Highlights:

• Transparency and authenticity are vital attributes for leadership, as they boost employee trust toward the organization.
• About 80% of employees say they would choose a workplace that prioritizes communication over other benefits.
• Trust in leaders is tied to observable behaviors like fairness, professionalism and accountability.
• Only 20% of employees strongly feel connected to their organization’s culture.

If you’re a mid-level executive, you’re probably not short on responsibility, pressure or visibility. What you might be short on is something far more important, and that is the trust of your team. You’ll need real trust, and not the polite version where people nod in meetings, but the operational kind where they speak up early and move fast without hesitation.

Real trust is built in small, repeatable actions your team watches more closely than you think.

1. Offer Radical Transparency, Not Just Occasional Updates

Transparency and authenticity are vital attributes to have, as they boost employee trust toward you and the organization. However, most leaders believe they’re transparent because they share updates. In reality, they’re often sharing conclusions rather than the process or the context, and that’s just one-sided reporting.

As such, radical transparency is different. It means your team understands both what you decided and how you arrived at that decision. It allows them to see the trade-offs, uncertainty and constraints you’re working within.

Communication is so important that roughly 80% say they would choose a workplace that prioritizes it over other benefits. Think about what that actually implies, as people are willing to trade perks, stability and sometimes compensation for clarity and honesty.

When you withhold your thinking until it’s perfectly formed, you might think you are protecting your authority and image. Instead, you’re creating distance where your team starts filling in the blanks, and they might not fill them in your favor. As such, radical transparency means narrating your reasoning while decisions are still forming, so explaining the “why,” together with the “what.” It also lets your team see that leadership is a process and not a performative act.

2. Focus On Small Details, Not Big Gestures

If transparency builds understanding, then consistency builds safety. Your staff often won’t remember your best moments, but they sure will remember your most repeated ones. You just need to be predictable, as inconsistency is what erodes trust fastest, even when your intentions are good.

That means your “yes” actually means “yes.” Your timelines remain in effect unless you explicitly reset them. Your behavior should stay the same under pressure, with different audiences or with varying workloads. Even small actions can impact your consistency, like ending meetings when you said you would, following through on commitments without reminders and applying standards evenly across people.

In fact, a study found that employees’ trust in leaders is tied to observable behaviors like professionalism, fairness and accountability. That matters because it removes the illusion that trust is built through personality, and shows it’s built through repetition. Consistency makes you reliable, which is what people trust when consequences are real.

3. Champion Their Success More Than Your Own

At your level, you’re expected to deliver results, manage perception and stay visible to senior leadership. It’s easy for that pressure to quietly shift your focus upward to how you’re being evaluated rather than how your employees are being enabled.

However, they would feel that shift immediately. They notice when credit flows upward to the point where leadership unintentionally absorbs more of it and less support flows downward. They’ll also notice when their concerns are softened or filtered before reaching higher levels. These feelings and concerns could reduce employee trust and connection to the organization.

As such, championing your team becomes a vital part of improving morale. You have to make their success visible when you speak upward and protect their work from distortion. It also means sometimes fixing credit ambiguity so they get recognition where it matters.

It can feel like you’re stepping back from personal visibility, but what you gain is far more important. You gain workers who believe you support and align with them. That belief creates a safe workplace environment where people are less defensive and focus on accomplishing team goals and preventing problems.

Why Small Actions Build a Stronger Foundation for Trust

If you strip everything back, radical transparency, consistency and championing others are not complicated. What makes them difficult is that they compete with how most leaders are usually trained to operate — controlling information, optimizing perception and prioritizing upward alignment. However, your employees are watching whether your daily behavior is predictable, honest and aligned with their success, meaning trust is something you demonstrate repeatedly and often in subtle ways. Pick one of these behaviors or do them all, but you have to start today, because your team is already forming conclusions about how much they can