with and treat each other, which turned around the culture of their leadership team.

2. Get to know each other

It’s hard to extend grace to someone whose story you don’t know. That means we need to spend time knowing each other’s stories better.

One of my go-to tools was taught to me by Patrick Lencioni. It’s simply having team members answer three questions about themselves:

1. Where did you grow up?
2. How many siblings do you have and where do you fall in that order?
3. Describe a unique or interesting challenge or experience from your childhood.

This creates a different type of conversation. The team slows down, listens to one another’s stories, and begins to understand each other differently.

3. Work on individual target behaviors

We all have behaviors we need to work on. For example, we may need to pause and listen before reacting, address issues head on, or take time to build a personal connection with others.

Every person on the team needs to pick a behavior they are working on. We’re in this together, working on being better leaders together. We’re not singling anyone out or pointing fingers.

Then, you have to work on the behaviors, together, as a team. Set aside regular time to remind each other the behavior you are working on and share positive progress (not perfection).

Your team will start to have very different, positive conversations with each other, and behavior overall will begin to improve.

Final thought: the number one factor in whether this works is whether you, as the leader, are committed to it. The leader must go first by setting the standard, engaging in a different type of conversation, working on your own behavior, and holding people accountable to working on theirs.

Teams don’t become cohesive by accident. They become cohesive because leaders intentionally create the conditions where trust can grow. Set the standard. Know each other. Grow together. Hold each other accountable. Those simple practices create leadership teams that can navigate tension without losing trust, alignment, or momentum.

Misalignment has several potential causes such as conflicting priorities, unresolved decisions, and a lack of cohesion.

But beneath those symptoms is another cause I have seen play out that doesn’t get talked about enough:

Letting the past run the future.

About seven years ago, while facilitating a leadership team retreat, I couldn’t figure out what was going on. Everyone was nice to each other and everyone participated. Everything seemed fine on the surface. But the team felt guarded and cautious.

And then a past wrong that had happened months earlier suddenly came rushing into the room like it had just happened that morning, and the lid blew off.

That team wasn’t reacting to what was happening in the room. They were reacting to what had never been resolved. And until grace showed up, nothing was going to change.

In The Four Passes framework, which I share in my keynotes and retreats, Grace is the pass that says you are enough, that you don’t always have to have it all together.

Grace doesn’t mean pretending the past didn’t happen, minimizing pain, or excusing behavior. It doesn’t reduce accountability. And sometimes trust needs to be earned back consistently over time.

Grace does mean refusing to let the past keep running the future, for ourselves and for others.

Sometimes that means releasing the score even when we feel justified in keeping it.

The problem is when we withhold grace:

• Mistakes never die
• We keep score
• Old stories show up in new conversations

The result is predictable: team cohesion suffers, alignment weakens, and execution slows because we’re dragging yesterday’s hurt and disappointment into today’s work.

This isn’t about fixing everything or letting everything go.

It is about noticing what we’re carrying and deciding to carry it differently.

So, who needs grace from you so that something better can finally move forward?

When alignment starts slipping, the instinct is often the same: communicate more, have more meetings, demand more updates, send more emails, and create more dashboards.

None of these are wrong, it’s just that often, there is a deeper issue than just communication.

When people, work, departments, or expectations become misaligned, there can be many causes: unclear priorities, competing agendas, incongruent incentives, silo mentalities, lack of communication, or even the complexity of the work itself.

But there is one overlooked cause that keeps popping up: the inability to decide what matters most.

Misalignment is often a prioritization problem before it is a communication or culture problem.

Someone has to decide what matters most. Until that happens, alignment is largely impossible.

Alignment doesn’t happen when everyone agrees. It happens when everyone understands what the organization is optimizing for.

When we don’t make that decision, we’re withholding clarity from the people who depend on us.

The result?

• Multiple “important priorities”
• People start to drift apart
• Projects stall
• Rollouts create friction
• Departments optimize for themselves
• Teams keep revisiting decisions
• Execution slows
• We lose the power of our collective effort on an important problem or opportunity

No wonder alignment slips and we don’t feel like we’re operating as one team. Why would we? There’s no compelling target to work towards together.

One of the passes we must give to those we serve as leaders is truth. And often, the truth people need from us is not just candid feedback or more information. It is clarity about what matters most.

I understand there are legitimate conflicts between priorities. Often times, prioritization is just as much about deciding what matters less than what matters most. Yet I’ve repeatedly seen the momentum that emerges when people are clear about what matters most.

Here are some examples:

• A newly opened medical facility smoothed out daily operations much faster by everyone in the building being focused on eliminating root causes of start-up problems.
• A manufacturer gained market share by everyone rallying around the fact that project management was going to be the strength of the company.
• When I was young, working as a cook for Pizza Hut, our restaurant thrived because everyone understood the priority: get pizzas to customers in 15 minutes or less. Cooks, servers, and managers all knew what mattered most.

Do we do that after hearing everyone’s perspective and engaging in debate? Absolutely. Do we need to reinforce the decision over and over? Definitely. But those are topics for another time.

For now, recognize that when alignment starts to slip, before increasing communication, ask whether the organization lacks clarity on what matters most.

 

Every department is busy and every leader is working hard, but somehow the organization still feels fragmented.

Perhaps you’ve been there: meetings are constant, projects are moving, and communication never stops, but underneath it all, it feels like people are pulling in different directions.

On the surface, everything may look fine, but dig a little deeper and you realize that activity is disguising misalignment and busyness is being mistaken for progress.

Teams are moving fast but not necessarily toward the same outcome.

The typical reaction is to push harder, hold more meetings, communicate more, create new dashboards, or reorganize in some way.

But the same issues keep resurfacing:

• We revisit the same conversations
• Departments are protecting their own priorities
• Initiatives slow down when collaboration is needed
• Everyone appears aligned publicly but operates differently privately

Usually, it’s not an effort problem, and more communication alone rarely fixes it.

It’s a direction problem.

When people are operating from different assumptions about what matters most, communication often multiplies activity instead of alignment.

What Actually Creates Alignment

What actually helps is remarkably simple, though not easy.

A Clear Strategy

Teams pull in different directions when leaders are operating from different assumptions about what matters most, how success is defined, and what the organization is really, actually trying to achieve together.

When leadership teams have even subtle misalignment around priorities or direction, the rest of the organization feels it quickly.

Clarity around how we behave together matters too. Organizations drift when leaders tolerate different standards, different expectations, and different interpretations of what teamwork looks like.

 A Most Important Goal

While working with a leadership team a few years ago, one team member piped up and said “I don’t know what our Super Bowl is.”

It was February, and he was feeling the weight of not knowing what the organization was truly rallying around.

I still remember that because when there isn’t something meaningful to pursue together, teams naturally drift back toward their own priorities and individual agendas.

Strong organizations usually have two big goals:

• A larger long-term goal that requires the entire organization working together to accomplish it.
• A clear short-term priority that is more important than anything else right now.

Different Conversations

Even with a clear direction and shared priorities, organizations still don’t move together unless conversations also change.

Too often, conversations become:

• Safe instead of honest
• Polite instead of productive
• Focused on updates instead of decisions
• Focused on departmental activity instead of enterprise priorities
• Focused on problems without clear ownership or movement

Alignment grows when leaders are willing to talk honestly about what is actually slowing the organization down.

None of this works without trust. When trust is weak, people protect departments, protect information, protect priorities, and protect themselves. Building trust is often the first step. It allows teams to stay in hard conversations long enough to solve real problems together.

 

Organizations move forward when people are aligned around what matters most and willing to work through the conversations required to get there.

Hard work without shared direction creates exhaustion. But shared direction creates movement.