I see this pattern a lot. A senior nonprofit leader contacts me because they believe their teams have communication problems. They know I integrate Everything DiSC® as a foundational tool into my programs and believe a half-day workshop will solve their problems.
During Discovery calls, I explore further for some examples, and I often hear a version of the following:
- Leadership teams smile and nod in meetings. Then, they leave and tell their teams something completely different. Or they leave and do something completely different than what they had just agreed to.
- Staff are having hallway conversations that contradict what was just decided.
- Department heads are tasked with communicating information to other departments, and that Information never makes it from one department to another.
Sound familiar? If so, that isn’t a communication problem. It’s a trust problem. Read on for four ideas on how to rebuild trust on a leadership team, starting with what actually breaks it.
What Trust Erosion Actually Looks Like
Trust doesn’t erode all at once. It erodes in specific, nameable moments.
I talked with one nonprofit last year where the leadership team ran a culture survey. They promised it would be confidential, and they meant it. But they presented the results in a way that let people figure out who said what. By the time the leadership team realized it, the damage was already done. The tenuous trust relationship between staff and leadership took a hit.
That single moment did more to shape how people felt about leadership than a dozen well-intentioned all-staff meetings could undo. On top of that, staff at that organization already felt leadership meetings were being held in “secret” and that leaders weren’t forthcoming about upcoming impacts to staff. It felt like leaders were intentionally withholding critical information. Constant turnover in top leadership positions didn’t help. Now this organization has a team exhausted from managing up instead of moving forward.
A few other examples include a finance director and program director who stopped communicating with each other via email because they didn’t want their words written down. One leadership team agreed to a decision, then after the meeting, three people independently asked one of the directors what was decided and what she was “really” going to do instead.
Those are trust signals too, and they’re just as telling as a broken confidentiality promise.
Why This Happens
It’s rarely one big betrayal. A VP at a large nonprofit put it to me this way, describing what happened on their own executive team:
“Trust is built in very small moments, and trust is also broken in small moments. You can talk about this big squishy word, a trust problem, but you’ve got to dial into what behaviors are actually contributing to it, like not listening, not following through, defensive postures, or not including the right people in conversations.”
Naming the word “trust” doesn’t fix anything. Naming the actual behavior does.
A colleague at the same organization named what it takes to reverse it, and it’s not comfortable:
“It’s tough to rebuild trust once it’s broken. If people truly want to rebuild trust, we have to stop the behavior that broke it in the first place. We’ve all played a part in eroding trust, and we have to own up to it. There’s got to be some agency, some ownership, some accountability. We can’t ask that of our teams if we’re not delivering it ourselves.”
I noticed a similar pattern in my interviews for the U.S. Nonprofit Culture Pulse Report. Leaders often believed they were modeling culture effectively, even while their teams reported skepticism and frustration.
That gap, between what leaders think they’re doing and what their teams actually observe, is where trust seeps out.
The Real Cost
In a separate conversation, a leader on a different nonprofit’s team described a leadership group where candor had become risky, and every department felt like it was fending for itself. In his words, “each person feels like their role will right the ship, and not everyone else’s.”
That’s what a team with eroded trust looks like from the inside. Everyone is focused on their own piece of the puzzle, with no one confident the others will hold up their end. Redundant work. Missed opportunities. Good people deciding it’s not worth staying.
How to Rebuild Trust on a Leadership Team
The Culture Pulse research confirmed that there is an alternative. One leader explained that one way to start is to be willing to say “I don’t know” in front of your team:
“That kind of openness isn’t a weakness. It’s trust. It signals safety and allows others to take healthy risks, experiment, and speak up before problems grow.”
I walk teams through the following sequence in the Culture Threads Assessment. It’s not a workshop exercise you check off just once. And it can take some time, but the conversations have always been worthwhile.
- Name what’s real. Leaders have to be honest about where trust has actually broken down. They need to say it out loud, not just make a note in their own private worry list. “Our leadership team makes decisions, but three of us don’t believe the other four will follow through” is a real sentence someone needs to say.
- Surface the unspoken agreements. What are the real, but probably unspoken, rules?
- “Don’t disagree with the ED in public.”
- “Protect your team from other departments.”
Unspoken norms are often running your culture, whether anyone admits it or not.
- Create new agreements together. You can’t force people to trust one another. You can co-create the conditions that help it grow. Culture is, as one leader in our research put it, “every day, everywhere, everything, the good and the bad of it.”
- Hold each other accountable, especially in the top leadership roles. Another leader we interviewed said this: “If you say we’re going to hold each other accountable, but you don’t demonstrate it, and you don’t do it at the leadership level, it will never work.” Trust rebuilds through small, consistent actions, not overly large gestures.
A Quick Gut Check
Before your next leadership meeting, grab a sticky note and score your own team from 1 to 10 on these seven things:
- Keeping promises and following through on commitments
- Being consistent in actions
- Sharing information openly
- Recognizing and rewarding honesty
- Creating real opportunities for collaboration
- Being transparent in decision-making
- Encouraging accountability across the team
Now imagine handing your team the same seven items and asking them to score you. Would the numbers match? That gap is usually where the real conversation can start.
What This Looks Like in Practice
I worked with a leader who had an outside consultant deliver a report on the trust issues among the leadership team, in front of their full staff. It could have gone badly. Instead, the leadership team stayed behind afterward to debrief it together.
One leadership team member who was in that room told me it was one of the few times in a long time she felt genuinely heard. Dissenting opinions got honored instead of smoothed over.
When one leader pushed back on an idea, someone else asked “why not?” instead of letting it die quietly. The room was silent for a moment, then began following that thread with further exploration instead of shutting it down. It certainly wasn’t a comfortable conversation. And yet, it was the first time in a while the team left a meeting having actually decided something together, instead of just agreeing to disagree quietly.
That’s what it looks like to rebuild trust on a leadership team in real time. It’s often not going to be a clean fix, but a team who intentionally chooses, in the moment, to do something different than they’d done the week before.
Trust isn’t rebuilt through a retreat or a consultant visit. It’s rebuilt through daily choices: to tell the truth, to follow through, to call out the gap between what was said and what was done.
The question isn’t whether your leadership team has trust issues. Every team does, to some degree. The question is whether you’re willing to see them clearly and do something about them.
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