The Missing Half of Trust

Why do we spend so much time teaching leaders to build trust but so little teaching them how to repair it?

There’s a strange gap in the leadership development space.

I’ve spent years in and around leadership development. Developing it, facilitating it, sponsoring it, commissioning it, sitting through it. Leadership presence. Trust. Psychological safety. Feedback. Coaching. Conflict. Difficult conversations. Emotional intelligence. Trust-building.

Trust repair barely gets a mention. It exists in some good contemporary work, but it has never been raised to the status of something leaders are expected to be able to do, in the way trust-building has. I’ve yet to see it in a leadership competency framework or in a job description.

Which is odd, given that leaders will damage trust. It’s not that they might damage trust, it’s inevitable. They’re human.

It will happen repeatedly across a career, mostly in small ways but occasionally in ways that can impact people for years.

They’ll be impatient when they shouldn’t be. Get defensive. Deliver tough news clumsily. Leave someone out of a decision. Break a commitment. Behave under pressure in a way they’re not particularly proud of afterwards.

If trust matters as much as we say it does, why aren’t we better at teaching, and practising, repair?

A friend recently told me a story that got me thinking.

She’s very senior, thirty plus years into her career. She told me that a colleague had been on at her about a tech project she was responsible for, sending messages, chasing her, generally giving her a hard time about getting it done, not prepared to understand the project’s constraints.

A couple of days later, the colleague came to find her and said, “I’m sorry. I was badgering you. It was unnecessary.”

She was astonished.

The crux of the story wasn’t the apology; it was that in thirty years of senior work she couldn’t remember another one.

It triggered a memory of a similar story, but this time I was the problem.

Years ago, relatively new in a senior role and still being figured out by the people around me, I attended my first senior leadership team meeting. Part way through the day I was asked about a project that had my name attached to it.

I didn’t understand the project nearly as well as I should have.

I felt exposed. I was being asked questions about timing and budgets that I couldn’t answer and, instead of admitting it, I deflected the attention towards someone more junior who was working on the project with me.

Named him. Said it was his responsibility. I threw him under the bus.

As soon as I spoke, I realised. I was mortified.

So afterwards I found him and apologised.

He laughed, agreed I’d thrown him under the bus and said, “No one at your level has ever apologised to me before.”

These are two ordinary apologies, years apart. Both were memorable to the recipients because apparently, they weren’t that ordinary at all.

What I’m interested in isn’t apology; it’s the impact repair has. What changes in a working relationship when someone comes back and owns something, and what happens to the work when they don’t?

And most interesting of all, why is it so hard for us to do?

When the leader is the problem

Almost all leadership development casts the leader as the competent party.

You create a vision. You articulate the strategy. You take the risks. You build the trust. You create the safety. You give the feedback. You manage the conflict. You make sure the problems are fixed.

What do you do when you’re the problem?

Not because you’re a bad leader. Because the pressure of ‘doing more with less’ or the umpteenth restructure meant you were tired, frightened, embarrassed, out of your depth, or all of them at once.

Self-preservation is a fast and ancient response. That’s what happened to me in that meeting. I didn’t make a conscious decision to throw a colleague under the bus. I’d already done it before I noticed.

It’s  uncomfortable.

Particularly because, as you become more senior, your identity is underpinned by being the person who knows what they’re doing. Admitting you handled something badly can feel like undermining your own authority.

So can going back to something everyone else appears to have moved on from. Organisations are very good at moving ahead. Leaders are rewarded for delivering forward momentum.

What’s next? Where’s the growth? What’s the plan? What are we delivering? What’s the next milestone?

Repair asks you to apply the brakes and go in the opposite direction. Back to yesterday’s meeting. Back to the conversation you handled badly. Back to the person you embarrassed. Back to something you said that you wish you’d said differently.

It can feel like a distraction from more important things, boring even. ‘We’ve moved on’.

Except sometimes the organisation has moved on and the relationship hasn’t.

Shame can be a factor too. For leaders who are used to being highly competent, recognising that you have damaged trust can be profoundly uncomfortable.

Repair asks you to own the possibility that you got something wrong, perhaps badly wrong, without rushing to explain or defend yourself.

That takes humility, self-reflection and sometimes more emotional processing than the rapid pace of work allows. So, we move on and tell ourselves we don’t have time to go backwards.

What we don’t process doesn’t necessarily disappear and sometimes other people end up bearing the brunt of it.

We don’t think there’s anything to repair

Earlier in my career I could be pretty dismissive when I thought somebody was being too sensitive.

“For God’s sake, they need to toughen up” and more colourful, less printable versions of that sentiment.

I’m not proud of it, especially because I am, and always have been, a deeply sensitive person who should have known better. (In an extreme case of delayed repair, I’ve since apologised to some of those people.)

I had learned that toughness was how I was going to get through the long career ahead of me.

Somewhere along the way, that became an expectation I placed on other people.

I learned to suppress this in myself. Why should I have to accommodate it in you?

I suspect I’m not alone in that.

It’s convenient, because once we decide someone is “too sensitive”, we no longer have to be curious about our own behaviour.

If you’re overreacting, I don’t have to question whether I was insensitive. If you need to toughen up, I don’t have to wonder whether I handled something badly.

Your reaction becomes the problem; it’s a very efficient way of avoiding repair.

Simply deciding that someone shouldn’t have been affected doesn’t make them unaffected.

The relationship may still have changed, and their behaviour with it. Perhaps they become a little more cautious around you. Perhaps they tell you less. Perhaps they challenge you less.

But there is an important distinction here; someone being upset does not automatically mean you have done something wrong.

Leadership involves making difficult decisions. Giving feedback people don’t want to hear. Setting boundaries. Saying no. Disappointing people.  You can stand behind the decision and apologise for how you delivered it. And sometimes you listen properly and conclude there’s nothing for you to apologise for.

