005: The Speed of Trust | Stephen Covey | You Lost Them Before They Left | Jeffrey Scott Stanton

THE JEFFREY SCOTT STANTON PODCAST: THE LEADERSHIP SERIES
EPISODE 5

Trust: You Lost Them Before They Left
Inspired by: The Speed of Trust  |  Stephen M.R. Covey

There is someone on your team who trusts you less than they used to. You may not know when it changed. But the person who used to bring you their real problems stopped bringing them. And they will not tell you.

ABOUT THIS EPISODE: 
Trust is not a soft leadership virtue. It is an economic force. When it is high, everything in your organization moves faster and costs less. When it is low, people stop bringing you the truth, commitment drops to compliance, and you lose people long before they ever hand in their notice.

In this episode, Jeffrey Scott Stanton goes deep on the one leadership currency most leaders are spending without realizing it. You will learn what trust actually is at a neurological level, why the distinction between character trust and competence trust changes everything, how the trust bank account works, and what trust repair actually looks like in practice when the damage has already been done.

This is not a motivational conversation about the importance of trust. It is a precise, applied examination of how trust builds, how it breaks, and what leaders at every stage can do about it.

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IN THIS EPISODE: 
• Why trust is not a feeling — it is a neurological state that changes how people think, collaborate, and commit
• The difference between character trust and competence trust — and why most high performers have one without the other
• Why compliance is what competence trust alone produces — and what it takes to earn commitment
• The deposits and withdrawals framework — what builds the account and what draws it down
• Why one trust withdrawal costs more than multiple deposits earn
• The trust repair sequence — and why most leaders get the order completely wrong
• Four specific things a new leader does in the first 30 days to build trust before competence has been demonstrated

TIMESTAMPS: 
00:00 - The Quiet Shift in Trust
01:25 - Welcome to the Leadership Series
02:38 - Trust as an Economic Force
03:32 - The Energy Shift: High Trust vs. Low Trust
04:45 - The Brain's Response to Social Threats
06:30 - The Trust Tax vs. The Trust Dividend
08:00 - The "Fine" Conversation: Identifying the Tax
09:14 - Two Foundations: Character and Competence
11:17 - Compliance vs. Commitment
11:37 - Case Study: David and the Inconsistency Trap
13:27 - The Trust Bank Account Framework
15:11 - Why Withdrawals Cost More Than Deposits
16:16 - Sponsor: The CE Shop
16:56 - Case Study: Renee and the Power of Consistency
19:18 - How Trust Actually Breaks
21:05 - Measuring by Intention vs. Experience
21:48 - Repairing Damaged Trust: Acknowledgement First
22:48 - Case Study: Marcus and the Sequence of Repair
25:29 - Building Trust as a New Leader
27:17 - Four Steps to Build Character Trust in 30 Days
30:50 - Final Thoughts: Leading with Trust
33:21 - Outro and Closing Credits

BOOK AND RESOURCES: 
Book referenced in this episode:
• The Speed of Trust — Stephen M.R. Covey

Research and concepts referenced:
• Paul Zak — neuroscience of trust research
• Negativity bias — research on how the brain weights negative experiences
• Trust repair research — acknowledgment, explanation, behavior, time
• Trust transference — how new leaders inherit relational history

Note: This episode is inspired by Covey's framework, combined with behavioral research on trust and real-world leadership application. Not a book summary.

CONNECT WITH JEFFREY: 
Jeffrey Scott Stanton is a coach, consultant, advisor, and speaker who has spent his career helping leaders and organizations perform at their highest level under pressure. As the former Executive Vice President of Learning and Development for Douglas Elliman Real Estate, he built and led development programs at scale across one of the largest residential real estate companies in the country.

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffreyscottstanton/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jeffreyscottstanton
• Website: https://jeffreyscottstanton.com/
• Network: J Squared Podcast Productions — https://www.jsquaredpodcast.com/

The Leadership Series is his masterclass on leadership delivered in podcast form — built for people who are currently leading, stepping into leadership, or building toward it. Each episode combines behavioral research, applied psychology, and real-world leadership experience into content that is as practical as it is substantive.

