Coaching practices for Trust Development Leadership

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Trust Development Leadership, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• I keep everything at work behind a polished, guarded front
• With new people I try to fast-forward to being close
• I won’t hand anyone real responsibility until they’ve completely proven themselves first
• I keep waiting for my manager to notice me and hand me more trust, and it’s not happening
• On my team nobody will admit they’re stuck or wrong or don’t know something

Practices that may help

1. The Trust Equation, Made Practical
   The Trust Equation (Maister, Green, and Galford) holds that trustworthiness = (credibility + reliability + intimacy) ÷ self-orientation. The model is a practitioner framework rather than a rigorously tested theory, but it usefully names the levers — especially self-orientation, which is the single biggest trust-killer most leaders overlook.
2. Lower your guard to raise the intimacy score
   Sharing something real about yourself makes others feel safer sharing something real with you.
   The Trust Equation, Made Practical
3. Earn the right to deepen the relationship in stages
   Trust compounds over time — start with technical credibility and expand into intimacy as it is earned.
   The Trust Equation, Made Practical
4. Extend trust deliberately to invite it
   Trust others first, in bounded ways, before they have earned every dimension — it is how trust is built.
   The Trust Triangle
5. Invest in the relationship before you need it
   Build relational credit through reliability and initiative, not charm or performance alone.
   Leader-Member Exchange (LMX), Made Practical
6. The Trust Triangle
   Charles Feltman’s Trust Triangle (from The Thin Book of Trust) identifies four distinct assessments that together constitute trust: sincerity (I mean what I say), reliability (I do what I say), competence (I have the ability to do what I say), and care (I have your interests at heart). Trust breaks down when any one of these assessments fails — and repairing trust requires identifying which assessment was damaged.
7. Build vulnerability-based trust
   Teams that can’t admit weakness, mistakes, or ignorance to each other cannot genuinely collaborate.
   The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Made Practical
8. Deliberately expand your inner circle
   Move team members from low-LMX to high-LMX through intentional relationship investment.
   Leader-Member Exchange (LMX), Made Practical
9. Build reliability through small, visible commitments
   Reliability is built not by big promises but by flawlessly keeping small, everyday ones.
   The Trust Equation, Made Practical
10. Audit and reduce your self-orientation
    Self-orientation is the denominator: a small increase in it wipes out gains in all three numerator variables.
    The Trust Equation, Made Practical

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