Trust Is Personal: How Leaders Build Trust

Trust is the operating system of leadership. When trust is strong, teams communicate openly, move faster, and perform better. When it is weak, even simple decisions become difficult.

In this episode of The Leadership Buzz, Buzz Buzzell explores a key idea from the book The Seven Rules of Trust — Make It Personal. Trust is not built through titles, authority, or slogans on the wall. It grows through everyday interactions between people.

Buzz reflects on why trust is built person to person, how leaders can avoid becoming transactional, and why spending time with people is essential if we want teams to feel valued rather than treated like just another number.

The episode closes with three coaching questions to help you reflect on how you are building trust with the people you lead.

Work hard. Tell the truth.

Transcript

TJ 0:00

Welcome to the Leadership Buzz Podcast with Lloyd BuzzBuzzle. Buzz is an international coaching federation, ACC credentialed coach, and a retired Air Force officer with more than 37 years of leadership experience guiding individuals and teams. This podcast is for leaders who want to align their behavior with their values and grow in self-awareness. Each episode follows a simple format: one book, one story, one concept, and three coaching questions to help you reflect on your own leadership. Because leadership isn't just about results, it's about character. Work hard. Tell the truth. Let's roll.

Buzz 0:40

Thanks, TJ. Trust is the operating system of leadership. When it's strong, teams thrive. And one of the simplest ways to build trust is this: work hard and tell the truth. Today we'll look at a key idea from the Seven Rules of Trust book.

TJ 0:56

Today we're exploring the leadership book The Seven Rules of Trust, written by Jimmy Wales with Dan Gardner and published last October. In the book, Wales reflects on how the trust-based model behind Wikipedia allowed millions of people around the world to collaborate and build one of the most widely used sources of knowledge on the Internet. The authors argue that trust is not something leaders can demand. It has to be built intentionally through everyday behavior, clear purpose, and transparency. Buzz. Let's talk about that idea.

Buzz 1:28

Welcome back to the Leadership Buzz. If you've listened to this podcast before, you know I have often come back to a simple phrase that has guided a lot of my leadership thinking over the years. That's work hard, tell the truth. It sounds simple, maybe even too simple, but the longer I've been around leadership both during my years in the Air Force and now coaching leaders, the more I believe those two things sit right at the center of trust. And trust is really what leadership runs on, as all relationships do. Let me give you an example. In the year 2000, there was a company that published its corporate values in its annual report. They were impressive words respect, integrity, communication, and excellence. Those sound like the kind of values any organization would be proud to put on the wall. But within a year, this company collapsed in one of the largest corporate scandals in history. The name of that company was Enron. Executives were hiding debt, manipulating financial statements, and misleading investors and employees. The problem wasn't the words, the problem was the values weren't real. They were written down, but they weren't lived. And people inside an organization always notice that gap. One of the quiet tests leaders face is this. Are you acting based on your values? Or are you acting based on who the boss is in the room? Are you saying something because it's true and it aligns with the mission and the values of the organization and your own? Or are you saying it because you think that's what the boss wants to hear? Because servant leadership doesn't work that way. Servant leaders are trying aren't trying to impress the person above them. They are committed to the mission, the team, and the values of the organization, whether the boss is present or not. Their behavior stays consistent, and that brings us to today's book. In the seven rules of trust, uh Jimmy Wales makes some simple but powerful points in the very first rule. He calls it make it personal. We'll be talking about that in just a second, but trust is won and lost to a person, person to person, not through slogans, not through mission statements, and not through posters on the wall. Trust grows through everyday interactions between people. It grows when leaders show up, do the work, and tell the truth. And that is exactly what we're going to explore today.

TJ 3:43

Buzz, the book talks about the idea of make it personal. Why is trust in leadership often built through personal relationships rather than just roles and authority?

