Trust Isn’t a Skill, It’s a Survival Strategy

Daniel Goleman is author of the international best-seller Emotional Intelligence and Optimal: How to Sustain Personal and Organizational Excellence Every Day. He is a regular contributor to Korn Ferry. 

One of the most overused words in corporate leadership: trust. This word shows up everywhere on values posters, town-hall slides, and strategy decks. And yet, for something mentioned so frequently, it’s surprisingly misunderstood—and underdeveloped—by many leaders.

Francis Frei, a Harvard Business School professor who studies the topic, defines trust as a triangle composed of three traits: authenticity, logic, and empathy. We trust people who are real with us, who make sound decisions, and who show us they care. For trust to be solid, all three of these need to be in place.

Through this lens, trust isn’t something we have or don’t have. Rather, it’s fluid, nuanced and contextual, built through time, presence, and emotional labor. This makes trust an inherently emotional and evolving process—far from the static state most companies make it out to be.

From an emotional-intelligence perspective, trust lives at the intersection of self-awareness and relationship management. Leaders who understand their own emotional patterns—especially under stress—are more likely to communicate with clarity and care. And those leaders who actively invest in relationships—who ask, rather than assume, and listen, rather than defend—are the ones who create the conditions for better decision-making and more connected bonds with colleagues.

From a neuroscience perspective, a lack of trust limits a team’s capacity for clear thinking. Trust is connected to the brain’s reward circuitry, where joy and stress are modulated. When people feel safe and trusted, they think more clearly, collaborate more openly, and take smarter risks. When they don’t, they are on alert—prone to a hypervigilance that shrinks their capacity to be creative, communicative, and engaged.

In today’s workplace, where many employees feel let down by what they perceive as performative values or shifting goalposts, leaders have to be especially attentive to how they are building or breaking trust. As the economy shifts and AI enters the workplace, employees are receiving mixed messages: Leaders are asking for increased output, flexibility, and loyalty, while simultaneously mandating where employees work and how they work, and even implementing surveillance tools. These actions send an implicit message: We need you, but we don’t fully trust you. When an employee feels this, it kicks off a reinforcing loop: When you don’t trust me, I don’t trust you. This loop goes on and on, until there is no trust left at all.

So what can leaders do—especially in environments where things are constantly shifting?

Here are some starting points:

• Slow down. Many leaders move so fast that they miss the relational cues right in front of them. Distracted check-ins or missed follow-ups are the small things that erode trust over time.
• Ask real questions. One of the simplest ways to build trust is to genuinely care how someone is doing—asking about not just deliverables, but about a person’s well-being, energy, and sense of meaning in the work. Trust expert Robert Hurley calls this “benevolent concern.” “Trust is an issue not because people are evil,” says Hurley “but because they are often self-centered.”
• Practice transparency. People don’t expect perfection, but they do depend on honesty. Especially in times of uncertainty, naming what you know—and what you don’t—is imperative. In moments of tension, what we don’t say can become far more powerful than what we do say.
• Be consistent. Trust is cumulative, built over time through repeated signals that say: I see you, I hear you, and I’ve got your back. This includes doing what you say you will: When words don’t match actions, trust falls flat, and people are left with little to believe in.

In a recent Korn Ferry Workforce survey, 80% of respondents said they would stay in a job because they have a manager they trust. This statistic confirms a long held truth: We don’t just work for companies, we work for people. Over the long term, even the best perks and compensation packages can’t compete with great leaders who build a sense of safety and loyalty in the workplace.  

Co-written by Elizabeth Solomon

Click here to learn more about Daniel Goleman's Building Blocks of Emotional Intelligence.