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Transcript

Jeffrey Scott Stanton 0:00

There's someone on your team who trusts you less than they used to. You may not know when it changed. There was no confrontation, no complaint, no obvious moment that you can point to. But something shifted. And that person who used to bring you their real problems suddenly stopped bringing them to you. The person who used to go above and beyond what was required quietly started pulling back and doing exactly what was required of them and nothing more. The dangerous part is they're not going to tell you. People do not stop trusting you all at once. They just stop bringing you the truth. They stop raising their real issues. They stop investing beyond what is absolutely necessary. They do it quietly enough so that by the time you feel it, the distance is already too significant. And here's what makes the whole thing so hard. You did not lose them when they checked out. You lost them much earlier than that. In a moment so small you probably don't even remember it. And that's what this episode is about.

Announcer 1:02

Our host believes the greatest leadership principles ever written were never meant to stay on the pages of books. They were meant to be applied in real decisions, real conversations, and real moments of pressure. Because leadership isn't learned in theory, it's built in practice. This is where timeless leadership frameworks are broken down, translated, and executed in the real world. This is the leadership series.

Jeffrey Scott Stanton 1:25

Welcome back to the Jeffrey Scott Stanton Podcast. This is the leadership series. Some of you listening are already leading, some of you are stepping into that leadership role right now. Some of you are not there yet, but you feel yourself being pulled towards it. You are the people that people come to, the person that the other people watch, and you're the unofficial leader, whether you have the title or not. This episode is for all of you. If we have not met yet, I am Jeffrey Scott Stanton, your coach, consultant, and advisor. I've spent my career building teams, developing leaders, helping salespeople, and working at scale in real estate. My work is focused on behavioral strategy, learning design, performance enablement, and leadership development in high-paced, high-stress environments like real estate sales brokerage. The leadership series builds each episode by each episode. If you're new here, go back to episode one and start listening from the beginning. Each episode sits on top of the one before it, and this one is no different. Before we go any further, I'd like to sincerely thank our founding partners, Subi, the C Shop, and WiseAgent. These are companies built for professionals who are serious about growing and serious about building something that holds up over time. Their information is in the show notes. Thank you very much for your support. Today's episode draws from the book The Speed of Trust by Stephen Covey. The central idea is this trust is not a soft leadership virtue, it's an economic force. When trust is high, things move faster and cost less. When trust is low, everything slows down and costs you much, much more. That idea layered with what behavioral research has shown us about how trust actually works at a human level is what we are working with today. As always, this is not a book review. It's about what the ideas from these books look like when you are actually applying them in the room when you're leading real people. I want to get started with something most leaders have never really stopped to examine. We use the word trust consistently. We talk about building it, about earning it, about losing it. But when you actually ask a leader what trust is, most of them describe it as a feeling, a sense of reliability, something that exists in the background of relationship. That's not wrong, but there's a layer underneath that that most people never get to. And that layer, once learned, is how you change how you lead. Think about the time you walked into a room and immediately felt a shift in energy. Not necessarily in an obvious way, not in a conflict, just maybe attention you couldn't name. Something just felt slightly different. People were a little less open than they were before. Conversations were a little more careful, and the usual ease of those conversations were gone. And you couldn't really locate why. You probably just wrote it off as, ah, it's a bad day, it's the market, something unrelated to you. But what you were actually feeling was a lack of trust environment. Trust is not just a feeling, it's a state. When someone trusts you, the brain is literally operating differently than when they do not. When trust is high in a relationship, people open up, they take risks, they collaborate, they commit to outcomes beyond their own immediate interest. When trust drops, people protect themselves. They become guarded, self-focused, careful about what they say and who they say to. They stop thinking about the team and start thinking about their own position. And here's a part that I find really interesting. The brain does not and cannot distinguish between a physical threat and a social threat. What that means is a broken commitment, an inconsistency between what someone says and what they did, a moment where they felt they were told something wrong or not told the truth or something was hidden, all triggers the same internal alarms as true actual danger. The body responds and openness narrows. The person automatically pulls back, often without being able to articulate why. They just know something feels different and they need to do something. And that leader on the other side of that usually