Most leaders think trust is rebuilt through communication.

More meetings.
More updates.
More town halls.
More promises.

But trust doesn't return because leadership talks about it.

It returns when leadership does something costly, visible, and consistent enough that people start believing the words again.

When I inherited a team struggling with internal conflict, damaged relationships, and a supplier dispute headed toward legal action, my first instinct was to fix the strategy.

That was the wrong starting point.

I couldn't fix the strategy until I fixed the room.

This week's Leadership In Focus newsletter explores what actually rebuilds trust, including a lesson from Howard Schultz's decision to close 7,100 Starbucks stores and why trust is not a feeling.

It's a system.

Read the full article below.

#Leadership #Trust #Culture #LeadershipDevelopment #OrganizationalCulture

A little over two years ago, I stopped running.

Recently, I decided to train for a half marathon and quickly realized something uncomfortable: ambition doesn't eliminate reality. Before I could move forward, I had to honestly assess where I was starting from.

Organizations face the same challenge.

Alan Mulally discovered it when he arrived at Ford and found a leadership team reporting green dashboards while the company was losing billions. The turnaround didn't begin with strategy. It began when someone finally felt safe enough to tell the truth.

The gap between what your organization knows and what it will say out loud is where every stall begins.

I pulled off the highway in rural Quebec to take a mandatory company call. What I heard changed everything; and shaped how I think about brand, culture, and leadership to this day. New article up.