Ep 27 - How Leaders Can Earn Trust When Certainty Fails

Impactful Conversations with Nejmi Alexander and Dr Glenn Wallis

Key takeaways

• Glenn argues that the traditional source of leadership authority - an information gap where the leader knew more than everyone else - has collapsed: anyone can now test what a leader says against an AI model in seconds, so performative certainty no longer works the way it might have five or ten years ago.

• Both hosts argue that transparency, not certainty, is the foundation of trust when the future is uncertain. Glenn distinguishes transparency from vulnerability and prefers it; Nejmi's view is that people sniff out incongruence instantly, so masking uncertainty is a bigger risk to trust than admitting you don't have the answer.

• Nejmi introduces the trust equation (attributed to Charles Green): credibility, reliability and intimacy over self-orientation - and reframes it as being other-interested rather than self-interested, arguing that admitting uncertainty rarely dents credibility if handled well.

• Glenn's field observation is that low team trust often traces back to the leader not being trusting enough: extending trust to your team is one of the fastest ways to become more trusted, and that trust is built in everyday behaviours and career conversations, not big staged town-hall events.

• Nejmi argues that implicit expectations are unfair to hold people to: when trust breaks down over unmet expectations, the leader's job is to make the expectation explicit and rebuild, not give up - and Glenn flags a follow-up topic the episode opened but didn't resolve: a leader's trust in themselves.

Episode summary

How do leaders earn trust when they can no longer offer certainty? Nejmi and Glenn's answer: the old authority of the information gap is gone, so trust now rests on transparency, consistency and being genuinely other-interested. They work through the trust equation, the leader who doesn't trust enough, and why implicit expectations erode trust - landing on trust as something built in a thousand small moments.

Why is it getting harder to earn and maintain the trust of my team?

Nejmi: Hello and welcome to today's Impactful Conversation with myself, Nejmi Alexander, and my excellent co-host, Dr Glenn Wallis. Glenn, how are you doing?

Glenn: Very good, Nejmi, thank you - enjoying some of this summer weather we're getting, and feeling quite upbeat as a result.

Nejmi: Very changeable, though. I was in Margate at the weekend and it was pretty much a washout - very rainy all the way through. Which is great when you've got two small children and some grumpy people to deal with - not the children! We had a great time. But yes, very much enjoying the summer, and looking forward to this conversation, where we're going to explore this idea of trust - and in particular, a conversation at the core of leadership identity. The topic today: how leaders earn trust when certainty isn't something they can offer any more.

Glenn: Maybe particularly on the back of a single piece - it is only a single data point, but it's worth sharing. The Edelman Trust Barometer 2025 report actually said that, for the first time, employees' trust in their employers is in decline - and, probably more starkly, there was an increase of 12 percentage points in employees feeling that their employers would overtly lie to them. It's one data point, but an interesting capture of some of what's going on. At a macro level, if you look at some of the behaviours we read about on the news on a regular basis, you get a sense that there's a greater level of distrust at a societal level than there may have been in the past - and particularly of people in authority. We end up with a bit of a populist political spectrum. Certainly here in the UK - I'm not going to comment on any other political situation, because I'm not qualified to do so - but it feels like there's some biting back going on.

Nejmi: It felt like we were about to go into a slightly different domain there, to go head to head with other popular podcasts! But that's fair. We've heard about this idea of being in a post-truth era, so it would be unsurprising that trust generally starts to decline when institutions are actively demonstrating that truth can be a questionable topic. Trust comes down to so many different factors. Macroeconomically as well, in the broader context, it's safe to say trust is declining. Even in the tech space a couple of years ago - the mass redundancies you saw in what had historically been growth areas over the past twenty years or so. It had been a one-way trajectory of growth for the big tech companies and the entire ecosystem, and when the things people could historically rely on start to be questioned, of course that leads to a decline in trust.

But what does that mean for individual leaders of people, when this kind of context shows itself? We spoke about the credibility gap on a recent podcast, and it really feels like it comes to the fore when we think about the role of the leader. When you think about defining what leadership is, or what makes a great leader, a bunch of different ideas come up - but typically trust, direction, clarity of vision, who that person is and what they represent, and how they're leading, feature highly in people's ideas of what a leader is. So there's a real challenge for leaders to maintain trust when the future feels uncertain. That level of uncertainty is increasing - one that leaders themselves are navigating, but they've also got the role of leading others when that context is true. It creates a real tension: how do I navigate this as a leader? How do I maintain the trust of my people? How do I create certainty when I don't have certainty myself?

How does AI change leadership authority when employees have access to the same information?

