Trust Pyramid: 10 Evidence-Based Coaching Practices

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

Practices that may help

1. The Minto Pyramid Principle
   Barbara Minto’s Pyramid Principle says to lead with the answer, then support it with grouped, parallel reasoning. The approach originated at McKinsey and is widely adopted in consulting, law, and business writing. Direct evidence for its superiority over other structures is limited — it is established professional practice rather than an experimentally validated method.
2. 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.
3. 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.
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. Use regular team health checks to surface dysfunction early
   Teams that check in on how they’re working together catch dysfunction before it compounds.
   The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Made Practical
6. Separate the doer (R) from the owner (A)
   The person who does the work is often not the person who owns the outcome — make this explicit.
   The RACI Matrix, Made Practical
7. 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
8. The Eisenhower Matrix and Delegation
   The Eisenhower matrix sorts tasks by urgency and importance into four quadrants: do now (urgent and important), schedule (important, not urgent), delegate (urgent, not important), and eliminate (neither). The most valuable quadrant is the one most people neglect — scheduling the important-but-not-urgent work that creates long-term leverage. Evidence for the framework is primarily practitioner consensus; its component parts (importance vs urgency, delegation effectiveness) have independent research support.
9. 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
10. Demonstrate care through visible acts in the other person’s interest
    Show that your interests and theirs are genuinely aligned — not only when it’s convenient.
    The Trust Triangle

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

• I won’t hand anyone real responsibility until they’ve completely proven themselves first→
• My team only ever talks about how we’re working together after something has already blown up→
• Everything still funnels through me because I own the outcome, so I can’t hand off the actual doing without feeling like I’ve let it go entirely→
• With new people I try to fast-forward to being close→
• I keep everything at work behind a polished, guarded front→

Describe your situation in your own words to search the complete practice library.