The Systems Behind Trust
High-performance teams from the ground up
A newly minted Chief Revenue Officer inherited a few existing teams into their newly created org. Marketing, merchandising, pricing. These previously disjointed teams would finally be together around the same table. Expectations were running high, but there was one problem. These teams had long been in conflict, and simply putting them around the same table did not , by itself, resolve the issue.
Most of the meetings had a similar vibe. Pricing and merchandising teams attempted to delineate responsibilities and get things in writing, and the marketing team refused to play along. Routine work fell through the cracks, and the team consistently found themselves struggling with their core responsibility of running the promo calendar.
When the CRO saw the distrust between the teams and the looming crisis this would cause, they sprang into action. They scheduled a series of team all-hands and ran, or attempted to run, sharing exercises. They encouraged teammates, with varying degrees of force, to be vulnerable with each other, thinking that shared vulnerability was the path to building the trust that the team was lacking.
These sessions were characterized by terse statements, awkward silences, and more than a few people looking visibly upset. While there were moments of vulnerability, distrust within the team was moving in the wrong direction. The CRO eventually asked one of their lieutenants what they thought was going on. The lieutenant responded by saying, “The head of the marketing team hasn’t made or kept a commitment in over three years. I don’t know if they’ve ever responded to a calendar invite. You’re asking me to reveal something of myself to someone I wouldn’t trust to make a ham sandwich, let alone do their job.”
The CRO’s first full quarter on the job became their last. After a few of these sessions, the team had tuned them out. The company had the biggest revenue miss in its history, and the CRO was out of the job in less than six months. Of the dozens of people in their org, every one of them departed the company over the next year.
Dysfunctions of The Five Dysfunctions
The CRO in our story correctly identified signs that their team didn’t trust one another. People were unwilling to ask for help and never revealed weakness. Meetings were filled with people who didn’t seem like they wanted to be there, and missed meetings reached a point where it became difficult to function. So why did this leader attempt to address this problem in the way they did?
They knew what behaviors were associated with high-functioning teams, and they attempted to right the ship by imposing these behaviors on their team. They started, and ended, with the base of the pyramid: trust. The complete model sounds like this:
Trust is foundational, and comes through vulnerability. With trust established, people begin to speak up and debate ideas, and are more likely to commit to decisions. Commitments allow teammates to hold each other accountable. These behaviors create a whole that is greater than the sum of the parts, a motivated team focused on collective goals.
If this model sounds familiar, that is because it is codified in one of the most popular business books ever written: Patrick Lencioni’s The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. It is still considered required reading among many executive teams. Lecioni’s elegant, intuitive ladder is responsible for The Five Dysfunction’s enduring success.
This elegance and intuitiveness is also what makes the model dangerous. It’s hard to argue against the list of traits and behaviors of effective teams. Of course trust is important. The question is not whether trust matters, but what causes it.
Trust Is a Verb
Trust as a building block of high-performing teams fits our intuition and is well-documented in research. Stephen Covey dedicated an entire book to the overwhelming body of evidence in The Speed of Trust. With trust as sine qua non to high-performing teams, we need to know two things: what exactly is it, and how do people establish it?
We get our answer from Mayer, Davis, and Schoorman’s research into organizational psychology. They define trust as willingness to be vulnerable with another person. The definition of trust has vulnerability as the outcome, not as an intervention to create trust. When vulnerability is disconnected from behavior, it tends to feel inauthentic and can erode trust.
These authors have also documented how trust is created: it comes from the perception that the other party is able, benevolent, and acts with integrity. Said another way, people trust you when they believe you have the competence to do the thing, they believe you care about their interests at least somewhat, and they believe your actions match your promises.
This finding gives us a trust-through-action model of trust building. Commitment becomes the base of the pyramid, because commitment provides the opportunity to demonstrate both competence and integrity. Behavioral integrity is established by consistently keeping commitments. As employees experience consistent support and kept promises over time, they respond reciprocally with loyalty and discretionary effort.
Meeting commitments might seem like an embarrassingly low bar, but literature on this topic suggests few organizations ever clear it. Jim Dethmer, who has spent decades coaching executive teams, gives us a model for high-performance organizations: people keep their commitments 90% of the time, and get ahead of and repair the 10% they cannot keep. This contrasts with his finding that people keep just 30 to 40% of their commitments at work.
Bad Apples, Bad Barrels
Keeping commitments is impactful and simple to describe. So why is it so rare? Doty and Kouchaki’s Commitments, Disrupted gives an answer that few leaders expect.
When people fail to keep commitments, the first impulse is to diagnose it as a failure of character. Doty and Kouchaki call this explanation “bad apples”. Of the four sources of commitment drift, this is the only one that involves failures of character. The other three are systemic. They contrast “bad apples” with “bad barrels”. These are systems where incentives and cultural pressures push people to renege on promises. “Weak commitments” are promises that had no hope of being realized because they were unrealistic or unclear at their inception. Finally “disconnected dots” are failures of coordination where people own parts of promises without visibility into the whole.
Their research shows that teams consistently rate themselves as reliable while viewing other teams as unreliable. This symmetry is the signature of a systems problem. It’s also proof that most people make the same mistake that Lecioni’s model makes: they assume failures are the fault of people rather than the barrels they are living in.