Glenn: And not to fake that - because, as you've often said, people can sniff that out a mile away. The world has always been uncertain, and leaders at the very best have made decisions based on the statistical probability that the decision they're making is the right one. But the point pertinent to what you've just said is that people had confidence and trust in their leaders very often because the leaders had access to more information than everybody else. The gap between what the leaders knew and what everybody else knew was quite wide. Information moved slowly, you didn't have access to it, and you certainly couldn't run scenarios through an AI model. Now that gap has shrunk really significantly - access to information is almost symmetrical between leaders and those who follow. The challenge is that if you're my boss and you tell me something, I can go straight to an AI model and test whether it's true, whether it's pertinent, or whether you're selling me a bit of a line. All of a sudden I'm not going to trust you only on what you say, whereas I might have done in the past. That's a really interesting space for leaders to consider: you can't be performative about certainty in the same way you might have got away with five or ten years ago.

Nejmi: Absolutely. So what we're talking about here is leadership identity - the role of the leader. If that asymmetry is no longer present, and that was a root source of where authority traditionally came from, then what is the role of the leader today, and where does leadership authority derive from? What are some of the components of a leadership identity when that's changed, or removed?

How should you lead when your team expects certainty but you don't have the answers?

Glenn: Good point. The honest answer is that it's for each individual leader to work out for themselves - it would be rather arrogant of me to stand there and say what it should be. I'd urge leaders to do their own learning around the different types of leadership styles they might want to adopt. Notice I said styles plural, not singular - don't go off and read only courageous-leadership or servant-leadership books. You can basically put anything before the word "leadership" and you've got a leadership model. Take the best from each. But what does your context require? What do the people in your team and your organisation require from leadership? Your organisation has probably got a set of leadership expectations - couple your own thinking and preferences with those. You need to proactively design what you are as a leader, who you're going to be, in the context of the organisation you're leading in.

Part of the information-symmetry piece is: accept that it is what it is. Don't try to blow smoke, or confuse people with stuff they could easily go off and research and find isn't true. I don't like the word "vulnerable", for all sorts of reasons, and you're aware of that because we've talked about it both on and offline. But there's something about being honest and transparent - I really like the idea of transparency, and I think it's different from being vulnerable. Be transparent about it. If you don't know, I wouldn't just go "I don't know" and leave it there - but you can be honest: "This isn't clear, we need to work through it and get some clarity." Wouldn't you argue that being honest is one of the basic tenets of building trust? I would.

Nejmi: I would, yeah. Like I said before, humans' ability to sniff out incongruence in people is dramatically high. People can tell when you're not being you, or not fully bought into what you're communicating, or not being honest in how you approach things. So it's really not a savvy way to approach leadership, because ultimately it will erode trust - it's inevitable. If that's important to you in your leadership, or important for you to have impact with the people you lead, then that's too big a cost to take when you trade off the risk of perhaps seeming less credible from not having the answers, versus maintaining trust.

Whenever I work with leaders on this topic, there's a discomfort with being willing to demonstrate where they feel weaker - this idea of imposter syndrome, where people feel they need to mask where they're less confident, or communicate an idea they're not fully bought into, and toe the party line, because "that's what leadership is, that's what leadership does". Often that's when we find incongruence between ourselves and what we think is required of us in our leadership - and then there's work to be done to identify where the reconciliation can sit, so people can be honest. "Authentic" is another very common word in this space, but it does have a place, because at its core what we're talking about is that it can feel risky to say "I don't have the answer, I don't know the way forward." What feels risky is this idea of credibility: if we admit we don't have all the answers, people might not trust us to lead them. But trust has so many different components - it's not just credibility. And I'd argue it doesn't impact your credibility if you manage it well. It's a real skill to navigate that tension: "I'm not entirely certain, this could go a bunch of different ways, but this is the way I think is best" - or "what do you think? Let's come to a consensus" - whatever the right method is to admit not having all the answers, but still be the decisive leader who leads the group.

If I admit I don't know the answer, will my team lose trust in me?

Nejmi: There's a book from a guy called Charles Green - I don't know if you're familiar with it - the trust equation, which talks about the different components that contribute to trust in a relationship. Credibility is a factor. Reliability - being able to deliver on what you said you would do - is another. Intimacy is one that comes up, which I think is a strange word in this context, but what it's describing is the comfort we can give people in a moment, and their trust in us - which is about effective trust: there being a small gap between how you show up in a moment and who you actually are. And it talks about the denominator around all those factors as being self-interest - self-orientation eroding trust - versus the converse, being other-interested: interested in the people you serve, putting their interests at the centre. All of those contribute to building trust. So if it feels risky, and it feels like you'll risk your credibility by admitting you don't have all the answers, I'd counter that it's a bigger risk to the overall quotient of trust - and ultimately that's the aim of the game.

Glenn: And back to your point about faking it: when you fake it, you massively undermine that trust-equation element, because it feels like you're working to your own agenda rather than everybody else's. Couple that with the credibility impact and it's huge. It's a great book, and a nice model to hold. I wouldn't set an awful lot of store by it literally, but it's a very good check-in point - "how am I doing against these things, and where is my trust?"

