The Trust Equation

Whether what someone says holds up. It comes from knowing the subject, getting the details right, being honest about where their knowledge stops, and a history of calls that turned out to be correct. It’s also where most people over-invest: piling on credentials is the most common way people try to earn trust, and the least effective.

When it’s the weak one: they’re pleasant and on time, but you quietly double-check whatever they tell you.

Whether someone does what they said, when they said. It’s built from many small promises kept, not one heroic delivery. It’s the only dimension that needs time to pass, which makes it the hardest to fake and the slowest to repair once it breaks.

When it’s the weak one: great in the meeting, and you’re never quite sure anything will happen after it.

Whether it feels safe to bring this person something risky, half-formed or unflattering. It grows through discretion, through taking feelings seriously instead of steering around them, and through going first with your own candor. It’s the dimension most often missing, and often where the biggest single gain is.

When it’s the weak one: capable and dependable, but you’d never take them a worry you hadn’t already solved.

It runs in one direction

Trust isn’t something a person has. It belongs to one relationship, pointing one way. How much you trust a colleague says nothing about how much they trust you, or how much the next person does. The same person can be deeply trusted by one teammate and barely by another.

That’s why the exercise below asks you to picture one specific person, not to rate yourself in general.

Each gap has its own repair

The four dimensions break differently, so they mend differently. Working out which one is low is most of the work; the fix usually follows.