Trust

Most teams don't fail because of missing skills. They fail because people don't trust each other enough to be honest.

I think about trust as one of three pillars that make teams actually work. The other two are purpose and competence. But trust is the one that gets neglected—partly because it sounds soft, partly because it's hard to measure.

When I say trust here, I mean something specific: can people on this team admit mistakes, voice doubts, and disagree openly without fear of looking stupid or getting punished? Some call this psychological safety. I use the term vulnerability-based trust.

What Special Forces taught me

Simon Sinek shared an example from the military that stuck with me. When operators in Special Forces describe what they value in teammates, the answers cluster into two buckets: performance and trust.

Performance covers the obvious stuff—physical capability, tactical knowledge, technical skill.

Trust covers whether you know how someone behaves under pressure, whether they share your values, whether you can predict how they'll act when things go sideways.

High performance plus high trust is the goal. But when you can only have one? They pick trust every time.

Having served myself, I know not every military concept translates directly to civilian teams. But this one does.

What vulnerability-based trust actually looks like

It's easier to describe than define.

People share mistakes and struggles without holding back. They ask dumb questions. They say "I don't know." They're genuine rather than performing a role.

Nobody uses failures as ammunition. Weaknesses are seen as areas to develop, not permanent judgments.

These things tend to happen together. When a team gets one of them right, the others usually follow.

Why conflict matters (the right kind)

A team's real value is in being more than a collection of individuals working side by side. If you're not getting that, you have a workgroup, not a team.

The value comes from different knowledge and perspectives actually mixing. That requires people sharing their real opinions and commenting freely on others' ideas.

Without trust, you get artificial harmony—diverse opinions exist but stay unspoken. The first view expressed by leadership gets accepted without alternatives considered.

Or you get the opposite: lots of debate, but it's about scoring points or protecting turf rather than finding better answers.

Here's the uncomfortable truth: if more than one person is in the room and only one viewpoint gets voiced, everyone else is redundant.

Feedback only works with trust

Feedback is supposed to be a gift. Usually it's more like a grenade.

In a psychologically safe environment, feedback can be direct and still be received as helpful. Criticism doesn't land as attack. Tough feedback doesn't get suppressed to avoid awkwardness.

Without trust, people either sugarcoat everything or weaponize it. Neither helps anyone improve.

Leaders set the tone here. Admit your own mistakes. Welcome honest feedback about your decisions. Model what you want to see.

Building trust faster

Trust builds naturally as people work through hard things together. But not all teams get enough of those moments organically.

Two things speed it up: awareness and practice.

Awareness means talking openly about why psychological safety matters, what constructive conflict looks like, and how feedback actually helps. This doesn't happen by accident.

Practice means actually doing it—having the difficult conversations, giving and receiving feedback, working through disagreement.

Some concrete approaches that work: assign tasks that require real collaboration, delegate, create situations where people have to depend on each other.

Skip the trust-fall exercises. Use tools that help people understand how they each work—Birkman, Working Genius, whatever gives insight into actual work behaviors. Lencioni's "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team" is useful for both raising awareness and practicing feedback. It's not complicated reading, and the exercises are practical.

The point

Trust lets teams do what groups of individuals can't: combine different perspectives into better answers, catch each other's blind spots, and adapt when circumstances change.

It doesn't happen by hoping for it. It takes deliberate attention from whoever's leading, and willingness from everyone to be a bit uncomfortable.