Trust breakdowns rarely start with incompetence. Maryam Rezaei argues they begin with bias, familiarity and the meanings we attach to tone, silence and directness. She explores psychological safety, real listening and what repairs trust: new experiences, not explanations. For L&D and leaders, trust is a skill to practise every day.
Do you trust your teammates? If you do, why do you trust them? Are you careful, distant, or unsure with other people, even before anything has clearly gone wrong? These issues sit underneath almost every team difficulty I have seen around poor communication, the silences that begin to fill meetings, the tension that slowly forms between departments, and that frustrating moment when a team that looks more than capable on paper suddenly stops functioning well together in real life.
Trust is rarely as rational as we like to think it is
How do we come to trust someone in the first place, can trust be learned, and, once it has been damaged, can it return? These questions have been on my mind for years. What I have come to believe is that trust is rarely as rational as we like to think it is. We prefer to believe that we trust people because they have earned it, because they are competent, honest, or deserve it – and of course sometimes that is true. But often trust begins much earlier than that, and much less consciously than that.
Similarity and familiarity
Very often, trust begins with familiarity. We tend to trust people who feel easier for us to read, whose way of speaking, reacting, expressing, or even withholding feels somehow known to us. Johanna Woitzel, Moritz Ingendahl, and Hans Alves showed in a 2024 Journal of Experimental Social Psychology paper that in-group members receive an added boost in trustworthiness judgments. This means that perceived similarity and group belonging can tilt trust before behavior has been fairly evaluated.
When someone feels unfamiliar, emotionally guarded, too blunt, too quiet, too different, or simply harder for us to understand, hesitation often enters before the relationship has had a real chance to develop. This is one of the reasons trust at work is not nearly as objective as people imagine. It is not built only through reality, it is filtered through interpretation, and interpretation is full of bias.
A study on relational signaling in the Journal of Management & Governance, has argued that in organisations, people do not respond only to actions themselves, but to what those actions signal about the relationship. That is what makes trust both fragile and deeply human, because two people can do exactly the same thing and have it received in completely different ways. One person’s silence may be experienced as calm and thoughtful, while another person’s silence may be experienced as withholding or cold. One person’s directness may be interpreted as honesty, while another person’s directness may be felt as hostility. The visible action is never the whole story, because the meaning the other person gives to that action becomes part of the story too.
Visible safety
This is why trust cannot be reduced to good intentions. What matters is not only what we mean, but what our words, tone, timing, and behavior become inside the other person’s mind, and this is where so many teams struggle without even realising it. They assume trust will grow because nobody has bad intentions, because everyone is professional, because they all agree on the values, or because no one is openly in conflict. But trust does not grow simply because harm is absent. Trust grows when people begin to feel safe enough to become more visible with each other, when they have a shared language, a shared understanding!
To trust, in any real sense, is to become vulnerable. It means speaking before you are fully certain, admitting concern before it hardens into frustration, revealing confusion instead of covering it with control, asking instead of assuming, and telling the truth before distance quietly begins to build around it. This is why honesty matters so much in trust, not only as morality, but as emotional clarity. Honesty on its own is not enough, because when it is not held with empathy and kindness, it can quickly become harsh and be received as criticism rather than care.
Listening with presence
The same is true of listening, though not the kind of listening people often perform in workplaces. Real listening is not simply waiting quietly for your turn to speak. It carries enough presence that the other person feels received rather than handled, and enough openness that what is underneath the words has somewhere to land. Amy Edmondson’s foundational research on psychological safety defined teams as safer when people felt able to take interpersonal risks, and the CIPD’s more recent evidence review connects trust and psychological safety directly to whether people feel defensive and self-protective or able to speak up, ask questions, and share concerns.
This is why genuine care creates trust more powerfully than strategy ever can. The moment another person feels that you are not only reacting to their role, but actually trying to understand their reality, something begins to change. Defensiveness lowers, assumptions soften, and the need to protect starts to loosen.
Damage control
This is also why trust can be damaged so quickly. Once people feel misread, unprotected, dismissed, used, or emotionally unsafe, they do not only withdraw from the situation itself. They begin to change the meaning they give to the other person’s actions, and from that point on even neutral behavior can begin to feel loaded, suspicious, or sharp in ways it did not before.
Trust can return, but not through words alone, and certainly not through polite language when the actual experience between people remains unchanged. Tiina Kähkönen’s 2021 systematic review of employee trust repair found that early repair efforts after smaller violations can prevent escalation and improve the effectiveness of trust repair, which supports something many teams learn the hard way: trust comes back when people create different experiences for each other, not when they simply explain themselves better.
Lived experience
Trust is not formed only by what we do. It is formed by what the other person lives through what we do, and once we truly understand that, we stop treating trust as a value people should simply agree on and begin treating it as something much more demanding and much more real: a human capacity that grows when people learn how to meet each other in ways that reduce fear, increase clarity, and make genuine connection possible.
Maryam Rezaei is the creator of L.A.U.G.H.E.™