Buzz 3:53

Thanks, GJ. Titles can create authority, but they sure don't automatically create trust. People watch how leaders behave day after day. They notice whether you're consistent, whether you listen, whether you follow through, and whether you tell the truth even when it's uncomfortable. Trust grows through those personal interactions. Over time, people don't trust the position someone holds, they trust the character of the person holding it. In the Seven Rules of Trust, Jimmy Wales talks about a triangle that's a version of a framework that came from the work of a professor at Harvard Business School. And in that triangle, there's authenticity, empathy, and logic. And this is a pretty good description of building trust. And that trust surrounds being authentic, being honest, then there's an empathetic piece, and then the logic. And the logic surrounds like, can you deliver on your words? Like, can you do the thing that you said, right? I had a class in Chicago once for a business class at Northwestern. And during that class, a lady, a civilian that I didn't know, not in the military, told me a story, and we were supposed to share things in class. She said, Hey, she it was so personal she didn't want it shared. She says, You need to promise me. Well, I've kept that promise to today. That's been at least eight years, I think, since she told me that story. Didn't share it during class, took a little heat from the instructor, but I could tell that story today, but why would I? It was just between the two of us. She'll probably never hear of this podcast. But I think that's part of delivering is that you're able to deliver on what you say you're gonna do. And isn't that what trust is all about? Is you say you're gonna do something, that you won't share something, or that you'll take those actions to help or assist or be with that person, and you take those actions. That is very, very important in building that trust with a person. Because in life, everything is about relationships, and everything of relationships is built on is one thing, trust.

TJ 5:58

If a leader listening today wanted to build more trust with their team, what is one simple way they could begin making leadership more personal this week?

Buzz 6:06

Trust becomes personal when leaders slow down enough to actually see the people around them. Let's face it, people want to be seen, heard, understood. That's pretty simple. That might mean having a short conversation with someone about what they are working on, asking how they're doing, or simply listening without rushing to the next task. Small moments matter. A quick check-in, remembering something important to someone, or giving honest feedback can make leadership feel more human instead of distant. And there's also kind of a feel there if that that you assume the good faith in people first. You know, what is their vo what is their viewpoint? Can you articulate what the other viewpoint is? I had a leader that came to me and said, Hey, we need to go to the boss and tell the boss that this is the way it needs to be done. And I said, Well, what's the other viewpoint? And they said, Well, there is no other viewpoint. This is the only way it is. People just don't want to do it. So I sent that person back and said, Hey, let's think about this overnight. Come back in here tomorrow and let's sit down and go over and see what that other viewpoint is. Person came back the next day, they sat down and they said, Hey, I I think I understand, and I think we're gonna hold off on interacting and working on this until we get a little bit more information, a little bit more time in the saddle to be able to get this fixed. And I think just being able to view it from the other person and assuming good faith that people aren't just trying to make you angry or trying to throw you off is is really important.

TJ 7:37

Coach Buzz, what happens inside a team when leadership becomes too transactional and people start to feel like they're just another number? Have you seen that in your leadership experience?

