Our leadership team members are quick to share operational updates, but they never share their personal vulnerabilities, mistakes, or professional anxieties, making our quarterly planning feel guarded and sterile. How do we use the Trust Equation to get them to lower their guard and admit their weaknesses?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

A leadership team that only shares polished status updates is practicing artificial harmony. True, vulnerability-based trust is the foundation of any high-performing executive team. To solve this, you need to understand the Trust Equation, which defines trust as the sum of credibility, reliability, and intimacy, divided by self-orientation.

Your team likely has high credibility and reliability, but they are severely lacking in intimacy. Intimacy is the measure of how safe people feel sharing mistakes, failures, and uncertainties without fear of judgment. Because intimacy is low, their self-orientation remains high, meaning they are focused on protecting their own image and status rather than solving systemic problems.

To increase intimacy and lower self-orientation on your team, take the following actions:
- Lead by example. As the Visionary or Integrator, you must be the first to share a major mistake or admit when you do not know the answer to a problem. This demonstrates that vulnerability is safe.
- Incorporate a vulnerability exercise during your next quarterly planning session, such as sharing their greatest professional failure and what they learned from it.
- Call out polished updates during your Level 10 Meetings™. When someone presents a perfect report but you suspect there are underlying issues, gently push them to share what is keeping them up at night.

Building intimacy takes time, but it is the only way to transition your team from a group of cautious executives to a cohesive, high-trust unit. Once intimacy rises, they will stop managing their status and start solving the real issues holding the business back.