Two Halves Of Trust

Trust isn’t one thing.

Decision and delivery

Most have felt it. You wrestle through a choice, align the team, leave the room with a decision—and months later, not much has changed. The call itself wasn’t wrong, and the effort wasn’t lacking. Somewhere between boardroom and frontline, momentum drained away.

We often badge this as an “execution problem.” But scratch the surface and what you usually find is a trust problem—not in the sense of whether people like one another, but something more structural. Organisations need two distinct elements of trust in place, and most are missing at least one.

Honesty in the room

The first part is interpersonal. Patrick Lencioni describes it as the willingness to be vulnerable with one another—to raise awkward truths, admit mistakes, and challenge assumptions without fear. Without this kind of trust, meetings are tidy but shallow: people nod along while doubts and risks stay unspoken, and the decision gets made on incomplete information.

This matters because it gives leaders better raw material. Interpersonal trust brings in the market signal, the operational constraint, the customer feedback that would otherwise be filtered out or softened. It makes the call more robust, and it surfaces problems early enough to address them.

Confidence in the system

The second part is organisational. Elliott Jaques argued that genuine trust in organisations comes less from personality and more from structure—the confidence that the system itself is reliable and fair. That means accountability and authority are aligned, managers genuinely add value to their team’s work, and decisions are made in the right place without endless rework.

When those conditions are present, people don’t need to hedge or second-guess. They can commit with pace and conviction, trusting that the scaffolding will hold. This is the trust that ensures choices made at the top actually travel—people can throw their energy into execution knowing the system won’t betray their effort.

Trust on trust

The two parts feed one another in ways that aren’t immediately obvious.

Honesty relies on execution. If people trust that decisions will be carried through—that the thing they argued for will actually happen—they can afford to be candid. The conversation becomes bolder, more nuanced, less defensive. Why fight for a position if nothing will come of it anyway?

Execution relies on honesty. If people trust that decisions are grounded in reality rather than politics or wishful thinking, they commit more fully. Without that, they hold back, build in hidden contingencies, or wait to see if management will reverse course once the real situation becomes clear.

Trust is not one or the other. It’s both, working together, each reinforcing the other.

In practice

Take a simple example: pricing a new product. Interpersonal trust ensures the debate is real—sales bring their view of the market, finance test the margin model, product weigh the competitive angle. The discussion is frank, not polite. That produces a stronger decision.

But the decision only matters if it’s acted upon, and that’s where organisational trust comes in. Marketing need to be trained to communicate the value, sales equipped with new collateral, finance systems updated to invoice correctly. Without that scaffolding—without confidence that the system will actually implement the choice—the decision dissolves into frustration, and no one quite knows why the thing they agreed on never happened.

The same pattern applies to strategy shifts. Interpersonal trust sharpens the choice; organisational trust embeds it in the way the business runs. Both are required, and weakness in either creates the familiar experience of decisions that never quite land.

Closing the loop

Candour without structure gives lively debate but little delivery. Structure without candour gives efficient silence—decisions carried out quickly but often wrong, because no one raised the problems they could see coming.

Strong organisations create trust through both: the honesty that makes decisions robust, and the structure that makes decisions travel. That’s what turns choices into action, and keeps momentum alive between boardroom and frontline.

Related: The Identity Constraint · Field Guide

Connects to Library: POSIWID · Viable System Model