Trust: The Invisible Foundation of Strong Leadership and Life
By Jane Phipps
Melbourne, Australia
Featured on medium.com
Trust is undeniably a fundamental part of being human.
It’s a word we throw around without thinking too much about it — “Of course I trust you.”
However, when we pause and dig a little deeper, we realize that trust isn’t just a word — it’s a feeling. It’s a connection and a choice.
This is the first of a series of articles I plan to write introducing the fundamentals of my bespoke heart-centred leadership model. At its core, the connections we build as leaders — as in life — rely on trust.
Without trust, everything starts to crumble. The ability to build deep, meaningful relationships and engage successfully with the world requires trust as a foundation. It is the invisible thread that underpins every relationship, every team, every organization, and every leader.
Trust is not something that appears overnight. It’s built slowly through consistent actions, nurtured over time, and can be shattered in an instant.
Trust invisibly shapes the way we move through the world.
In our personal lives — in relationships with partners, family, and friends — it’s the thread that allows us to be vulnerable, to open up, and to show our real selves. When trust is present, we feel safe to reveal more of who we are. We share our dreams, our fears, and our failures without fear of judgment or rejection.
We approach relationships with hope, openness, and the belief that we will be met with understanding. We have those hard-to-have conversations because we believe the relationship can hold them. Trust feels like calmness and security — a reassurance that we are safe.
When trust is absent, the opposite happens. We reveal less and assume the worst in others. Communication becomes cautious, like walking on eggshells. We approach situations with fear, worried that openness might come back to hurt us.
Life starts to feel like something we need to protect ourselves from, rather than something we can lean into. My mum used to warn me about “the sting in someone’s tail.” Lack of trust can feel like a constant state of unease and vigilance — a mind filled with doubt and suspicion.
Trust in the Workplace
The workplace is no different. Trust determines whether organizations succeed or merely survive.
When trust is present in a workplace, teams collaborate. People take risks, share ideas, and feel confident challenging the status quo. Innovation becomes part of the organization’s DNA, and a blame culture becomes unnecessary — mistakes are treated as opportunities to learn.
When trust is missing, a very different culture takes hold — dare I say, a toxic one. Leaders become more controlling as they compensate for their fears. Bad intent is assumed in interactions between colleagues, escalating to conflict and resentment.
People stay silent even when they see something going wrong because they don’t feel safe enough to speak up. The symptoms of a low-trust workplace aren’t hard to spot — declining engagement, low productivity, and sinking morale. You can feel it when you walk into the building… or even on a Zoom call.
I’ve been there — not sleeping on Sunday nights, riddled with anxiety about going to work the next day.
Without trust, psychological safety can’t exist. And without psychological safety, organizations lose their greatest strengths: creativity, collaboration, and resilience. People become more concerned about protecting themselves than contributing to meaningful work.
Trust is the foundation. Everything else is built on top of it.
Trust in Leadership
Nowhere is trust more important than in leadership.
Great leaders earn trust by being present, transparent, and consistent. They show up. They follow through. They don’t pretend to be perfect. They own their mistakes — and make it safe for others to do the same.
As a leader, building trust with your team is essential, but often overlooked is the need to build trust with your peers.
Trust within teams means people feel safe to bring their full selves to work. Trust among peers means leaders collaborate rather than compete — it means shared success, not political games. How refreshing would that be?
The leader sets the emotional tone for the entire organization. If a leader is guarded, defensive, or inconsistent, that energy ripples through the organization — often invisibly, but deeply damagingly.
Trusting Yourself First
One final thought: you can’t lead others if you don’t trust yourself first.
Self-trust is essential for heart-centered leadership. It’s the belief that you can navigate challenges, make good decisions, and recover from mistakes. It’s the inner knowing that even when things don’t go to plan, you have the resilience to course-correct.
Leaders who don’t trust themselves often become overly controlling, defensive, or detached. Their self-doubt leaks out — sometimes subtly, sometimes not — and it erodes the trust others have in them.
Self-trust is where courage comes from. Self-trust is where leadership starts.
Trust isn’t just a concept — it’s the fabric that holds life, leadership, and organizations together. It shapes how we love, how we work, how we lead, and how we live.
Building trust starts with you.