Leaders are told to build trust. It is good advice in the way that "be healthy" is good advice: true, unobjectionable, and almost impossible to act on directly.
Trust is not an input. It is a reading. It tells you what a relationship has produced over time, under pressure, when something was at stake.
What a low reading actually means
When people do not rely on one another, they compensate. They verify work that has already been verified. They copy people into decisions to create witnesses. They convert judgment calls into approval chains. Each of these is a coordination cost, and each one is measurable.
Where to intervene
Not on the gauge. On the conditions the gauge is reading: whether commitments are met, whether bad news travels without punishment, whether people can disagree without paying for it later.
Fix those and the reading moves. Run a trust workshop and you will get a better vocabulary for the same problem.
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