How the Best Teams Build and Spend Trust

Picture a leadership team in the middle of a make-or-break launch. The deadline is non-negotiable. The pressure is high.

In that moment, the real question isn’t whether the plan is watertight. It’s whether the people in the room trust each other enough to speak up, disagree, and commit to the next move.

Trust isn’t a “nice-to-have” in teams. It’s the invisible infrastructure that allows people to take risks, tell the truth, and stay aligned when the stakes are highest. Without it, even the most talented groups stall.

Two Types of Trust Every Leader Needs to Manage

Harvard Professor Heidi K. Gardner’s research with over 3,000 senior professionals shows there are two distinct kinds of trust in teams:

• Task Trust – the belief that others will deliver high-quality work. Built by doing what you said you’d do, on time, and to standard.
• Relationship Trust – the belief that others have good intentions. Built by assuming positive intent in tough moments, offering help without being asked, and sharing vulnerabilities.

The best teams cultivate both. Over-index on “getting along” without delivering, and goals slip. Over-index on output without relational glue, and the team becomes brittle.

Trust Behaves Like Currency

Think of trust as the currency of performance. You can earn it, bank it, spend it, and lose it.

• Build it by delivering and connecting.
• Protect it by preventing misunderstandings.
• Spend it by having the hard, high-value conversations.

Teams that hoard trust but never spend it miss chances to learn and improve. Spend what you don’t have, and the result is friction and disengagement.

The Trust Ropes Model

Instead of thinking of trust as one shared feeling, picture it as a web of ropes connecting every pair in the team.

Strong ropes keep the team connected when pressure hits - enabling them to adapt, decide, and act fast. Weak or missing ropes create gaps where miscommunication and dysfunction take hold.

The bigger the team, the more ropes there are to manage - and the more deliberate leaders need to be.

The Three Moves: Connect. Check. Test.

Our research with 1,496 team members shows that the highest-performing teams don’t leave trust to chance. They actively:

• Connect the Ropes – Build them before you need them. Swap the spreadsheet for a story. Know the person behind the job title.
• Check the Ropes – Maintain them in real time. Call out the niggles early. Clarify before cracks spread.
• Test the Ropes – Put them under load. Ask the hard question. Challenge the thinking. See if it holds.

What the Data Says

• Teams that combined Connect and Check had the highest trust scores - stronger than either behaviour alone.
• All three moves - Connect, Check, and Test - together had the strongest link to high performance.
• Over-relying on one move backfired: checking without connection eroded trust, and testing without the first two weakened performance.

Why This Matters for Leaders Now

Change is faster. Teams are more fluid. The only constant is pressure.

Your ability to build, protect, and use trust - on purpose - is now a competitive advantage.

Every meeting, every decision, every conversation either braids the ropes or frays them. The best leaders know which one they’re doing.