The sessions on trust were the ones where I had the deepest sense of recognition. I’ve been building trust on my team deliberately from the day I took this role — small, repeated behaviours that compound — and the four-dimension model the training used gave me the cleanest way I’ve seen to name what I’d been doing and check whether I was missing anything.
The frame:
| Dimension | What I’m asking the person to believe | How it’s built |
|---|---|---|
| Integrity | “You do what you say.” | Following through on small commitments, especially when nobody is watching |
| Competence | “You can do this.” | Demonstrating capability in the specific area, and admitting when I can’t |
| Compassion | “You care about me as a person, not just as output.” | Being present in tough moments, not just transactional ones |
| Reliability | “I can count on you consistently, not just on a good week.” | Setting realistic expectations and meeting them, again and again |
Each one is earned separately, in different evidence. Each one is lost separately, too — and most of the trust failures I watched in teams I was on as an engineer weren’t catastrophic. They were quiet decay in one dimension that the leader didn’t realise was decaying.
How I build each dimension on purpose
I want to walk through each one with the specific moves I’ve been making, because trust is a thing the leadership literature treats as a vibe and a thing the team actually experiences as a series of small behaviours.
Integrity is the dimension I’m most deliberate about. I’m a list person, and the list isn’t there to make me look organised — it’s there to make sure I do the thing I said I’d do, even when nobody is checking. The conversation I committed to in the hallway, the action item I took without writing it down, the favour I promised — they all go on a list. The team’s quiet model of me is if Helio says he’ll do it, he does it. That model is integrity-trust above the line, and I work to keep it there.
Competence is built when the team has seen me do the work, or seen me ask for help when I couldn’t. The most damaging move to competence-trust isn’t lacking a skill; it’s pretending to have one. Engineers especially have a sharp nose for this — I had one for years from the other side. The leader who says I don’t know this area, help me think it through is read as competent in the dimension that actually matters: the ability to know what they don’t know. I do this often, deliberately. My team knows the gaps in my technical depth, knows the moments I’ll defer to them, and trusts me more because of it, not less.
Compassion is built in the moments outside the work. The check-in after a hard week that wasn’t about a project. The remembering that someone’s parent had been ill, the acknowledging that a recent change had cost them something. This is the dimension I lean into most naturally — it’s part of why I’m close to my team, and one of the practices that took the least construction because it’s the way I was already wired to care about people. The session reminded me that it’s not a coincidence; it’s a dimension I should keep cultivating.
Reliability — the dimension the self-assessment exercise pushed me to look at most carefully — is built when small promises are kept the same way big ones are. I’d been doing this well, but the exercise made me notice that I’d been treating small commitments as a different category of seriousness than large ones, and the team reads those small ones as data too. When I say I’ll review a doc by Friday, that’s a contract; the team uses my track record on small contracts to predict the big ones. The shift I’m making, deliberately: when I notice myself about to say “I’ll get to this by Friday” while privately not sure, I now say “I’ll either get to this by Friday or I’ll tell you by Thursday that I can’t”. The latter is a different kind of commitment, and one I can keep cleanly.
A small story about reliability
The first time I really felt the weight of small reliability was about a year into this role. I had a one-on-one with a junior engineer who told me — kindly, indirectly — that I’d missed a doc review I’d promised by three days, and that she’d held her PR for it. She didn’t make it a thing. She just mentioned it because I’d asked what would help her work better that week. The whole conversation was twenty seconds, and I felt it for a month.
That conversation made me a much better manager. It’s why my list-keeping is what it is now, and why I treat small commitments as the same category as large ones. Reliability is built or lost in those small moments; I learned that from the kindest possible source.
How trust accelerates a team
The team-effectiveness lens on trust is the most concrete I can make it.
A team with high trust decides faster. There’s less negotiation about whether to trust a decision because the people making it have integrity-trust and competence-trust banked. A decision can be made, communicated, and acted on without a parallel process of validation. The math on a quarter’s worth of decisions made at half the cost of debate is dramatic.
A team with high trust surfaces problems earlier. People raise concerns when they trust the response will be measured and the relationship won’t deteriorate. Without that trust, concerns are sat on — and the cost of sitting on a concern is always larger than the cost of raising it.
A team with high trust handles conflict in the open. Disagreement that the team trusts is read as care, not as personal attack. The disagreement is debated, the better idea wins, and the team moves on. Without trust, the same disagreement goes underground and starts producing side-channel politics. That’s the most expensive kind of conflict, because it consumes energy that never produces a decision.
A team with high trust rotates roles without re-establishing every dimension from scratch. The handoff from one tech lead to another, the move from one project to another, the shift in scope between team members — all of these are cheap when trust is high and expensive when it isn’t.
Each of these is a throughput effect. Each is invisible on a single day and obvious across a year.
How trust is lost
This is the part I want to be most careful about, because it’s the part I’ve watched the most as an engineer working under different managers.
Trust is rarely lost in a single dramatic event. It’s mostly lost the way reliability can erode under any leader who’s distracted — small misses, over time, accepted as the new normal. The integrity slip that wasn’t called out. The competence pretence that the team learned to work around. The compassion gap that the team stopped expecting to close. The reliability misses that became the joke about the leader who’s always behind.
Each of these is recoverable, individually. None of them is recoverable easily if you let it ride. The work, then, isn’t dramatic — it’s just paying attention to the small signals that one of the four dimensions is fraying and addressing it before it becomes a story the team tells.
What the session added
Two things, both useful.
The four-dimension self-assessment. I’d been tracking my trust-building informally. The exercise — rate yourself, then ask someone you trust on the team to rate you — gave me a structured habit I’m going to keep. I’m planning to do it quarterly. The first time I asked someone on my team for the rating after the session, the gap between my read and hers was instructive in exactly the way the exercise was designed to be.
Confirmation of the four-piece model. I’d been thinking of trust as one thing with multiple inputs. The framework split it into four dimensions that can be tended separately, and I’ll be thinking about it that way now. The model lets me notice which dimension a particular issue lives in, which makes the fix faster.
What I’m doing differently now
The quarterly self-assessment is the new habit. I’ll write down my own rating across the four dimensions, then ask a trusted person on the team for theirs. The gap between the two ratings is the data. Where I think I’m fine and they think I’m not is the dimension I’m under-tending. That conversation is already changing how I think about my next quarter.
Trust is infrastructure. It’s load-bearing. And it’s only built one small act at a time. That’s the work I’ve been doing since I started this role, and the work I’ll keep doing. The session sharpened the tools; the practice doesn’t change.