has no idea what's happening. You know, it's because nothing dramatic occurred. There's no confrontation, no complaint, just a quiet internal shift that shows up weeks later as someone who used to be fully committed starts gradually pulling back. Listen, the numbers on this and the research on this is striking. People in a high trust environment are 74% less stressed, 106% more energetic at work, 50% more productive, and 76% more engaged. Those aren't soft numbers. Think about if your people were 50% more productive. Those are direct, measurable costs of low trust and high trust in organizations. And what makes this hard is that low trust does not usually show up as a conflict. It shows up as distance, as people who are present but not fully there, as conversations where something important is going to be left unsaid. You don't always feel it as a problem. You feel it as a friction you just can't seem to locate the source of. Now, a framework from Covey's work that I keep coming back to because it gives language to something that most leaders have experienced, but have never really been able to name. And the idea is it's simple. Low trust creates a tax, high trust creates a dividend. Think about what actually happens inside an organization where there's low trust. Every conversation needs more explanation because people are reading between the lines. They're trying to figure out what is being said, what's really being said, what's not being said. Every decision takes longer because people are protecting their own interests instead of moving towards a common shared goal. Every initiative requires more effort to execute because people are complying rather than being fully committed. Conflict takes more energy to resolve because no one is operating from a foundational point of good faith. None of this shows up on a spreadsheet, but it's real and expensive and compounds. That's the text. High trust works exactly in reverse. Communication is faster because less needs to be explained and less needs to be verified. Because people believe the reasoning behind them, even if they don't have all the information. Problems surface earlier because people feel safe raising them and bringing them to you before it becomes a crisis. That's the dividend. And here's the thing about most of them they don't get charged or paid all at once. They run on every single transaction, in every single interaction with every person you have every single day. Like they were giving you a version of the story that they thought you wanted to hear, that you should hear, not what was actually going on. You asked how things were going. They said fine, but that fine did not match what you were seeing in their numbers. What they said and what was true didn't match. That is the tax in real time. They don't feel safe enough to tell you what's actually happening. Not because they're dishonest, because somewhere along the line, that trust account got so low that it felt risky to be honest. Now think about an agent in your world where that never happens. Where you can have completely direct conversations with them, where they bring you their real problems before those problems become a huge crisis. Where there's no performance in the room, there's no acting in the room because the relationship doesn't require it. That's a dividend. That difference between those two conversations and not a personality difference. It's a trust difference. And it is one that you have far more control over than you might think. There's a distinction in how trust actually gets built that most leaders never heard stated directly. And once you understand it, you will see it in almost every relationship around you. Trust in a leadership relationship is built on two completely separate foundations, character and competence. And here's the important part. You can have one without having the other. And when you do, the trust you have built is incomplete in a very specific way that shows up in a very specific way, in very specific behaviors from the people you lead. Character trust is what someone has in you when they believe you mean what you say, when they believe your intentions are genuine, when they believe that if something goes wrong, you'll tell them the truth rather than just trying to manage the narrative. When they believe that you are the same person in private as you are in public, it's built through consistency between your words and your actions, through honesty in uncomfortable moments, and being through being willing to say, I don't know, or I was wrong, or I'm sorry, when those things are true. Competence trust is different. Competence trust is what someone has in you when they believe you are capable of delivering on what you commit to, when they trust your judgment, when they believe that following your directions will actually get them somewhere worth going. It's built through results, it's built through sound decisions, through navigating complexity and following through over time. Now, this is where it starts to get interesting. Most leaders in high performance environments, they invest heavily in building competence trust. They have the track records, the results, demonstrated capability. But a lot of them have significantly, significantly underperformed in character trust. Not because they're not people of good character, but because they have never thought specifically about what behaviors build that type of trust. And so they assume that because they are competent, people trust them. And then they get generally confused when people comply with their directions but are not fully committed to it. Compliance is what competence trust alone produces. Commitment requires character trust also. Most leaders are leading