You can't start with trust

Every leadership framework wants to start with trust. Lencioni's pyramid puts it at the base. Psychological safety models treat it as the foundation. Team health assessments measure it first.

I get the appeal. Trust feels fundamental. If we could just get trust right, everything else would follow.

But you can't start with trust. It's not a lever you can pull. Telling a dysfunctional team to "build trust first" is like telling someone who's drowning to "just breathe."

The backwards pyramid

Lencioni's Five Dysfunctions of a Team is probably the most popular team framework out there. Trust is at the bottom. Without it, you can't have healthy conflict. Without conflict, you can't get commitment. And so on up the pyramid.

As a description of what successful teams look like, it's useful. You can hold it up to a high-performing team and see all the elements. They do trust each other. They do have productive conflict. The model fits.

But as a map to get there? Almost useless.

I watched a VP try to implement Lencioni with a struggling engineering org. They ran the exercises. Did the vulnerability shares. Had the difficult conversations the book recommends. Three months later, nothing had changed. People were still hoarding information. Decisions were still getting second-guessed. The "trust building" felt performative because it was.

The problem wasn't execution. Trust isn't something you build through trust-building exercises. It emerges when other things are true.

What's actually at the base

Think about what trust requires. For me to trust you, I need to believe a few things:

You're competent. You can actually do what you say you'll do.

You're reliable. You follow through consistently, not just when it's convenient.

You're honest. You tell me what's really happening, even when it's uncomfortable.

You're not going to sacrifice me. When things go wrong, you won't throw me under the bus to save yourself.

None of these are trust itself. They're the preconditions for trust. And most dysfunctional teams are missing several of them.

The team that VP was trying to fix? They had a competence problem. Half the engineers had been hired too fast during a growth sprint, and they weren't up to the level the work required. No amount of vulnerability exercises was going to fix that. People couldn't trust each other's work because some of the work wasn't trustworthy.

They also had a consequences problem. A year earlier, a team lead had been publicly blamed for a project failure and quietly managed out. Everyone remembered. They'd learned that mistakes get punished. Trust exercises weren't going to overcome that lesson. Only consistent contrary evidence would, over time.

The shallow version

When frameworks talk about "starting with trust," they usually mean something shallow. Assume positive intent. Give people the benefit of the doubt. Don't start from suspicion.

Fine advice. Also not trust.

Assuming positive intent just means "I won't treat you as a threat until you give me reason to." That's baseline professional courtesy. It's the absence of active distrust, not the presence of real trust.

Real trust is specific. I trust you to make this technical decision because I've seen you make good ones before. I trust you to tell me when a project is off track because you've done it in the past. I trust you to push back on bad ideas because I've watched you do it.

The shallow version feels comfortable. We're all being nice to each other. We're listening in meetings. We're not attacking each other. But comfort isn't trust. Comfort is just the absence of obvious dysfunction.

I've been on plenty of comfortable teams where nobody actually trusted each other. They just avoided the topics that would reveal it. Everything looked fine until something went wrong. Then the real dynamics surfaced.

Survivor bias in frameworks

Here's something I keep coming back to: who actually buys these frameworks?

Not the deeply dysfunctional companies. Those orgs are too busy fighting fires to invest in team development. They can't afford the consultants, the off-sites, the dedicated time for exercises.

It's the already-successful companies looking to optimize. They've got the basics working. They have enough stability to invest in improvement. They're trying to go from good to great, not from broken to functional.

So the frameworks get tested on teams that already have most of the preconditions in place. Reasonable competence. Some track record of not destroying each other. The trust exercises work because the foundation was already there.

Then the framework gets packaged and sold as universal. "Start with trust! It worked for these successful companies!" But the successful companies didn't actually start with trust. They started with everything else, and trust emerged. The framework just helped them name what they already had.

When you apply the same framework to a genuinely dysfunctional org, it bounces off. The exercises feel fake because they are fake. You can't vulnerability-share your way past incompetent teammates, or a leadership team that punishes failure, or a culture where people have learned to protect themselves first.

What actually works

If you can't start with trust, where do you start?

Make sure people can actually do the jobs they're in. This sounds obvious but it's where a lot of teams fail. You can't trust someone's work if their work isn't good. Hiring matters. So does being honest about whether someone is in the right role.

Make the rules stable. If good work gets rewarded sometimes but punished other times depending on political winds, trust can't develop. How leadership responds to failure has to be predictable before people will take risks.

Give it time. Trust builds through accumulated evidence. There's no shortcut. People need to see, over and over, that the patterns hold. One good response to failure isn't enough. It has to happen repeatedly before people believe it's real.

Model learning. Teams where people admit mistakes and try to improve develop trust faster than teams where everyone postures. You can't mandate this. You can only demonstrate it and create conditions where it's safe.

None of this is as clean as "start with trust." It's messier. Takes longer. Requires actually fixing broken things rather than running exercises.

The honest framework

If someone wrote an honest team development framework, it would look something like this:

1. Fix your obvious problems first. Incompetent people, toxic individuals, broken processes.
2. Make failure survivable. Show repeatedly that mistakes lead to support, not punishment.
3. Give people agency. Let them make decisions and live with consequences.
4. Wait. Keep doing steps 2 and 3 for a year or two.
5. Notice that trust has developed.

Not very marketable. "Wait two years while consistently not being terrible" doesn't fit on a slide. Doesn't give executives the feeling that they're taking action.

But it's what I've seen work. The teams with real trust got there through accumulated experience, not exercises. They went through hard things together and came out okay. That's what built trust. Not deciding to trust each other.

The uncomfortable truth

I think "start with trust" is popular because it lets us skip the hard parts. If trust is a decision, a choice we make, then we can just decide to trust each other and move on to the fun stuff.

But trust isn't a decision. It's a conclusion. It's what your brain produces after processing enough evidence that someone is safe to rely on.

You can't hack that process. You can only feed it the right inputs and give it time.

What's your experience with team frameworks? Have you seen them work on genuinely dysfunctional teams, or only on teams that were already mostly functional?