Trust is destroyed in moments, built in years

I watched a tech lead blame a junior developer in a post-mortem once. The outage wasn't even that bad. But in front of the whole team, he pointed at her and said, "This is why we have code reviews." She'd been there three months.

She left six weeks later. So did two other engineers who saw it happen. Three years of trust-building, gone in about ten seconds.

Assumed trust versus tested trust

Most teams I've worked with describe themselves as having good trust. High psychological safety. Open communication. The usual.

Then something goes wrong.

A deadline gets missed. A customer complains. Someone makes an expensive mistake. And suddenly you find out what was actually there all along.

Assumed trust is what exists before the pressure. It's the feeling you get when everyone's aligned, projects are on track, and nobody's stressed. It feels real because it's comfortable.

Tested trust is what survives after the pressure. It's what's left when someone screws up badly and the team's response is "how do we fix this" instead of "who do we blame."

I've learned to stop confusing the two.

"We have a great culture" usually means "we haven't been stressed yet"

A startup I consulted with had amazing vibes. People genuinely liked each other. Friday beers, team off-sites, the whole thing. Everyone talked about the culture like it was their competitive advantage.

Then they missed a major product deadline.

The CEO, under pressure from investors, started asking pointed questions in all-hands meetings. "Who signed off on that estimate?" "Why didn't anyone raise this earlier?" The questions weren't unreasonable. But the tone shifted from curiosity to accusation.

Within a month, the culture everyone praised had turned defensive. Engineers started documenting everything to protect themselves. Managers got careful about what they said in meetings. The trust that seemed so solid turned out to be conditional. It only existed when things were going well.

They didn't have a trust problem. They had an untested-trust problem. The culture was real, but it had never been under load. When load arrived, it cracked.

The moments that matter

Trust gets built incrementally. A manager defends a decision even when their boss pushes back. A team member admits they don't understand something without getting judged. Someone misses a deadline and the conversation is about support, not punishment.

These small moments compound over time. They create patterns that the team learns to rely on.

But destruction is faster. Way faster.

One public blame session. One "I told you so" in a meeting. One leader who throws someone under the bus to save face. That's all it takes to undo years of accumulated trust.

I've seen teams recover from destruction, but it's hard. The memory lingers. People remember who was protected and who was sacrificed. They adjust their behavior accordingly.

What I look for now

When I join a new team or organization, I've stopped asking "how's the culture?" Everyone answers that question the same way.

Instead I ask about failure. "Tell me about the last project that went badly. What happened?" "How do you handle it when someone makes an expensive mistake?" "What's the worst meeting you've been in here?"

The answers tell me whether I'm looking at assumed trust or tested trust. Teams with tested trust talk about failures openly. They can name specific situations where things went wrong and describe how the team responded. Teams with assumed trust get vague. They might not have examples, or the examples are from years ago, or they change the subject.

Neither is necessarily bad. Every team starts with assumed trust. But knowing which one you're in helps you understand what you're actually working with.

The rebuild

I mentioned that tech lead who blamed the junior developer. He apologized eventually. Not a real apology. More of a "sorry if you felt that way" apology. The kind that makes things worse.

He's not a bad person. He was under pressure and reacted poorly. But that one moment defined how the team saw him from then on. Two years later, people still referenced it when they talked about why they didn't trust leadership.

The team rebuilt trust eventually, but not with him. It happened after he left, when new leadership came in and explicitly said "we don't do blame here." And then backed it up. Repeatedly. In multiple situations where blame would have been easy.

That's what rebuilding looks like. You have to show, over and over, that the new pattern is real. One statement isn't enough. The memory of destruction is too strong.

How do you build trust on your teams? Have you seen teams recover from trust destruction? What made the difference?