You Can’t Systematize Trust. But You Can Destroy It Fast.

Trust is built slowly, lost quickly, and earned most in how you act when nobody’s watching.

I’ve built a lot of systems.

Operational ones. Technical ones. Team ones.

But the one thing you can’t turn into a system?

Trust.

You can have the best CRM in the world.

The slickest SOPs.

Weekly huddles, performance dashboards, team offsites even the much-loved pizza day (it isn’t).

But if people don’t trust you?

None of it works.

And I’ve seen trust break in real time usually not with a loud bang, but with a quiet shrug.

A missed follow-through.

A “we’ll talk about that later” that never happens.

A leader who disappears when things get hard.

That’s all it takes.

Because people don’t remember what you said you’d build.

They remember whether you showed up when it counted.

Whether you kept your word when it was inconvenient.

Whether you made the hard call or pushed it off until someone else had to clean it up.

And once trust breaks?

No system will save you.

I’ve worked in organizations with no budget, no tech, and barely any support but we had trust. And we got it done.

I’ve also seen places with everything on paper fall apart because people stopped believing leadership had their back and these days, I see it more and more.

Here’s what I learned:

Don’t make promises you won’t keep.

Don’t preach transparency while practicing secrecy.

Don’t systematize the appearance of trust. Build the real thing daily.

It doesn’t take a spreadsheet. It takes consistency.

It takes ownership.

It takes showing up when you’d rather not.

Because trust can’t be engineered.

But it can be earned moment by moment, decision by decision.

Just don’t expect a second chance if you blow it the first time.