Getting what you give: How leaders can cultivate trust in organisations

At Nous, we believe in the sustaining power of great organisational leadership. Over the past two years, we have launched the Nous Leadership Way (NLW), a leadership model and development program that articulates the core principles of effective leadership at Nous. Developing NLW has prompted Managing Principal and CEO Tim Orton to think more broadly about the challenges of great leadership, the attributes of great leaders, and how we think about these at Nous. 

Bank runs, conspiracy theories, and panic buying are disparate phenomena. But they each stem from the same cause: distrust.

Trust is the antidote to chaos and disorder. It is the foundation of social cooperation and coordination.

It is also a vital asset for businesses; it engenders better performance, and underpins strong cultures. Trust leads teams to work together because they want to, rather than because they have been compelled or directed to. Trust enables high performance, particularly under times of stress.

Leaders of organisations must thus think hard about how to build and sustain trust.

At Nous, we operate on three “truths” of trust:

1. Trust feeds itself. While most goods are subject to supply constraints, trust is not limited in this way. Its supply is not fixed and it can be continually developed. In fact, it is more than just unlimited: it is self-generating. Trust inspires and fosters more trust. The more we demonstrate and cultivate trust, the more we will receive.

2. Trust should be anti-fragile. It is often said that trust is hard-earned but easily lost. According to this view, trust is a fragile good. At Nous, we believe that this need not be the case. Trust can be strengthened by stressors and shocks (i.e. anti-fragile). Acts of trust often trigger reciprocal trustworthiness. Trust grows stronger in challenging times when it is tested and proven reliable. Even breaches of trust can (within reason) be trust-enhancing by providing an opportunity to learn from mistakes and forge deeper connections.

3. Trust is an accelerant and a lubricant. Trust enables organisations to move faster and with less friction, particularly in times of crisis, when it is most needed. It reduces transaction costs and the need for excessive oversight to enforce compliance. For this reason, trust gives a competitive advantage to organisations that actively invest in it. While trust is certainly a good in and of itself, it would be wrong to deny that there isn’t a commercial benefit to it, either.

These truths may be comforting, but they are nonetheless contingent. Leaders validate or nullify them through their actions. At Nous, we call them truths because we demonstrate them. We do not consider them mere nice things to say. For this reason, trust is one of the thirteen tenets of the Nous Leadership Way, our organisation’s leadership model and philosophy.

As Ernest Hemingway once said, “The best way to know if you can trust someone is to trust them.” At Nous, too, trust is assumed. We do not consider that trust should be earned, but rather freely and automatically given. In our experience, automatically granting trust tends to inspire trustworthiness. It is reciprocal, leading to our colleagues to trust us in return.

We also expect our leaders to inspire trust: in themselves, in others, and in Nous as an organisation. There is both an individual and a collective component to this.

Individually, Nous leaders promote and embody trust by acting in a trustworthy manner. This isn’t the same as being reliable. After all, inanimate objects can be reliable, but you wouldn’t necessarily call them trustworthy. (You might be disappointed by a broken clock, but it would be strange to feel betrayed by it. Not so with people). Acting in a trustworthy manner involves demonstrating goodwill, empathy, integrity, ethical conduct and good judgment that is befitting of others’ trust.

Promoting trust at the organisational level also requires leaders to take a mature approach when they experience a loss of trust. This involves three steps:

1. Understand. We must first stay calm and consider the situation, because many apparent breaches of trust are just misunderstandings borne of unclear expectations or poor communication.

2. Rectify. Once understood, we must fix the problems that arose from the lack of trust as well as the underlying causes that led to it.

3. Rebuild (or Exit). We must then invest in rebuilding trust between individuals and teams. In extreme cases, this may require the offending party to leave Nous and its network of trust.

Trust is a precious capability. Some would say that it is also precarious. We disagree. By consciously and constantly investing in trust, as individuals and as an organisation, trust can be an abundant and self-generating good.

In short, the more we give, the more we get.

Get in touch to discuss how you can cultivate trust within your organisational context.

Connect with Tim Orton on LinkedIn.

This is the fifth article in Tim Orton's 'Exploring Great Leadership' series. It was originally posted on LinkedIn on 4 June 2025.

You can read the previous article in the series here and the next article here.