Buzz 7:48

Yeah, I have seen that. But transactional leadership really just focuses on only on tasks, results, and probably performance metrics. Those things all matter. Don't don't let me lead you all wrong on that. But people need more than that. They need to feel noticed, valued, and connected to a purpose. Leaders build trust when they recognize the contributions of individuals, when they show appreciation, and they when they remind people how their work fits into the bigger mission. When people feel seen and respected, leadership stops feeling transactional and starts feeling more meaningful. It's just more than a task, okay? Um I try and stop trying to stop and talk to people at times when I was in the Air Force. I would just find times to stop by their desk, or if I was just walking by their desk and I'd ask them a question. Uh, hey, what's that picture in your desk? Hey, is that your dog? Is that uh your your kids that are your screensaver? And don't make it about the task or the deadline or even about work. And if it does go to that, that that's fine too. But I find often, like when you try and stop and talk to somebody, they will try and steer that back to work because it's normally about work. But when it becomes a little more personal, you'll notice that they interact with you more also. You know, you're walking past the desk, they know you're saying a Boston Red Sox fan, and they might comment on baseball to you when they're when they see you. Uh but otherwise steer it away from that and just focus on those little things around them, like their families, uh, their pets, uh whatever they have around their personal space. I I think that's a great way to do that. I had a boss that when they showed up to the workspace, all they wanted to do was ask questions about the deadlines. And that really created more of a transactional type space for people. And they they the workers, my my folks, because this was my boss, they kind of uh resented that. They really didn't want that, and that really made them feel like, okay, they're just here to to find out about the deadline. And so I gave that feedback, and it actually helped. Like that they changed they didn't realize that's what they were doing when they came into that particular workplace. I think that was a great win for us. I do want to talk a little about this week the fastest way maybe to build trust or the way we usually see it being built on teams, and I think that's really through consistent consistency and when the leader and then just seeing honesty amongst your leaders. And those leaders need to just not be protecting themselves. And that's the first thing I think people will will kind of look at like, oh, is she or he just out for themselves and like when something goes wrong, they're willing to throw people under the bus, whether they intend to do it or not, and not standing in front and being the leader and taking their position, and really just not living the value as what of what maybe a servant leader or servant leadership looks like, and that's really taking care of people and serving them first. Uh, you know, when we talk about work hard and tell the truth, really working hard is your commitment. That's where you show commitment, and telling the truth is about your credibility. I know as a uh major when I took over as a flight commander, I just decided that I was gonna work harder and I'll work everybody else. And so if the garbage needed to be taken out, I took the garbage out. If a door needed to be shut, I shut it. If somebody stayed late, I stayed late with them. Even if I couldn't help them, I was just there. Because really authority comes from the role and trust comes from the person. And it's very easy to lose that trust and lose that credibility with people. I saw this amongst a team uh when we'd go on the road a lot of times, we had a pretty fairly large team and we had some pretty critical things to work on. And being personal with people and being consistent with them and being focused when you have to be focused, and giving people the room and the space to be able to be adults and work on their own. Because people know their jobs. If the person knows their job, you don't have to treat them like a child, you can actually let them figure things out on their own and come to those conclusions they need to do in their in their technical job. If you can manage that and help that and be consistent with that, and really just talk to them on a on a personal level while being uh living your values and being a servant leader, I think is what's gonna build that faster. And I would just ask you, have you know, how do you see this as playing out? Do you consistently just make it transactional like we were talking about before? Or are there times when you just really have to break down and talk to a person? Because if you're only talking to people from a role position, you are just making that transactional. That's not becoming something that's gonna build that honesty and consistency with people. You know, the the commitment piece and the credibility piece is what people are really looking for, and once they see that, they will do anything for you. They'll do anything for you to make sure that you're successful as the leader and that the team is successful, because after all, they didn't build you and then find a team. The team was built with the mission in mind, and then the leader was placed in front of that mission, so you're performing a role on that team as the leader.

TJ 13:26

Let's get to this week's three coaching questions for our listeners.

Buzz 13:30

Okay, for the first coaching question, what is making leadership personal look like in the relationships you have with the people you lead? What does that look like to you? How does that show up for you week in, week out as a leader? Two, where in your leadership might people experience you more as a role than as a person? In other words, rather as a title than as a human. And you are what you are behind that role, and do people see that? Finally, three, what might change on your team if people felt more personally known and valued by you as their leader? How would that be known, and how would that how would that show up?

TJ 14:14

Today we explored the Seven Rules of Trust by Jimmy Wales and Dan Gardner, and the idea that trust grows when leadership becomes personal. When leaders take time to know their people, listen, and treat them as individuals rather than roles, trust has room to grow. As you reflect on today's conversation, ask yourself this how personal is your leadership with the people you lead? Buzz, over to you.

Buzz 14:38

Thanks for listening to the Leadership Buzz. If this episode helped you think a little differently about leadership, do me a favor. Share it with another leader who might benefit from the conversation. Leadership grows when we pass good ideas on. And if you're enjoying the podcast, please take a moment to follow or subscribe wherever you listen. And leave a rating or a short review. That really helps other leaders discover the show. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn where I continue the conversation around leadership, coaching, and building strong teams. Thanks again for listening and remember work hard to tell the truth.