on borrowed trust anyway. Their competence, the competence trust bought them entry into the room. But their character trust is what keeps the people around them in the room with them. I worked with a leader, I'll call David. David was exceptional, sharp, strategic, decisive. When he spoke in a meeting, people listened because his read on the market was probably one of the best I've ever seen, and he was almost always right. His competence was never in question. And yet something was consistently off in how his team members responded to him. They followed his directions but never brought him their real problems. They executed well, but they never went beyond what was explicitly asked of them. And the agents on his team were leaving at a rate that didn't match how well they were performing. When David brought me in and I started talking to the people around David, a pattern came through almost immediately. People trusted his judgment completely. What they did not trust was his consistency. He said things in one-on-ones that didn't match what he was saying in the group settings. He made commitments and forgot about them. He was warm and invested when a relationship served an immediate purpose and was distant when it did not. Not malicious, just inconsistent. And that inconsistency at the character level erodes trust in ways that no amount of competency can ever fix. Because people don't ultimately follow leaders whose judgment they respect. They follow leaders who they respect. And those are not always the same person. Think about the people closest to you professionally right now. For each one, honestly, ask yourself this question: Does this person trust who I am or do they trust what I can do? Because if the answer is only one of the two, you know exactly where you need to put your energy. Competence without character produces compliance. Character without competence produces goodwill without followership. And you need both. And the one that's underdeveloped is worth working on first. Let me give you the framework I come back to more than almost anything else when I'm working with leaders on trust. Trust operates like a bank account. Every interaction you have with another person is either a deposit into the trust account or withdrawal from that trust account. Deposits build the balance, withdrawals draw down the balance. And unlike financial accounts, the balance in a trust account is not just a number. It determines everything about the quality of the relationship and the effectiveness of your leadership. Deposits look like this. You make a commitment, no matter how small and you keep it. You tell someone something difficult because you respect them enough to be honest. You follow up when you said you would. You give credit publicly to someone who earned it. You admit when you're wrong without making a whole big production. You say, I don't know, when you really don't know, instead of giving some weird answer that sounds confident but turned out to be totally wrong. You treat people the same whether they're in the room or not. Each one of those is a deposit. And the person on the receiving end registers it, usually without even consciously noting it. They just feel the account growing. Which rurals look like this. You make a commitment in passing, you forget about it. It felt small to you, so you didn't do anything. You tell someone one thing, and someone else finds out something totally different that you said. You take credit for an outcome that belonged to someone else. You promised a conversation with someone that never got scheduled. You made a decision that affected someone, and they find out after the fact from someone else besides you. You're a warm and direct in your one-on-ones and vague and evasive in a group setting. Each of those is going to be a withdrawal, and the person registers those two. Now, here's something that most people genuinely don't know. Withdrawals cost more than the deposits earned. There's research on what's called negativity bias. And this research shows us that it takes multiple positive interactions to offset a single negative one. So just one trust withdrawal does not simply cancel one deposit. It may take three or four or five deposits to what one single trust withdrawal cost you. Which means the leader who makes two deposits one week and one withdrawal every other week, they're not breaking even. You're slowly running in a deficit. And they usually don't notice it until that account is significantly overdrawn, which is usually when someone valued unexpectedly leaves. Or they stop bringing you problems, or they stop going above and just do what's minimally required. Now, I want to spend a moment on the other side of this too, because the deposit side is just as real. And leaders who build it deliberately produce something almost impossible to replicate by any other way. You're listening to the leadership series on the Jeffrey Scott Stanton podcast, where leadership principles are broken down and applied in the real world. I want to take a moment to recognize and thank one of our family partners, the CE Shop. If you believe growth never stops, and I know you do because you're here listening to this, then investing in your education should feel like a step forward, not a chore. The CE Shop provides online real estate education designed to fit your schedule and keep your career moving. Pre-licensing, post-licensing, continuing education. All that is built so you can learn on your own terms at your own time. Visit theceshop.com. Link is in the show notes. Tell them J Squared Podcast Productions sent you. I know a little call Renee. Renee was not the most she didn't have the most charisma. She wasn't the loudest voice in the