The Three Tensions Preventing Trust-Building in Organisations It is widely accepted that building trust is vital for entrepreneurs who want to inspire, fulfil the potential of their ideas, and create value. Yet trust in bosses and businesses is in decline.

So why is it so challenging to build trust even though we know it is essential? What steps can leaders take to resolve the tensions that hold us back? Institutions and individuals who may once have commanded trust simply because of reputation and status can no longer rely on that certainty.

Scandals have undermined public trust in organisations, from banks after the financial crisis to police forces and churches. Inappropriate behaviour by leaders across sectors has been exposed, resulting in ended careers. Business leaders are also negotiating a post-pandemic environment in which their essential relationships may be with people they are rarely in the same room with. Building trusting relationships in a hybrid world remains a work in progress, with differing attitudes about how successful it can be. In a volatile environment, at a time when leaders need to invest in earning - not expecting - trust, they are also navigating three tensions:

Pace versus Space
Growing a thriving business can mean back-to-back meetings, deadlines, targets, to-dos, to-don'ts, KPIs, snap decisions, data, dashboards, and budgets. Leaders regularly tell us they work beyond the pace that humans can normally cope with. By way of consolation, nobody can accuse you of being neither important nor effective because you are always so busy. However, in this intensity, where is the opportunity to build trust with the people around you?

In this whirlwind of activity, conversations- for us, the DNA of trust - become fragmented, and their quality is diminished. There is a real danger that you stop seeing people as individuals and lose your capacity to properly assess their capabilities or how far they've developed in competence and confidence. To survive, you become more self-reliant and fall into the default of "it's easier if I do it myself." Rather than demonstrating trust in your team, including them in problem-solving or delegating significant developmental work to them, you become a remote figure, and they have no clear sense of how you view them - or whether you care. If you're not deliberately stepping into the spaces where active, trust-building conversations can take place, you miss vital opportunities.

EQ to IQ
Your morning: An unscheduled conversation with a team member about a personal and sensitive matter is followed, without a break, by an online meeting with your investors to review progress against targets. One conversation needs to be emotionally literate and empathic; in the other, you're poring over a spreadsheet, and your grasp of the overall picture and pertinent details has to be crisp and clear.

The problem is that without time to decompress from one and prepare for the other, you may find yourself experiencing what one of our clients described as "cognitive whiplash." For the individual leader, the switch from one to the other and back again can be exhausting, and we know that versions of this pattern repeat themselves for our clients day in and day out.

Unless we recognise that both of these scenarios have the potential to build trust - the first nurturing trust in our humanity, the second in our competence - the danger is that we show up indifferently in both. Taking time to breathe out, focus on yourself, and only then move to your next interaction enhances your impact and preserves the potential for building greater trust.

Conventional and contemporary
Hiring talent for a growing business often means attracting not just skills, but different perspectives, experiences, and outlooks. Meanwhile, rapid changes in societal and cultural attitudes have brought topics into focus that are perceived as controversial, highly nuanced, and impactful on teams and workplaces. The result can be leaders moving into discomfort because they feel they lack the tools, knowledge, or relatable experience to react constructively and build rapport with the individuals and teams they are working with.

The consequence of this unease can be the avoidance of conversations that could have helped deepen mutual understanding and create empathy. We also see leaders sit in inaction because they can't achieve certainty of outcomes or perfection. We prefer the alternative - imperfect action - which at least creates a space where good intentions, openness, and ultimately trust can emerge.

Faced with these three tensions, what steps should entrepreneurs take to embed high trust into the businesses they are building? We advise making simple actions habitual:

• Take time for yourself so that you can think, anticipate opportunities to build trust, and actively take them.
• Initiate conversations in which you are honest about what you feel, empathic, accurate about what you want to say, and respectful, valuing yourself and others.
• Acknowledge that building deep trust, with all its benefits, might involve discomfort and tackle the discomfort anyway.

The power of paying attention to trust extends beyond immediate teams and collaborators and into a healthy organisational culture and scalable success.