The Secret to How the Best Leaders Build Trust

In the theater of business leadership, we’ve long been taught to project unwavering confidence, display flawless competence, and maintain a professional distance. “Never let them see you sweat” remains an unspoken commandment hanging over conference rooms and executive offices.

Yet the question of how leaders build trust has never been more crucial. How do you create trust? The greatest leaders may know a counterintuitive secret that turns this conventional wisdom on its head.

Here’s the paradox: The harder you try to appear perfect as a leader, the less trustworthy you become.

When leaders present themselves as infallible authorities who have all the answers, they create an unbridgeable chasm between themselves and their teams. This apparent strength becomes their greatest weakness, as team members stop bringing forward problems, cease taking risks, and begin performing for approval rather than purpose.

So what’s the secret that extraordinary leaders understand? The most powerful trust catalyst isn’t authority but its opposite: strategic vulnerability. Understanding how leaders build trust begins with recognizing this fundamental shift in approach.

Think of trust like a pyramid. At its foundation lies psychological safety—that profound sense that we can take risks without fear of rejection or humiliation. Without this foundation, everything built above becomes unstable and eventually collapses.

The surprise? The fastest way to create psychological safety isn’t through displays of strength but through carefully chosen moments of vulnerability.

When a leader demonstrates appropriate workplace vulnerability, they’re essentially saying: “I trust you enough to show you more of who I am.”

This initial deposit of trust creates an opportunity for reciprocal trust to develop. Research by Dr. Matthew Lieberman at UCLA explores how our brains are fundamentally wired for social connection, helping explain why authentic interpersonal engagement creates the neurological conditions that support trust development.¹ Meaning, your vulnerability creates the psychological safety others need to become vulnerable themselves.

Strategic vulnerability isn’t simply about disclosure, and it isn’t about oversharing personal struggles or abandoning boundaries—it’s about revealing what you care about and why it matters.

When leaders have the courage to share what they genuinely care about, they invite others to recognize their humanity and connect to a shared purpose. This care-based approach to vulnerability does more than build trust—it creates meaningful alignment around what truly matters to the team and organization.

Strategic vulnerability means intentionally revealing these pieces:

• Your thinking process, including uncertainties
• Your learning journey, including mistakes
• Your emotional reality, when relevant to work
• Your authentic questions, when you don’t have answers

We all carry what we call an “emotional backpack” into work each day—filled with the stressors, concerns, and challenges we’re navigating. Traditional leadership approaches ask us to pretend this backpack doesn’t exist. But high-trust leaders acknowledge their own backpacks with authenticity that invites others to do the same.

Leadership and trust in the workplace are intrinsically connected through these moments of appropriate revealing of care. Brené Brown’s extensive research on vulnerability in leadership demonstrates that appropriate openness from leaders helps create workplaces where people feel comfortable bringing their full selves to work.² When teams can acknowledge the reality of their emotional experiences, they spend less energy maintaining facades and more energy on meaningful contribution.

Here’s how sharing something in your emotional backpack might look. Let’s say you are a team leader who typically brings high energy to meetings. Today, however, you’re coming into a team meeting distracted by a difficult conversation you just had with a key client. Rather than pretending everything is fine, you decide to acknowledge what you’re carrying in your backpack.

You might simply say something like this:

Before we dive into today’s agenda, I want to share something with you all. I’m noticing I’m coming into this meeting carrying some heaviness from a challenging client conversation I just finished. I’m a bit distracted and not bringing my usual focus. I’ve taken a few deep breaths, and I’m committed to being present with all of you—but I wanted to acknowledge where I’m at rather than pretend everything’s perfect.

This brief moment of vulnerability accomplishes several things at once:

• Normalizes humanity—It demonstrates that everyone has moments when they’re not at their best

• Increases psychological safety—It silently gives permission for others to be authentic

• Models self-awareness—It shows the importance of recognizing our current state

• Builds trust—It demonstrates a willingness to be seen as human, not perfect

The Japanese art of kintsugi involves repairing broken pottery with gold, highlighting rather than hiding the cracks. The philosophy behind it is profound: the piece is more beautiful for having been broken.

The most trusted leaders practice “kintsugi leadership”—they don’t hide their cracks, but instead honor that those cracks paved the way to the gold they manifested from within and rely on so heavily today. In honoring both their cracks and their gold, they create organizations where mistakes become recognized as essential components of growth and innovation. Through this practice, ethical leaders build trust in organizations by modeling that perfection isn’t the goal; growth and integration are.

To embrace kintsugi leadership in your own practice, look for the gold both in yourself and others. When setbacks occur, create intentional moments to extract and integrate the learning. You might ask: “What wisdom are we gaining that we couldn’t have accessed any other way?” or “How will this experience make us stronger moving forward?”

And when you observe team members navigating challenges with grace and wisdom, acknowledge the beauty in their process—how they’re engaging with the difficulty is the gold shining bright.

If you’re ready to accelerate trust through strategic vulnerability, start with these steps:

1. Identify your current “vulnerability edge”—the point where sharing feels uncomfortable but not unsafe. What’s one step beyond your current practice that you could take?

2. Schedule a “questions only” meeting where you commit to asking more than telling, approaching your team with genuine curiosity rather than prescriptive solutions.

3. Practice the “emotional check-in” at the beginning of one-on-ones or team meetings: “Before we dive in, how are you showing up today?” Then authentically share your own state first.

4. Lean into kintsugi and acknowledge a recent mistake. Share what you learned—how you filled the cracks with gold—creating permission for others to do the same.

5. Use the phrase “I don't know yet” the next time you’re uncertain. This powerful admission demonstrates both vulnerability and respect. You truly don’t have to have all the answers right away.

6. Redirect—don’t reject—negativity. When faced with complaints or criticism, resist the urge to become defensive. Instead, practice finding the care behind the complaint—what does this person truly value that feels threatened? When you ask someone what they truly care about behind their complaint, you continue to build trust by demonstrating that you value their perspective.

These practices help leaders gain trust by demonstrating both humanity and competence—showing that true leadership emerges not from perfection but from authentic engagement with challenges.

Make no mistake—strategic vulnerability requires courage. It means facing the fear that openness might be perceived as weakness. But here’s what remarkable leaders understand: trust isn’t built in comfort; it’s forged in the crucible of courageous authenticity. No matter what configuration you are in, whether building trust in a leadership team, department, or project team, it all starts with leaders who model this courage.

When leaders step onto the vulnerability ladder’s first rung, they give silent permission for everyone around them to do the same. One step of leader vulnerability creates a collective leap in psychological safety—the essential foundation upon which high-performing, innovative, and resilient organizations are built.

The secret is simultaneously simple and challenging: to build extraordinary trust as a leader, you must be willing to go first. Your strategic vulnerability becomes the catalyst that transforms your organization’s culture from one of fear and self-protection to one of courage, innovation, and thriving.

This is how the best leaders build trust—not by projecting infallibility, but by demonstrating authentic humanity paired with genuine competence.

Try it and experience the transformation for yourself. Through strategic vulnerability, you’ll discover that what seemed like your greatest weakness may actually become your most powerful strength.