“The challenge in every case is the same: you can’t demand trust. You can only build the conditions for it and then wait.“
Welcome to the fifth issue of The Executive Edit
I’ll be transparent with you: I’m writing this issue from inside the problem.
Trust specifically the kind required to keep showing up when nothing is working yet is something I’m actively wrestling with right now. Across different parts of my life, I’m experiencing the gap between the effort being invested and the results that haven’t arrived yet.
And here’s the irony that wasn’t lost on me. I sat down to write an issue on how leaders build trust in their teams and with their stakeholders, and I found I couldn’t write it without first being honest about how hard I find it myself. By nature, I want to see results quickly. The waiting is the hard part.
So that’s where we start ,how do you keep showing up when there’s no proof yet that it’s working?
Here’s what I want to flag before you read on. Most issues of The Executive Edit give you things to do. A framework, an audit, a set of questions to take into your next leadership conversation. This issue does too and I’m aware of the slight irony in that, because the central truth of trust is that you cannot manufacture it through action alone.
What you can do is create the conditions for it and that includes your own mindset. You can choose the right actions, you can collect the right evidence, and you can give it the time it needs which is almost always longer than feels comfortable.
That’s not nothing. In fact, for action-oriented leaders, it might be the hardest work of all to set up the conditions and process and then wait for the results to appear.
Sandra Webber
Editor-in-Chief, The Executive Edit
Author: Own It and The Evergreen Executive
Have a leadership topic you’d like me to explore? Email me: sandra@sandrawebbercoaching.com
On building the conditions for trust - in your team, in your stakeholders, and in yourself
The Problem With Trust Is That You Can’t Do It
Most leadership challenges have an action attached. Clarity? I suggested you run a team audit. Communication?get to know your people and make changes to your rhythm or approach. Accountability? redesign your check-ins and ensure clear ownership with one owner not many. There’s always a lever to pull.
Trust doesn’t work like that. In my experience its either there or not there.
And for practical, action-oriented leaders which describes most of the high performers I coach that’s deeply uncomfortable. You’re used to solving problems by doing something – I can relate to this big time. Trust asks you to keep doing the same things, without certainty, without feedback, for longer than feels reasonable.
The advice you’ll get is trust the process, keep showing up and this is correct. It’s also maddening to hear, because it offers no mechanism. Nothing to adjust. Nothing to measure. Nothing to fix.
What fills that void is doubt and in my case frustration. And doubt doesn’t just feel bad it actively interferes with execution. When you’re not sure the effort is working, you start questioning the actions themselves leading you to tinker (think diets and golf!). You consider quitting. And paradoxically, the uncertainty that came from not trusting enough starts to create the very underperformance you feared.
That’s the vicious circle. And leaders can get into it just as easily as individuals.
Where Trust Actually Breaks Down
In my experience coaching senior leaders, there are five places in the system where trust tends to fracture:
Within Themselves
High performers who’ve lost faith in their own judgment usually after a period of poor results, failed initiatives, or personal disruption, start over-correcting. They second-guess decisions, stall on action, seek excessive validation. The internal narrative shifts from I know what I’m doing to what if I’m wrong this time?
With Individual Team Members
Often a performance issue that was never properly addressed, or a dynamic that corroded quietly over time. By the time the leader recognises it, the gap between expectation and delivery has become personal.
With The Team As A Whole
When clarity has been absent (and if you read Issue 4, you’ll recognise this pattern), the team defaults to self-preservation. People stop taking risks. Collaboration becomes transactional. Performance flattens.
With Senior Stakeholders
The leader is executing well but hasn’t made that visible upward. The absence of evidence not the absence of performance is the problem.
With Clients
A shift in delivery quality, communication rhythm, or relationship investment that the client notices before the leader does. I had this experience recently in a visit to a shop I have used for nearly 5 years in London, there was a definite shift in the wrong direction with the service delivery that I felt big time as a customer, I have lost trust now in the standard of service I might get next time – do I give them another chance or do I go elsewhere? Up until this recent experience I couldn’t fault them now I have doubts.
The challenge in every case is the same: you can’t demand trust. You can only build the conditions for it and then wait.
What I’ve Learned From Watching It Work
I want to share something that happened recently, because it’s the clearest evidence I’ve encountered of why patience with trust is not passive it’s a discipline.
Last year I worked with a client navigating a career transition within marketing. We got precise about what she wanted: role type, company culture, salary range, the conversations she needed to have, the way her CV and profile needed to read. She executed everything. She got to final rounds. She didn’t get the offers. When our formal work together ended, she still didn’t have the role.
