October 30, 2026 | Read Online​

The Recipe for Trust

My friend Ron Friedman’s first book, The Best Place to Work, didn’t cover trust. “I took trust for granted for a really long time,” he confessed. Writing about trust felt like saying honesty or integrity was important. Duh. Too obvious.

Then he spent five years researching his new book, Superteams. He came away convinced he’d been wrong. Trust isn’t a given. It’s a skill. And you can build it faster than you think once you know the recipe.

Trust at work isn’t the same as trust between friends. You don’t need your surgeon to share your love for Fredrik Backman novels or quote your favorite scenes from The Office. You need them to be good with a scalpel.

On this week’s podcast, Ron shared the three ingredients of workplace trust. I call them the Three Cs.

1. Competence – Can you do the job?
2. Caring – Do you care about me and my success?
3. Consistency – Do you show up that way every time?

Miss any one and trust collapses like a sourdough loaf with a sleepy starter.

Here’s what surprised me. When trust breaks at work, it usually isn’t competence. It’s caring.

Ron gave a simple example. A client tells you something your teammate needs to know. You don’t pass it along. You’re perfectly capable of sending an email. So that’s not a skill problem. It’s a caring problem.

Most of the time it’s an accident. We get busy. But some people hold onto information on purpose. I’ve spent enough years in big organizations to see it. Knowledge becomes power. If only I know, I have to be in the meeting. Ron shared that the people who hoard information are usually insecure. And they make everyone around them insecure too.

There’s an old sales maxim: “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” It’s no different on teams.

The good news is that caring is trainable. Start with keeping people in the loop. Build a simple system and teach your team to use it.

After any meeting where a decision gets made, ask, Who wasn’t in the room but needs to know? Better, ask that question in the meeting and assign the follow-up communication to the right person. End each week by asking, What do I know that my team doesn’t? Share a short update.

Think of someone at work you don’t fully trust. Which C is missing? You’ll usually know in seconds.

Then flip it. Who might be asking that question about you?

One question to ponder in your thinking time: Which of the Three Cs would my team say I’m weakest in?

Make an Impact!
Jay Papasan
Author | CEO | Coach

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