The Leader's Chronicle #4 📰 Can You Deliberately Build Trust?
With Elina Kazantseva - Leadership Capability System
Good Morning, fellow Leader 🚀
Welcome to this special edition of The Leader's Chronicles, where my goal is to share resources and ideas on a specific topic, always featuring a contribution from a guest author.
Today I have the pleasure of introducing Elina Kazantseva from Leadership Capability System.
Elina is an author and a certified coach and mentor who writes to Leaders about coaching techniques and offers practical insights for aspiring professionals. This collaboration was what triggered the article on Trust and shares Elina’s unique view, which I am excited to share with you.
If you enjoy the content, please consider liking this article and subscribing to Elina’s work. Your support is important for us writers.
Trust at work is one of those topics everyone knows matters in theory, yet many struggle with in practice. Today, we are taking one question and sitting with it from two different angles.
The question: Can you deliberately build trust, or do you just have to earn it slowly?
Here is Elina’s viewpoint:
The first lens I would use to answer this question is the subjective experience of trust. We interpret every interaction through a different operating model, shaped by past experiences, beliefs, and personality traits. When you put a group of people in a room, each carrying their own lens, you cannot engineer trust based on just your understanding of the world.
I remember taking a team out for an informal social event, exactly the kind of thing you do to build connection. At some point one colleague made a casual joke, normal team banter, everyone laughed. Later, the person the joke was about told me she felt excluded. The environment had been deliberately designed to create trust, and it still produced something no one intended. You cannot control what a situation means to someone else.
But there is a second lens: what can you actually control? As a leader, you still have a responsibility to create conditions where trust is possible; and that requires capability, not just good intentions.
Early in my management experience, my instinct was to fix situations like that one. What I learned is that the more effective role is not fixer but container creator — someone who observes before intervening, acknowledges everyone’s experience without taking sides, and shows up consistently enough that people know what to expect. Someone who creates enough space for the group to work through friction rather than around it.
That capability takes time to build. But the return is not just smoother team dynamics, it is the ability to prevent serious derailment before it happens.
I would invite you now to visit Elina’s highlighted article:
Back to me!
I believe trust must be earned slowly, regardless of your background or past achievements. My approach is similar to a “brute force” strategy: I have a firm conviction that trust is built primarily upon results.
While great communication and stakeholder management go a long way, if a manager takes too long to deliver, trust starts to erode from the top down.
A leader never stands alone. They require the support of those above them in the hierarchy and the commitment of the teams below.
Even a CEO needs the confidence of shareholders to execute an ambitious strategy, just as the teams need to be aligned with the same goals for being able to succeed. Trust may be channeled through words, but it is built upon results.
In a recent article, I explored how trust must be materialized through results, no matter your position. I advocate for taking initiative, breaking silos, and fostering collaboration by integrating ideas from multiple sources.
Together, these actions don’t just build trust, they define a strong Leader.
To conclude this edition, a big thank you to Elina for this collaboration! Find the link to the newsletter below.
That’s it. If you find this post useful, please share it with your friends or colleagues who might be interested in this topic.
Cheers,
Elina & Artur
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