I kept in touch, because once a client, always a client, and I kept believing in the process because I’ve seen it work too many times to doubt it. At the end of 2025, she emailed me. She’d found exactly the role we’d targeted. Higher salary than we’d aimed for. She’d just had to trust the process for longer than either of us expected. In this case we had originally given 9 months to work the process and in reality she secured her new role in 12 months.
I had a second client in almost identical circumstances. Same outcome but instead of 5 months it took 9 months.
The intellectual conclusion is simple: it takes longer than we think. The correct actions, executed consistently, eventually compound. But knowing that intellectually and trusting it while you’re inside the uncertainty are two entirely different things.
The difference, I’ve come to believe, isn’t the quality of the process. It’s the quality of the evidence you’re collecting while you wait.
The Trust Issue is the fifth in The Executive Edit’s series on the building blocks of sustainable high performance. Issue 4 explored Clarity.
Sandra Webber is a high-performance executive coach and author of “Own It” and “The Evergreen Executive.” With 25+ years of leadership experience spanning corporate finance and executive development, she specialises in helping leaders develop the attitudes, behaviours and skills needed for today’s complex workplace.
Reach out at sandra@sandrawebbercoaching.com
The Trust Framework: Evidence, Actions, Time
Trust isn’t a feeling you conjure. It’s a conclusion your brain reaches when it has accumulated enough evidence that the right actions, applied consistently over time, will produce results. For action-oriented leaders, and most high performers are, this is uncomfortable. There’s no lever. Nothing to fix. Just the discipline to keep going.
Here’s the model I use with clients, and the one I’m currently applying myself.
Evidence – Reminding yourself of similar challenges where you succeeded
Write down three situations where you have trusted a process before that felt uncertain and it eventually worked. That’s your evidence bank.
This isn’t wishful thinking. It’s deliberately building a case that your brain can return to when doubt appears. For a leader building team trust, the evidence is: what happened the last time you invested in a person? What changed when you held that difficult conversation early and performance on the edge of disciplinary resulted in a star performer now? What did consistent recognition actually produce when someone felt undervalued and questioning their career prospects in the organisation?
Actions – Focus on what you can control only
The specific, repeatable behaviours that are within your control. Not the outcome, which you cannot control, but the input. In a team context: the weekly check-in that never gets cancelled. The recognition that is given in public. The hard conversation that happens in the moment rather than being stored. The decision that gets communicated, clearly, before people start speculating.
Time – Accept its going to take much longer than you think
The discipline to resist premature conclusion. Most trust breaks down not because the actions were wrong, but because they stopped too soon. The evidence hadn’t arrived yet. The compound effect hadn’t landed. The individual or the team needed more time than felt comfortable.
Where leaders derail is in confusing absence of evidence with evidence of absence. The fact that trust hasn’t visibly arrived yet is not proof that the process isn’t working.
The Leader's Specific Challenge
There’s a pressure senior leaders face that others don’t: you are expected to model trust even when you don’t feel it.
Your team reads you. If you’re visibly questioning whether the strategy will work or whether the effort is worth making they will mirror that doubt. Uncertainty is contagious. So is conviction.
This doesn’t mean performing false confidence. High performers see through that immediately. What it means is behavioural trust maintaining the actions associated with trust even when the internal feeling isn’t fully there yet.
The check-in that doesn’t get cancelled even when you’re exhausted. The follow-through on the commitment you made in passing. The decision communicated clearly before people start speculating. The recognition given publicly even in a difficult quarter.
The behaviour precedes the belief. Act as though you trust the process. The feeling follows.
This is counterintuitive for most people, who assume they need to feel confident before they can act confidently. Coaching, psychology, and my own experience all point the other way.
Your Toolkit This Issue — The Trust Audit
Take ten minutes. One pen, one page.
- Where in your leadership is trust currently under pressure? Name it specifically – a person, a project, a stakeholder relationship.
- What actions are you taking? List them.
- Are those actions genuinely right – or have you been tinkering because the results haven’t arrived yet?
- If the actions are correct: give them more time before you change anything. If they’re not: change the actions, not the timeline.
The most common leadership mistake with trust isn’t choosing the wrong process. It’s abandoning the right one too soon.
Want to explore building high-performing teams further? Executive coaching helps you develop both the strategic thinking to create the plan and the leadership presence to make it happen. → sandrawebbercoaching.com