The marketing leader in the story at the start of this essay who never kept commitments may have been a bad apple. Doty and Kouchaki ask another question: what type of system allowed this person to be successful despite letting down their colleagues for years? It could only be a bad barrel.
This reframe is critical because it offers at least the possibility of discovering problems that are not rooted in personnel. This approach is also, not incidentally, much more demanding of leadership. Of our four sources of commitment drift, leadership has a role in all of them. Leaders are directly responsible for designing the systems their employees occupy; every bad barrel is a failure of leadership, as are systems where people cannot connect the dots across functions. Weak commitments and bad apples are reflections of culture and standard-setting.
Sixth’s Time’s a Charm
After the CRO’s team had the biggest miss in company history, the CEO shouted down the team and said “I know someone knew this was going to happen and didn’t speak up.” They were right; a team member told their peers it would be a historic miss weeks before the event. They had already spoken up five times to no end. There would not be a sixth.
If commitment is the currency of trust, voice is where that trust gets spent.
Trust helps create the conditions where people are willing to speak up to surface problems, challenge assumptions, and ask uncomfortable questions. Voice is the organizational behavior that trust unlocks, and voice is the heart of high-performing organizations.
In Albert Hirschman’s Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, he describes the conditions for people choosing to exercise their voice. The probability of success x the value of the potential outcome must be greater than the personal cost of exercising their voice. Trust acts on both sides of the equation, lowering the perceived cost and increasing the probability of success. Absent these conditions, people will opt for silence and eventually, exit.
Voice is how organizations learn, adapt, and change course. The most powerful moments I’ve experienced and written about started when someone broke through an intractable problem by reframing it. Without voice, problems can go unsolved for years because nobody has the safety or the standing to challenge the status quo.
Voice is professional vulnerability. It’s the willingness to risk being wrong in public, to challenge a decision, and to surface information that people don’t want to hear. It requires trust, but a specific kind of trust: the belief that the system will treat your contribution as signal rather than punish it as dissent. This trust comes from behavioral reliability, not through intimate knowledge of your co-worker’s life. Close friendships are a near inevitability of teams that work well together, but this is a byproduct rather than an input.
Scoring the Scoreboard
I worked with a business that knew it cost them 5x more to win back a churned customer than it cost to prevent them from churning. Yet, an audit revealed that the company was spending next to nothing on retention. A bit of digging revealed that the retention marketing team received credit for winbacks. but not for retention. They responded by deliberately let customers churn so they could win them back, costing the company millions of dollars.
A team with high trust where voice is valued and where commitment is kept is a formidable force, but this alone is insufficient. What we have is a scalar, and what we need is a vector. Trust and voice determine how strongly a team performs: the magnitude. Direction comes from accountability: knowing where effort should go.
Accountability, like trust and productive conflict, does not exist for its own sake. It exists to help generate an outcome on behalf of the organization.
The retention marketing team hit the exact target they were given. Hitting targets is an execution problem, and people are good at execution. What most people in execution roles are not good at is surfacing when they’ve been given the wrong target. Knowing whether the target is right requires a vantage point that most people in the organization don’t have, and surfacing a concern about a target is an act of voice that carries significant risk; you’re telling your boss they’ve made a mistake.
What this highlights is how accountability flows in both directions. Leadership is responsible for choosing the right targets and aligning the incentives of teams and people such that they work towards the best collective outcomes. Once leadership has held up its end, people with formal authority can then set expectations for their reports, measures against them, and act on the results.
Accountability is best thought of as flowing only vertically. Lateral accountability requires peers to absorb the social cost of confrontation without any of the formal authority that makes confrontation worth the cost.
Choosing the right targets, aligning incentives, ensuring teams aren’t working at cross-purposes, these are commitments leadership makes to the organization. When they get it wrong, it’s not the team that failed. It’s the system. And the team knows it, which is why poorly designed accountability erodes trust rather than reinforcing it.
With the addition of accountability and outcomes, we now have a fully realized pyramid of high-performance teams. Commitment serves as the foundation layer. If people can’t rely on each other to do what they said they’d do, nothing above it matters. When commitments are kept consistently, teammates learn to trust each other. Trust sets the stage for productive conflict. Conflict requires a functioning voice channel, venues where speaking up isn’t futile, where P(success) is high enough to justify the cost.
Where the first three layers of the pyramid create highly functional teams, accountability to outcomes focuses their efforts to the right ends. Accountability only flows vertically because it follows authority. Results follow whatever scoreboard leadership actually built. If politics has a higher ROI than value creation, people will play politics, and they’re right to.
A Sip of Beer
One of Stafford Beer’s gifts to the world is POSIWID: The purpose of the system is what it does. One of the reasons Beer emphasized viewing systems as black boxes that should be understood through their inputs and their outputs is that anyone who peers inside the box risks assuming outputs match inhabitants’ intents. If a system regularly punishes candor and rewards politics, that is what the culture becomes.
One of the most common category errors in business writing is when authors locate organizational failures in the character of people. Many of the most popular books, like The Five Dysfunctions, Amp It Up, and Radical Candor share this problem. Moralizing failure by framing it as individual deficiency in courage, standards, discipline, or character risks blinding leaders to systems and incentives problems.
High-performance teams don’t emerge from exhortation. They are made when leaders design systems where good people can meet high standards without being punished in the process.