room, not the most traumatic storyteller, not the best storyteller. But Renee had more than anyone I have ever watched lead was this. She did exactly what she said she would do every single time. If she said she would follow up by Thursday, there was an email by Wednesday night. If someone mentioned in a one-on-one that they were stressed out about something personal, she would check in with them the following week without having to be reminded. Not because she had a system, because she was paying attention and she actually cared about what happened. Small things. Nothing that would stand out in any given week, but over time leading the same team, those small, consistent deposits built something that showed up in a very specific way when the market got difficult. Rising rates, slower transaction, less volume. Agents who had been coasting in that strong market prior to suddenly felt a production challenge and had every reason to disengage or start taking those calls from other offices and other brokerages. They did not disengage. Her agents, they leaned in. They brought Renee their real problems early enough to actually help solve them. The agents covered for each other, the team covered for each other. They stayed committed to outcomes that were not immediately in their individual best interest because they trusted the leader in the front of the room, had their backs always. That trust is not built on a single big moment. It was built upon hundreds of small ones compounding over time. And when the pressure came, the account had enough in it to carry the team through something that broke a lot of other teams, a lot of other brokerages. That's the dividend. You know, you don't lose agents when they leave. You lost that agent when the trust broke. And that moment, that trust broke, was probably something neither one of you have been able to name, even if you tried. So here's the thing I'd ask you to do for at least the next week. Track every commitment you make, not just the big ones, all of them. Every time you say, I'll get back to you, or I'll send that over, or let us connect about that, write it down and follow through on every single one. That habit, practiced consistently on a daily basis, will build the kind of trust that holds up under pressure no matter what. Trust rarely breaks in dramatic moments. We tend to think of trust as being broken in terms of a major failure, a major disappointment, a significant eye, a public betrayal, a decision that was clearly wrong or self-serving. And yeah, those things absolutely do break trust. But that's not how most trust actually gets damaged in leadership relationships. Most trust damage happens quietly in moments so small that the leader doesn't even realize they've happened at all. Trust not break when you fail. It breaks when you say something and they don't follow through. I want to share something that still to this day I think about. I had a person on a team that I was leading, someone who was talented, who I believed was fully committed. And they were for a really long time. And then they weren't. And I didn't catch it until they came to me and told me they decided to leave to go to a different brokerage. That conversation that we had, that conversation we had that day was probably more honest than any conversation we had had in months. And what they told me hurt. Somewhere along the way, they had stopped believing I would follow through on the things I said. Not the big things, the small ones. The check-ins that got scheduled and rescheduled, and I never followed through with. The promises made in passing that I already forgot about by the time I got to my office. They stopped bringing me their real concerns because they stopped trusting that anything would actually come about it. I didn't lose them when they left. I had lost them a long time before that. Lost them in a series of moments I hadn't even noticed. Each one small enough to be rationalized, together large enough to cost me someone I generally did not want to lose and someone I considered a friend. There's something that I have found to be universally true when I work with leaders. Most of them are carrying an inflated sense of where they stand relationally with the people that they lead. They are measuring it by their intention. The people around them are measuring it by what they actually experience. And those two numbers almost never the same. But here's what changes it. Before you make a commitment, any commitment, ask yourself this question. Am I honestly going to do this? Not do I intend to do it, am I going to do it? And if the answer is maybe or probably or I hope so, don't make the commitment. Instead, say, let me check my calendar, let me check my schedule, and get back to you today if we can do that. That one shift changes the dynamic in your most important relationships faster than almost anything that you can do. Here's a question I get asked often. What do you do when the trust is already damaged? When you're not starting from zero, you're actually starting from a deficit, when the account has been overdrawn for so long, such a long Time and the person on the other side of the relationship has already adjusted how they show up with you because of it. Here's what most leaders do when they realize trust has been damaged. They go straight to explanation, explaining it away. They want to provide context for what happened, to give the reasons behind the decision that felt like betrayal. They want to explain the circumstances that led to the broken commitment, why they did, why they didn't. And the intention behind that is completely genuine. I get it. What they want is for the other person to understand. But here's what research actually