I'll give you another one, not related to the model, but which speaks to what you've just shared. Very recently, working with a very senior global team, one of the things that came out of the diagnostic conversations we have before we start working with any team was that trust was very low across the team. That wasn't a massive surprise based on some of the conversations we'd had before we even started. But the degree to which trust was felt to be low was quite extreme. And very interestingly, the reason it was so low was that the leader of the team wasn't trusting enough. We think about trust in this context as "do you trust your leader?" - but the other side of the coin is: is the leader trusting enough to show that sense of "I believe in you, I believe you've got the skill set, the appetite and the capability to go do this"? One of the ways of increasing your own trustedness from your team is to be more trusting of members of your team. Sometimes that ability to let go feels quite risky for leaders - the irony is that by not letting go, you're impacting your own trustedness, which is felt by everyone in the team.

Why does trusting your team make them more likely to trust you as a leader?

Nejmi: It's a really interesting dynamic. With a team I worked with not too long ago - similar to what you just described - the unlock, for precisely that team, was for the leader to recognise the impact of their low-trust behaviours. There will be a reason why you're not trusting: the stakes feel too high, or the relationship with your own hierarchy or senior stakeholders means you don't have as much trust in them, it's not been extended to you. There's usually context behind it. But irrespective of that, we all get into our blinkers, and that drives our behaviours. It's really important to remove those and see the context - the repercussions, the sometimes unexpected consequences of your behaviour. That gives you the little nugget to work with around shifting your behaviour to have an outsized impact on your team.

Glenn: Additionally - a thought that went off in my head as you were saying that - with a relatively small number of exceptions, you don't solve a lack of trust with a big staged event. It's not about the town halls, or the all-hands meeting, and definitely not about getting 2,000 people into a very swanky hotel and launching a new message. It's in the everyday conversations, the everyday behaviours you role-model, that build trust both ways: you'll be more trusted, in part because you're being more trusting. It's in the career conversations you have with somebody - what are their aspirations, what are you going to do to help them get the post or the exposure or the introduction they need? It's usually the million and one little things you do, rather than the big launch event. The only exception I can think of is when, say, one of the big oil companies has a massive oil spill and somebody's got to stand up and put their hand up for that globally. With that pretty rare exception, doing a big event to try to re-establish trust is not the way to do it.

Nejmi: Totally agreed. It's a really interesting quality that trust has: it can take hundreds of micro-moments to build up, and one moment to erode all of that credit in the bank. And it is in the micro-moments. Extending trust to your team is often closely tied to autonomy, consistency, and giving appropriate space for other people in the moments of their interactions with you. It's not all about the excellent judgment you can demonstrate in a moment - it's about how you bring people along in that judgment and that thinking. That's what helps people feel that sense of effective trust. It can shift quite quickly when you recognise the shift in behaviour you need to demonstrate, and then put it into action immediately.

If you want to build trust with your people: acknowledge, or even ask, how consistent are you being? Do they know what they can get from you? Do you stick to what you said you'd do? Do you maintain the time you've put in with them for conversations focused around their goals and interests? Those factors that come into building trust - are you consistently prioritising them? And if you're not, or if there are moments where it drops, acknowledge that, park the ego - there's always context, always reasons - and just try, in as objective a manner as possible, to look at: what could I be doing better here? Could I be more consistent? Could I be more transparent with my people? Can they trust in me? Very difficult questions to pose in isolation - they really are conversations to be had with people you trust around you. But they're important.

Someone on my team has broken my trust — how should I respond as their leader?

Glenn: And that leader has got to be willing to do that work. If you're not, the by-product will be that trust isn't where you'd like it to be for the team to work optimally. You mentioned a really interesting point - I've had, I can't tell you how many conversations, particularly with more junior leaders, about the idea that it takes lots of steps to build trust but maybe one to dash it. I've honestly had tens of conversations with more junior leaders who say, "That's it - they've lost my trust now, they're gone to me." And I say, "Well, what have they got to do to help rebuild it?" And the number of times people have turned around and said "Well, nothing - that's it, that trust will never be the same as it was."

I get it, when you feel let down. But that's a standard that means that person has never got a way back to re-establishing trust with you - you're not trusting them, and there's no way to repair the relationship to a level that's going to be as effective, or even more effective, as it was. Those kinds of fissures in a relationship should be an opportunity to make it stronger, not weaker. To leaders listening: if you're one of those people who's quite binary about it - either we're high-trust or we're not - I think that's a real limiter for your effectiveness as a leader, and for that person's ability to deliver what you need them to deliver. Understandable, but not helpful.

