Trust Is Built Slowly, Lost Quickly, and Rebuilt Through Consistent Behavior
The most important lesson I've learned about culture is that trust drives everything else.
9/15/20264 min read
Trust is built slowly, lost quickly, and rebuilt through consistent behavior rather than inspirational messaging.
I've been thinking a lot about this recently as I talk with peers about the challenge of building and maintaining culture in a post-COVID, post-layoff workplace.
Most leaders would agree with that statement in principle. Fewer appreciate just how profoundly trust affects culture.
Over the course of my career, I've seen organizations spend enormous amounts of time trying to improve collaboration, increase engagement, or strengthen culture. They launch initiatives, publish values, hold all-hands meetings, and organize team-building events.
Sometimes these efforts help.
But I've come to believe that culture is less about what leaders say and more about what employees experience repeatedly over time.
Trust is the operating system underneath everything else.
When trust is high, employees share ideas freely, ask for help without hesitation, volunteer for difficult assignments, and invest in relationships that continue generating value long after a project is complete.
When trust is low, even the best-designed systems struggle.
The Strongest Culture I Experienced
At one company, we stumbled into a number of practices that, in hindsight, created an unusually strong culture.
We hired people in groups and brought them together for intensive onboarding. New hires learned the technology, our consulting methodology, and our expectations. Just as importantly, they built relationships with one another.
Those onboarding cohorts often stayed connected for years.
When someone encountered a problem, they knew who to call.
When a client needed expertise, they knew who had seen something similar before.
When a new idea emerged, there was already a network of people willing to help explore it.
What we thought was an onboarding program turned out to be a trust-building program.
At the time, I would have told you the program worked because it taught people our approach, our technology, and our expectations.
Looking back, I think that's only part of the story.
The real value was that it allowed people to build relationships before they needed one another. The consulting methodology mattered. The software mattered. But those investments paid dividends because trust existed underneath them.
The same thing happened with collaboration tools.
We were early users of Slack, but some of the most valuable interactions didn't happen in work channels. They happened in channels dedicated to hobbies, interests, sports, technology, and random conversations.
At first glance, those discussions looked unrelated to work.
In reality, they were creating the relationships that made work collaboration easier later.
People tend to share unfinished ideas with people they trust. Trust usually develops through human connection rather than organizational charts.
Competition Wasn't the Enemy
One lesson that often gets overlooked is that collaboration and competition are not opposites.
In the best cases, they reinforce each other.
In another experience, we rewarded strong performance through bonuses, recognition, and access to highly desirable assignments. There were projects everyone wanted to work on, and earning a spot on those teams carried status and opportunity.
Importantly, people understood what was being rewarded.
Great client work.
Initiative.
Leadership.
Innovation.
Helping the business succeed.
The goal wasn't to create winners and losers. The goal was to create examples.
Recognition answered the question:
"What does good look like here?"
People naturally gravitate toward behaviors that are rewarded and celebrated.
Culture Under Stress
By around 2020, the culture began to feel different.
Like many organizations, we experienced a period of significant disruption. The pandemic changed how people worked and interacted. Teams became more distributed. Economic uncertainty affected business decisions. The company itself was going through a major transition.
I've spent time reflecting on why the culture no longer felt quite as strong as it once had.
Looking back, I don't think the challenge was a lack of talent, commitment, or good intentions. If anything, people were trying to navigate an unusual amount of change all at once.
While it's impossible to isolate any single cause, I've come to believe the underlying issue was trust.
Employees can navigate an extraordinary amount of change when they trust leadership, trust their colleagues, and trust that the organization is moving in a positive direction.
What becomes difficult is maintaining a highly collaborative culture when uncertainty increases.
The internal dialogue begins to shift.
Before: How can I help?
After: How do I make sure I'm okay?
The difference may seem subtle, but its impact can be profound.
Collaboration becomes less automatic.
Knowledge sharing slows.
People become more selective about where they invest their time and energy.
Not because they care less.
Not because they become worse employees.
But because uncertainty naturally encourages self-preservation.
Why Culture Cannot Be Fixed by Messaging Alone
One mistake organizations frequently make after difficult periods is assuming morale can be restored through communication campaigns.
Communication matters.
Transparency matters.
Leadership visibility matters.
But trust is rarely rebuilt because of a single speech, email, or town hall.
Trust returns when employees repeatedly observe behaviors that support the messages leadership is sending.
If leaders say people matter, employees look for investments in training, development, and career growth.
If leaders say collaboration matters, employees look at who gets promoted and rewarded.
If leaders say the future is bright, employees look for evidence through hiring, client growth, and strategic decisions.
Employees believe what they see much more quickly than what they hear.
What I'm Taking Forward
The biggest lesson I've taken from these experiences is that healthy cultures should not be designed around engagement.
They should be designed around trust.
Trust grows when people build relationships.
Trust grows when expectations are clear.
Trust grows when leaders behave consistently.
Trust grows when organizations create opportunities for people to succeed together.
For professional services firms especially, culture is often less about perks and policies than about networks, relationships, and shared experiences.
The strongest cultures I've seen created belonging through cohorts, learning through mentorship, motivation through healthy competition, and commitment through meaningful contribution.
None of those happened overnight.
And none can be restored overnight once lost.
Earlier in my career, I probably would have described culture in terms of incentives, communication plans, and organizational design.
Today, I think about it differently.
Those things matter, but they are ultimately multipliers. They amplify what already exists.
When trust is strong, organizations become more collaborative, innovative, and resilient.
When trust is weak, even the best-designed systems struggle.
The encouraging part is that trust can be rebuilt. Not by attempting to recreate a previous era, but by helping people develop confidence in the next one.
Every organization eventually changes. The healthiest ones recognize that culture is not something they preserve in amber. It's something they continuously renew through relationships, shared experiences, and consistent leadership actions.
Culture follows trust. Everything else is downstream.