shows on repairing trust. And it shows it clearly. An explanation without acknowledgement first is heard as excuse making. And the person whose trust was damaged does not feel understood when you just explained. They feel managed. And being managed is its own form of withdrawal. There was a leader, Marcus. Marcus made a decision significantly affected one of his key people. A decision about a role and a responsibility that that person found out, not through Marcus, but someone else in the organization. The trust was immediately damaged, visibly damaged. The person became guarded, withdrawn, professionally compliant, but personally disengaged, disengaged from Marcus, disengaged from the organization. Marcus knew something had broken. And his first instinct was to explain it away, to lay out the full context, the constraints what he was working on, the reasons it unfolded, why it did, which all that from his side sounded legitimate. Before he went into that conversation, I asked Marcus one question. What do you think that person, what do you think the person needed to hear from you first? Not what do you need to say? What do they need to hear? Marcus sat there for a while and said, probably that I that I understand why they feel the way they feel, and that it wasn't okay they found out from somebody else the way they did. And that I understand that it cost us the relationship. Marcus hadn't been planning on starting there. He had been planning on starting with the explanation. He changed the sequence. He went in with acknowledgement first and stayed there until the other person visibly softened and then only moved to context then. The conversation was still hard. The repair did not happen in that one meeting. It took several months of changed behavior before the relationship fully recovered, but it did recover. And what Marcus said to me afterwards was that the other person didn't need to hear a perfect explanation that he thought. They just needed to know that he understood them and understood how they felt, the way they felt, and what it had cost. Once they felt that, they were willing to hear everything else. That sequence, the sequence matters more than the context. If you have a relationship right now where the trust has been damaged, here's what that sequence looks like. Here's the sequence you can use. Acknowledgement first. Not your reasoning. Acknowledge their experience. Acknowledge that something happened that affected them in a real way and that their experience is valid. Stay there in that acknowledgement longer than it feels comfortable for you. Because the instinct to move to resolution at that point is going to be powerful, but you need to resist it. Then and only then, context. Then you need to change your behavior. That changed behavior, which can't be announced, has to be demonstrated. And then time. On their time, not yours. The discomfort of sitting in that deficit while you try to rebuild is the price of the original withdrawal. There's no way around it. You can only go through it. What about trust when you're new? And I want to spend some time on that situation because I know a lot of people listening are either in it right now or heading towards that. What about when you're new in a role? New to a specific team, the office, the responsibility. How do you build trust when you have not yet had the time to demonstrate anything? This is harder than it actually looks. When you step into a leadership role, you're not walking with a blank slate. You walk into a relational history. If the previous leader was trusted, there's an expectation you will need to either earn or you're going to disappoint people. If they were not trusted, there's skepticism that has nothing to do with you personally, but you're going to have to work through that and build that trust. And if you were promoted from within the team, the people who used to be your peers, who used to talk to management about, are now being asked to follow you. That shift does not happen automatically, regardless of how well they know you, regardless of how well they like you, regardless of how well they expected you when you were on the team. Here's something that research shows that you may find a value. People make an initial trust assessment of a new leader within the first few interactions, not weeks, interactions, which means what you do in those very first conversations, in those very first moments when people are watching and forming their impressions of you matter more than you may realize. And the mistake I see most often is that new leaders try to establish credibility through competency first. They want to demonstrate that they know what they're doing. They come in with answers, they make decisions quickly to show confidence. And while none of that is wrong, it's addressing the wrong dimension of trust first. People do not need to know what you are capable of before they trust you. They need to know who you are first. There are four things that you can do to build character trust within the next 30 days before competency has ever had time to be demonstrated. First is listen more than you talk, not as a tactic, but because you generally do not know yet what the team needs of you, what worked, what hasn't worked, what's not working, what people are carrying with them. A leader who asks real questions and actually listens before making decisions signals to everyone that they value what is already there in the team and in the room. And that signal lands immediately. Second, keep every small commitment that you make with obsessive consistency. In those first few weeks, the team is watching everything you do. The commitment made and kept, no matter how minor is a deposit into your trust