The question is whether you’re willing to ask ‘something has happened between us. Is there anything here that I need to understand, own or repair?’.

Sometimes the answer will be no.

Those two things can coexist.

Repair tells you something trust-building can’t

People who study relationships have understood the importance of repair for a long time.

There are decades of research into what happens after trust is violated, and relationship researchers have long studied “repair attempts”, the things people do to stop a negative interaction escalating and find their way back to one another.

The point isn’t that healthy relationships never rupture. Of course they do. The ability to repair is part of what makes a relationship resilient.

Why would relationships at work be fundamentally different?

We talk about trust as though it is only built through consistency: over time I learn that you do what you say you will do, that you treat me fairly, that I can disagree with you, that you won’t punish me for bringing you bad news. I learn how you normally behave.

But repair gives me another important piece of information: I learn what you do when you don’t behave that way.  When you mess up, what happens? Do you pretend it didn’t happen? Get defensive? Explain why it was my fault? Change the subject? Avoid me?

Or do you come back and acknowledge it?

Trust matters because it changes what people are willing to do together.

The best work rarely comes from everyone agreeing. It comes from people bringing different perspectives, testing each other’s thinking, disagreeing well and tolerating some tension and friction in pursuit of a better answer.

Some of the best intelligence in an organisation sits with people who are quieter, newer, less senior, or simply less inclined to fight for airtime.

They are already calculating when to speak and whether it is worth the risk. If the relationship is damaged, that changes the calculation.

Repair can do more than restore a damaged relationship. It can help make the relationship robust enough for people to keep taking the interpersonal risks that great work requires.

And occasionally, it can even accelerate trust.

Not because damaging trust is somehow a good thing, and repeated bad behaviour can’t be fixed with repeated apologies. But when something does go wrong, what happens afterwards shows us something about another person that might have taken much longer to learn.

That’s what happened with the colleague I threw under the bus.  I was new in the role. I had no credit in the bank; there was no reason to trust me.

In that meeting, he learned something about me: that when I felt exposed and under pressure, I would protect myself at his expense.

What happened afterwards gave him another piece of information. When I realised that I had got something wrong, I was prepared to own it.

I have wondered since whether that apology did more than repair the damage I’d just done. Whether, in some small way, it helped build trust between us faster.

Power changes who has to go first

There’s another reason repair matters particularly for leaders.

The responsibility for initiating it cannot be evenly distributed when the power in the relationship isn’t evenly distributed.

It takes considerably more courage to tell your boss that something they did damaged your trust than it does for the boss to come back and say, “I handled that badly.”

Waiting for the person with less power to raise it means it may never get raised.

And if they respond by becoming more careful instead — telling you less, challenging you less, withholding the half-formed idea — the room loses some of its intelligence.

The person with more power may not be the only person capable of repair but they have more responsibility for going first.

The tax of the unrepaired relationship

There is also a much more practical cost when repair doesn’t happen.

Think of it as the tax of the unrepaired relationship.  But only some of that tax is visible.

The person you haven’t repaired with might be ruminating, second-guessing, covering themselves, rehearsing conversations in the shower, telling colleagues, telling friends, keeping notes, withholding an idea, challenging you less than they would have.

They’re still doing their job but some of their energy has moved off the work and onto managing the relationship with you.

Maybe you’re paying a tax too.

Maybe you are aware that there’s something off between you. Perhaps you’re avoiding the person slightly or rehearsing your own defence. Every interaction carries a little more friction and uses more energy than it did before.

None of this appears on a P&L but it does have a cost.

And unrepaired relationships have a habit of recruiting other people.

Most of us have experienced the mechanism outside work.

You call customer service about something that has gone wrong. It’s irritating, but manageable. Then the person on the other end starts justifying why it happened. Or tells you it’s standard procedure. Or points out the bit of the terms and conditions you apparently failed to understand.

Or, worst of all: “I’m sorry you feel that way.”

If you’ve ever been on the receiving end of this type of ‘apology’ you will know that it usually fans the flames rather than dousing them. You’re much angrier than you were when you made the call. You plan to escalate your complaint. You tell your friends all about it.

That takes energy and time.

The same thing happens at work. A five-minute interaction can end up consuming hours of organisational attention, and often the escalation is nothing more sophisticated than a continuing search for acknowledgement.

Will somebody please say out loud what happened here?

Two sincere minutes at the start might have contained the entire thing.

We skip repair because we think it diverts our time away from the work, but over time, unrepaired relationships can cost us so much more.

If a leader’s job is to create the conditions in which people can bring their intelligence, judgement and commitment to work, then unresolved relationships matter for a completely unsentimental reason.

Repair isn’t a distraction from performance; it is about improving performance.

Good repair returns energy to the work, where it belongs.

Going back

There was no HR department. No process. No difficult conversations framework and no script.

A senior person did the human thing of walking down a corridor and saying, “I’m sorry. I was badgering you. It was unnecessary.”

Thirty seconds, at most.

Thirty years into a career, my friend noticed.

My colleague noticed too, when I did it.

That tells you something about the power of repair. It also tells you how rare it is.

And repair is bigger than the word sorry. Most of the time it sounds like: I handled that badly. I was defensive. I can see the position that put you in. I stand by the decision but not by how I spoke to you. I said I’d do something and I didn’t.

So, here’s the one question worth acting on.

Is there something sitting between you and someone you work with that you both know is there?

Leadership has a forward-motion bias. Strategy, growth, transformation, next quarter, next milestone.

We’re wired to move on.

Except sometimes the unrepaired thing comes forward with you, into every meeting the two of you are ever in again.

Trust isn’t built by leaders who never get it wrong. Nobody has ever met one of those.

It’s built by what they do afterwards.