Trust
The No. 1 reason business leaders ask for our help, is to build connection and trust in the top team.
​
Why?
​
1. Because trust, belonging, and psychological safety are so critical to business performance (research links to over 50% performance gains, a 50% drop in turnover risk, and over 150% uplift in employer promoter score).
​
2. Because a leader team that isn't founded on trust and psychological safety can never hope to develop these qualities elsewhere in the organisation - they have to be modelled from the top.
​
3. Because wise leaders know that top teams naturally tend towards dispersal, competitiveness, and self-interest - driven by system-level complexity, pressure, and accountability for results.
​
Yet since trust is still such a relatively rare commodity in business, we also often encounter:
​
- top teams with middling-low levels of trust, whose leaders think trust is high
- leaders who recognise that trust is not what it could be, but accept it as a function of personalities
- leader teams who have never experienced a high trust environment, and who under-estimate its criticality to their success.
​
So - how do we do it? How do we accelerate what can only ever be a natural process of building trust between human beings?
​
As you'll realise by now, we don't follow a set formula. Instead, over the course of our time together, we'll create the spaces for:
​
1. Unspoken truths to be brought from the shadows into the light (e.g. via interview feedback, system constellations, peer coaching conversations)
2. Leaders to offer an honest window into their lives, beyond the professional mask we all need to wear
3. Deeply sensitive yet uncompromising facilitation. We won't let you get away with anything less than what you aspire to for yourselves.
​
Through this combination, we regularly receive feedback like:
​
"I heard more courage, honesty, and vulnerability in the room than we've ever had before. It was transformational."
​
"Creating the space to appreciate each other was incredibly valuable - something we've never done in 3 years together"
​
"Since joining the top team 2 years ago, this is the first time we're actually making it real. It feels like our conversations until now have just been on the surface."
​
TRUST AND VULNERABILITY
A word about vulnerability.
We take huge inspiration on building trust from our volunteer mentoring through the UK charity A Band of Brothers. Working with young men involved in the criminal justice system, who typically bring deep scepticism and cynicism to the start of a mentoring relationship, has taught us plenty about how to effectively accelerate "vulnerability based trust".
As a concept, vulnerability-based trust has spilled over into corporates from the therapeutic/counselling space - with very mixed results. Too many leaders will unfortunately bring unsafe experiences of this kind of approach, led by inexperienced facilitators, who have not learned how to explore personal vulnerability in a business team context. They may consequently:
​
- lack judgement around how to introduce, frame, and close out this type of dialogue
- encourage inappropriate sharing, or inadvertently set up a “trauma competition”
- leave participants feeling ashamed, embarrassed, or that they’re in the hands of an amateur therapist
​
Inexperienced facilitators will in short almost certainly not know how deep to go, in true service of what, or how to integrate personal vulnerability into the broader work of accelerating team trust and performance.
​
For such a precious commodity as trust between your senior leaders, the last thing you can afford is to leave the process to chance.
