Two Halves Of Trust

26 Jun, 2025

Trust isn’t one thing.

Decision and delivery

Most have felt it. You wrestle through a choice, align the team, leave the room with a decision — and months later, not much has changed. The call itself wasn’t wrong. The effort wasn’t lacking. Somewhere between boardroom and frontline, momentum drained away.

We often badge this as an “execution problem.” But scratch the surface and what you usually find is a trust problem — not in the sense of whether people like one another. Organisations need two distinct elements of trust in place.

Honesty in the room

The first part is interpersonal. Patrick Lencioni describes it as the willingness to be vulnerable with one another — to raise awkward truths, admit mistakes, and challenge assumptions without fear. Without it, meetings are tidy but shallow. People nod along, while doubts and risks stay unspoken.

This kind of trust gives leaders better raw material for decisions. It brings in the market signal, the operational constraint, the customer feedback. It makes the call more robust.

Confidence in the system

The second part is organisational. Elliott Jaques argued that genuine trust in organisations comes less from personality and more from structure: the confidence that the system itself is reliable and fair.

That means accountability and authority are aligned, managers genuinely add value to their team’s work, and decisions are made in the right place without endless rework. When those conditions are present, people don’t need to hedge or second-guess. They can commit with pace and conviction, trusting that the scaffolding will hold.

This is the trust that ensures choices made at the top actually travel. People can throw their energy into execution knowing the system won’t betray their effort.

Trust on trust

The two parts feed one another.

Honesty relies on execution. If people trust that decisions will be carried through, they can afford to be candid. The conversation can be bolder, more nuanced, less defensive.
Execution relies on honesty. If people trust that decisions are grounded in reality, they commit more fully. Without that, they hold back, build in hidden contingencies, or wait to see if management will reverse course.

Trust is not one or the other. It’s both, working together.

In practice

Take a simple example: pricing a new product. Interpersonal trust ensures the debate is real. Sales bring their view of the market, finance test the margin model, product weigh the competitive angle. The discussion is frank, not polite. That produces a stronger decision.

But the decision only matters if it is acted upon. That’s where organisational trust comes in. Marketing need to be trained to communicate the value, sales equipped with new collateral, finance systems updated to invoice correctly. Without that scaffolding, the decision dissolves into frustration.

The same applies to strategy shifts. Interpersonal trust sharpens the choice; organisational trust embeds it in the way the business runs. Both are required.

Closing the loop

Candour without structure gives lively debate but little delivery. Structure without candour gives efficient silence — decisions carried out quickly but often wrong.

Strong organisations create trust through through candour and structure. That is what turns decisions into action — and keeps momentum alive between boardroom and frontline.

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