How Leaders Build High-Trust Teams in Times of Change
A few years ago I was leading a small team on a client proposal that I was very excited about. The brief was ambitious, the client was important, and I had a clear vision for the approach.
I drove the project hard. I outlined the strategy, expanded the scope, and kept the energy high. My team seemed engaged. The quick "sounds good" responses. The heads nodding in planning sessions.
Two days after we submitted, the client rejected the proposal and went with a competitor who had offered something simpler and cheaper.
Then came the email that changed how I lead permanently.
One of my team members, one of the best people I had worked with, wrote to tell me he had seen this coming. He had known the client was budget-constrained. He had known we were overcomplicating it. He had chosen not to say so, because I seemed so committed to the full approach and he did not want to be the person who dampened the enthusiasm.
Three weeks of work. A lost client. And the reason was not the strategy. The reason was that I had created a team that felt they could not challenge my thinking.
What Psychological Safety Actually Means
Psychological safety has become one of the most discussed concepts in leadership over the past decade. It is also one of the most misunderstood.
It does not mean a team where everyone feels comfortable. It does not mean avoiding conflict. It does not mean that leaders have to be gentle or that difficult feedback cannot be given.
What it means is this: every person on the team believes they can raise a concern, challenge an idea, admit a mistake, or ask a question without it damaging their standing or their relationship with their manager. They believe it is safe to be honest.
In practice, this is much rarer than most leaders realise. Research consistently shows that teams with high psychological safety significantly outperform those without it, across innovation, problem-solving, and results delivery. But the same research shows that most teams do not have it, and that the primary reason is leadership behaviour, usually unintentional.
Leaders create unsafe team environments not by being cruel or unfair, but by being predictable in the wrong ways. By visibly reacting when challenged. By favouring people who agree with them. By confusing compliance with buy-in. By being so committed to a direction that the team understands, without being told, that dissent is not welcome.
The signs are usually subtle. People speak up in one-on-ones but stay quiet in meetings. Conversations after sessions contain more substance than the sessions themselves. Ideas arrive through intermediaries rather than directly. The team stops trying because they know things will be done a certain way regardless.
The Accountability Piece That Gets Left Out
Here is where the conversation about psychological safety often becomes incomplete.
Safety without accountability is not a high-performing culture. It is a comfortable one. And comfortable is not the same as effective.
What distinguishes genuinely high-performing teams is not just that people feel safe to speak up. It is that they also feel expected to. There is a standard of honesty and directness that the team holds each other to, not just with the leader, but between peers. Problems get named early rather than managed around. Poor performance gets addressed with care but without avoidance. Commitments are taken seriously and followed through on.
Building this kind of culture requires leaders who can hold both things at once: genuine warmth and psychological safety on one side, and genuine expectations and accountability on the other. Most leaders find one of these easier than the other. The naturally warm and supportive leader tends to let accountability slide. The naturally direct and results-focused leader tends to create safety problems without realising it.
The development work for most leaders is not learning the concept. It is learning how to hold the combination in the specific, daily, often unremarkable situations where culture is actually built: the meeting where someone raises a concern, the moment someone pushes back on your idea, the conversation where performance has not been what was agreed.
What Change Does to Trust
In stable conditions, even imperfect trust dynamics can be managed. People know the rules, know what to expect, and have learned to navigate the culture. The dysfunction is present but contained.
In change, everything destabilises. Reorganisations eliminate familiar structures. AI and automation shift what roles actually involve. New leadership brings new expectations. Teams that were functioning adequately under predictable conditions suddenly face situations that require genuine trust to navigate: honest conversations about what is working, real information about what people are worried about, actual input on decisions rather than the performed version of it.
This is the moment when the trust you have built, or not built, determines everything.
I have worked with teams on both sides of this. Teams that had done the work of building genuine trust handled change in ways that impressed even their own leaders: surfacing problems early, adapting quickly, holding each other accountable through the discomfort. Teams that had coasted on surface-level harmony fell apart. Not dramatically, but gradually: the best people started leaving, information started flowing around the formal channels rather than through them, leaders started managing perceptions rather than solving problems.
The difference was not talent or resources. It was the quality of the relationships and the norms around honesty that had been built, or not built, before the disruption arrived.
Building It Before You Need It
The conversation about high-trust teams is sometimes positioned as a response to a problem. The team is not functioning well, so we need to build trust.
The leaders who create the most consistently effective teams do not think about it this way. They invest in the culture of their team as an ongoing leadership responsibility, not a repair job.
This means being explicit about what you expect, including the expectation that people challenge your thinking. It means consistently demonstrating, with your own behaviour, what happens when someone disagrees with you. It means noticing and naming the moments when the team is being too polite, rather than letting the surface harmony mask what is not being said.
And it sometimes means asking the simple question that changed my own leadership: what am I not seeing here? Then waiting through the silence until someone tells you.
Leadership coaching and team development at The Change Republic, working with leaders and organisations across Switzerland and Europe: www.thechangerepublic.com/leadershipcoaching
Tünde Lukacs is an executive coach and founder of The Change Republic. She works with leaders and leadership teams on building cultures of trust, accountability, and genuine performance.