Nejmi: Absolutely. This comes to a conversation I was having yesterday with a group, around this idea of implicit expectation. We all have them, of course - but it's not fair to exercise a decision, or conclude on a moment, if our implicit expectations haven't been made explicit. If people don't deliver on what your expectation was, but you aren't 100% sure they were crystal clear on it, then it's your responsibility to clarify and work on that, not to give up. Because what it sounds like you're describing is people just giving up: "I'm giving up on that person, I don't trust them, I don't think they can get to where I need them to be." Effectively you're giving up in those moments. It's a responsibility of your leadership, I'd argue, to do everything you can to enable performance to happen in the way you expect. Not over-committing - it's not necessary to over-commit to everybody, I'm not suggesting that. But if there are expectations that haven't been met, or better still, expectations at risk of not being met, intervene to make them explicit, and then hold people to that standard. Because if you hold people to a standard that was implicit, I don't think that's fair.

Glenn: I couldn't agree more. That's absolutely key to good, effective leadership. Without it, everyone's playing a guessing game - I don't know how to do what you need me to do if you, as the leader, haven't been clear on that.

Nejmi: That's where you can bring certainty. In terms of where your expectations lie, you have the agency to describe that and manage to it - so that is something you can create some structure and certainty around. When there's more uncertainty in the way forward, when there's newness in it, of course there might be implicit expectations you aren't aware of until they haven't been met - and equally, at that moment, that's a learning for everybody. So I don't think it's fair to erode, or decide, that trust has been lost in those moments. There's more work to be done.

How do you create psychological safety without lowering expectations or accountability?

Glenn: I think what we're hinting at is a concept we've mentioned before on the podcast: psychological safety. You've talked before about Google's huge research project - Aristotle, I think it was called - about effective teams, and how important psychological safety is: make clear expectations, but also make it clear that if you mess up, that's fine. We're not looking for people to mess up, but it's okay to get it wrong, and okay to speak up - you're not going to break my trust by speaking up. In fact, I'd argue that you speaking up and being honest with me increases my trust in you. But we all know there are leaders who don't operate with that frame.

I've always said to people that I tend to work from a position, when I first meet somebody, of "I trust you implicitly from the start - it's almost your job to disprove my belief in you." I start from that position. I understand, for all sorts of reasons, why people can't or don't do that - but there's some benefit to it.

Nejmi: It's a bit of a segue, but a really interesting data point. There are studies around privilege and the relationship between privilege and a trusting position. I don't have the exact data, but I looked at it for a programme I led a couple of years ago: broadly, if you benefit from a greater degree of privilege, you tend to be more trusting of your environment and people by default; and the opposite is also true - if you didn't benefit from privilege, and there's a whole range of sources of privilege, you tend to be less trusting of people generally. People unconsciously bring that into their leadership, for better or worse. I mention it because it's an interesting angle if you're curious about why there could be a difference. But what's more interesting is what it means for how you lead: if you know that's your mode - if you know you're not trusting - then I'd argue you've got some inward work to do to relinquish some of that and trust your people a little more. And I don't know if the opposite is true: if you're too trusting, maybe there's work to trust people a little less. I'm not sure.

Glenn: The fear people always raise about that position is "you could be taken for a ride, or for a bit of a mug." That's true, and has it happened over time? Definitely. But personally I'd rather operate from that position, and on the rare occasion it happens, you get bitten - fortunately it's been quite rare, and the upside massively outweighs the downside.

There's definitely not time to do it on this podcast, but I'm going to stick a pin in an idea, if I might, because this has opened up a topic I've not thought about overtly and would love to come back to: what about trust in yourself as a leader? Particularly as you transition into a new role - we've heard the phrase imposter syndrome banded around for years - what would it take to have trust in yourself, high levels of self-efficacy, those kinds of constructs? I keep coming back to it: what's the trust going on inside the leader, of themselves, to lead effectively? Maybe that's one for us to come back to.

Nejmi: Definitely - I'd love to explore that. The imposter syndrome topic comes up with every leader I work with, because it's contextual. For me it has a direct relationship with uncertainty, newness, novelty - being in new challenges, new environments, new relationships. So trust in oneself in an uncertain context is a really interesting exploration. Let's absolutely get into that.

Glenn: Let's do that another time. I really enjoyed that, as I knew I would, because it's such an important topic. For leaders to establish high levels of trust across their team, function and organisation is absolutely critical. You won't get it right all the time, but it's such a vital ingredient to being effective, at both a local and organisational level. Hopefully we've given people ideas, tips and thoughts about how they might protect the trust they've already built, and maintain and grow trust to an even higher level.

Nejmi: Thanks so much.

Glenn: Really enjoyed it. Thanks a lot, mate. See you on the next one.

Nejmi: All right, bye.

Transcript lightly edited for clarity: filler, false starts and crosstalk removed; punctuation corrected. Content otherwise faithful to the recording.

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