account. The commitment made and broken, no matter how minor is a withdrawal, that is huge. In the early days of new leadership, every data point gets weighed heavily, and those withdrawals get weighed much more heavily than those deposits. Third, be honest about what you know and what you don't know. New leaders often feel the pressure to project certainty because they think that that's what leadership looks like. It's not. Certainty projected over real uncertainty erodes character trust the moment the uncertainty becomes visible, which it almost always does. A leader who says, I don't have the full picture yet, and I want to fully understand before I make the call, they build trust in that moment more than anyone who gives away a confident answer that later turns out to be wrong. The fourth is find one thing that matters most to the team and deliver on it visibly in the first 30 days. It doesn't have to be a big, huge initiative. Something specific and meaningful. In the real estate environment, it might be fixing a process that the agents complained about for months, or addressing something that came up in your early conversations, resolving maybe a communication breakdown everyone knew about, but nobody was able to solve. Connect that directly back to what you heard. That signal, more than almost anything else you can do, tells the team that the listening was not an act, that you actually heard them and you did something about it. Before we wrap up, I want to make sure this lands somewhere real for you. Think about three or four of the most important professional relationships in your world right now. The people whose trust determines whether they stay, whether they bring you real problems, whether they go beyond what's required of them. For each one, ask yourself honestly this question: Is this account in surplus or in deficit? You probably know that answer deep down inside already. You felt it in those conversations, how easily or how careful things were, and whether it's real honesty in the room or just a managed version of it. If there's a relationship where the trust is lower than you want it to be, don't guess which side is the problem. Ask the person. Find a private moment and ask that person directly. What's the one thing I could do differently that would make it easier for you to come to me with the real stuff, with the problems? That question, asked genuinely and received with openness, will tell you more about where you actually stand than anything else you could do or anything else you can ask. And then importantly, take the answer serious. Because the leaders who build the deepest trust are not the ones who never break it. They are the ones who pay attention when it's breaking, do something about it before it becomes permanent. For the people listening to this who are not yet leading a formal team, I want to give you some direct advice. Trust is not something you just start building when you get the title. It's something you either have or don't by the time that title arrives. A leader who steps into a new role and builds trust quickly are almost always the people who are already known for keeping small commitments, already known for being honest when honesty was uncomfortable, or treating people the same way no matter if it was convenient or not convenient. That reputation is built right now in the relationship you're in today, in the commitments you make and your current role and the commitments you keep. In those small moments where it's easier just to let something slide and you didn't. Every one of those moments is a deposit. And the account you're building right now is the account you will always lead from. Trust, it's not soft. It's not a background condition or a leadership nice to have. It's the economic engine of every important relationship that you will lead. When it's high, everything moves faster, the cost is less, and you produce more. When it's low, everything costs more than it should. And the extra cost is invisible in the moment, but compounds over your time and truly is going to cost you and the organization. Building trust is not complicated, but it requires doing unglamorous things consistently, keeping those small commitments, being honest, acknowledging before explaining, building the character side of the equation with the same rigor that you tried to build the competence side of the equation. And when trust is damaged, doing the repair work in the right sequence, on the other person's timeline without trying to shortcut it through your own discomfort. Thank you very much for continuing this journey with me. If you'd like to stay connected, please follow me on social media for updates, future episodes, and additional leadership insights. If you found this episode of value, I'd really appreciate it if you can leave a comment to review or share with someone who is trying to lead people but does not realize that trust is the reason it's not fully working yet. Because the right message at the right time can rebuild a relationship that is already starting to break. And that conversation is worth having before the distance gets too wide. Thank you again to our family partners, all leaders in their respective field, wise agent, the CE Shop, and Subi. Their information is in the show notes. I'm Jeffrey Scott Stanton. Lead with intention, lead with trust. I'll see you on the next one.

Announcer 33:22

Leadership isn't learned in pages, it's built through repetition. What you apply becomes your standard, and what you reinforce becomes who you are as a leader. Leadership is built in practice and proven in performance. This has been the Leadership Series, hosted by Jeffrey Scott Stanton and produced by J Squared Podcast Productions.