How To Build Trusting Teams

Learning how to build trusting teams at work is critical if you’re going to be successful as an employee, a manager, or an effective leader. If you don’t have trust, it’ll be more difficult to communicate and coordinate with your peers or colleagues. If teams lack trust, it’s difficult to achieve true collaboration and create performance greater than the sum of each individual’s talent.

A team isn’t a team without trust. Without trust, it’s just a group of people who share the same boss—who they probably don’t trust either.

But with high levels of trust, teams can do amazing work. People who work at high-trust companies experience 50% greater performance and 74% less stress. The opposite is also true. A low-trust team underperforms and unnecessarily stresses out for everyone involved.

In this article, we’ll outline seven ways to build trusting teams—and hence unlock that greater performance.

Build Real Bonds

The first way to build trusting teams is to build real bonds — specifically, bonds between teammates that form for reasons beyond shared work or collaborative roles. In other words, build friendships. Research suggests that those who report having friends at work are more productive, more committed, and more trusting (and trustworthy). You can’t force two people on your team to be friends, but you can create the conditions in which friendship becomes more likely.

The mechanism that most often sparks genuine connection is the discovery of what researchers call “uncommon commonalities” — interests, experiences, or passions two people share that are unusual relative to the rest of the group. When team members find these shared threads, they become more likely to form real friendships, and with those friendships comes mutual trust that extends into their work.

The most practical way leaders can help their teams find uncommon commonalities is by creating unstructured moments for conversation — shared meals, activities, or even just the few minutes before or after a meeting when talk drifts away from the agenda. These moments allow people to self-disclose, discover common ground, and build relationships that go beyond their roles. As those relationships deepen, trust in each other’s work, intentions, and ideas deepens with them.

Signal Vulnerability

The second way to build trusting teams is to signal vulnerability. Especially if you’re in a leadership role, it’s important to signal vulnerability and admit weaknesses from time to time. This doesn’t mean “deal-breaker” mistakes or weaknesses that would undermine your credibility. But in those moments you’re willing to admit you don’t know the answer or haven’t figured out the solution, you send several signals that create trust on your team.

You signal to the whole team that they don’t have to be perfect all the time, and you’ll still support them. You encourage the team to contribute, which helps them feel their opinions, ideas, and experiences are valued. And crucially, you demonstrate that you trust them — which matters because when people feel trusted, they respond with trustworthy behavior. That reciprocity is what makes vulnerability so powerful as a leadership tool. It kicks off a virtuous cycle where openness begets openness, and trust compounds over time.

Absent vulnerability, when everyone is pretending to be perfect and unwilling to admit any mistakes, trust can diminish just as quickly in a negative feedback loop. So if you’re in a leadership role, signaling vulnerability isn’t optional — it’s the act that makes everything else on this list more likely to work.

Welcome Task-Focused Conflict

The third way to build trusting teams is to welcome “task-focused” conflict. This might seem counterintuitive but conflict, done well, can not only be productive for a team it can increase trust. Conflict around the task—debates around ideas or solutions done respectfully—helps teams find better quality ideas and sends the message that all ideas are welcome even if they aren’t ultimately chosen. Obviously, conflict around people, personalities, or other immutable attributes diminishes trust and should be avoided. But when people speak up to disagree, and offer respectful counterarguments, that ought to be treated as a form of collaboration—because it is a form of collaboration. And over time, teaching a team to “fight right” will help every team member know they can jump into discussions earlier and not fear being judged or punished just because they disagree. And that will help everyone on the team build greater trust in their teammates’ ideas and intentions.

Respond with Respect

The fourth way to build trusting teams is to respond with respect — which is really about what happens after someone takes an interpersonal risk. It’s one thing to encourage people to speak up, admit failures, or share unconventional ideas. But when someone does take that risk and they don’t feel heard, respected, or cared for in response, their trust is immediately diminished. And the trust levels of anyone watching the exchange go down as well.

The most effective tool for responding with respect is active listening. When vulnerable moments occur — someone admitting a mistake, surfacing a disagreement, or proposing a long-shot idea — leaders need to be fully present. That means offering nonverbals that signal genuine attention, holding back quick responses or criticisms, and asking clarifying questions to draw out more rather than shutting the moment down.

When leaders respond this way consistently, two things happen. The person who took the risk feels seen and valued, making them more likely to take risks again. And everyone watching learns that this is how the team responds to divergent thinking — which lowers the perceived cost of vulnerability for everyone. Respect in response to risk is what turns isolated acts of trust into a durable team culture.

Spotlight Wins

Another way to build trusting teams is to spotlight wins. Whenever members of the team have small wins — work-related or not — take the time to let the whole team know. This is good for the overall culture and camaraderie of the team, but it also tells individual members that you notice what matters to them and that you care. That signal alone builds trust. When people believe their leader is paying attention and genuinely invested in their progress, they’re more likely to trust that leader — and more likely to bring both their successes and their failures forward, knowing they’ll be met with the same attentiveness either way.

Celebrate Failures

The sixth way to build trusting teams is to celebrate failures. Failures are an inescapable part of work. Projects will go awry. Changes in the environment will happen too rapidly to make adjustments. And when those failures happen, teams need to have an honest conversation about what went wrong so they can extract the right lessons from them and make future failures less likely. That learning is what teams should celebrate. When team members are transparent enough to properly dissect a failure and learn from it, we need to celebrate the transparency (and vulnerability) that allowed it to happen. In some cases, this can go so far as creating specific moments in time—failure funerals—that allow teammates to mourn the loss of the project but celebrate the lessons learned together. In the long run, celebrating failures creates an environment where people feel safe to experiment because they know learning gets celebrated—and because they trust they won’t be punished for taking intelligent risks.

Establish Help Times

The final way to build trusting teams is to establish “help times.” Help times are either specific times on someone’s calendar—or permission to spend a certain amount of someone’s calendar—helping a project someone else is working on. This should be less of a mandate and more of a cultural ritual. Helping other people or team’s projects reinforces the idea that no one individually is at the center of the organization—they’re all interdependent. And it helps cross-pollinate ideas and potentially find new solutions. But more specific to trust, it’s impossible to be on the receiving end of help and not trust the person helping. And when you do receive that help, you realize just how good the intentions of your teammates usually are. In too many organizations, colleagues are often seen as competitors in the climb up the hierarchy. But establishing a regular ritual like help times reinforces the idea that we’re all on this mission together.

While these seven methods may seem equal at first, one is much more important to start with than the others. If you’re in a leadership role, you must start building trust by signaling vulnerability. You cannot pretend to be perfect and convince your team to trust you at the same time. But when you admit your flaws, you make it safe for the team to let down their own guard and make it more likely the other three methods will work. And when they do, they’ll create a climate of trust that helps everyone on the team do their best work ever.