Stepping into a leadership role, especially over an existing team, comes with an unspoken pressure.
You’re expected to build trust quickly, deliver results, steady the ship, and somehow prove you deserve the role… often all at the same time.
If you’d prefer to listen, this topic is also explored in the episode How to build trust in a team as a new leader of the How to Lead podcast.
But whether you’re listening or reading, let’s be clear about something upfront:
“Build trust” is one of the vaguest pieces of leadership advice you’ll ever receive.
It sounds sensible.
It’s also deeply unhelpful when you’re dealing with inherited clients, tight budgets, messy processes, and a team who are quietly working out what kind of leader you’re going to be.
So let’s slow this down and make it practical.
Because trust isn’t built through grand gestures, forced friendliness, or pretending you’ve got all the answers.
It’s built through clarity, consistency, and how you show up in everyday moments — especially under pressure.
A necessary reframe: trust doesn’t come from having all the answers
One of the fastest ways to lose trust as a new leader is to act as though you should have all the answers from day one.
This shows up a lot in agencies and consultancies, where:
The work is complex
Clients are demanding
And the team often knows far more about the detail than you do
New leaders sometimes fall into performance mode, trying to look competent, decisive, helpful. They fix work. Rewrite decks. Jump into client emails. Stay late. Rescue things.
The intention is good. The impact is not.
Because what your team experiences isn’t reassurance, it’s uncertainty.
They don’t yet know:
When they can decide without you
When you’ll step in
Or what “good” actually looks like in your eyes
And uncertainty erodes trust far faster than mistakes do.
Strong new leaders understand something important:
Vulnerability, done well, builds trust. Performance theatre destroys it.
Trust doesn’t come from being liked. It doesn’t come from being hands-off either.
It comes from people knowing three things about you:
What you expect
How you make decisions
Whether you’ll back them when things get uncomfortable
It’s OK — and powerful — to say you’re new
One of the most trust-building things a new leader can say is this:
“I’m new here. I want to do a good job. And I want to be the best leader for this team.”
That doesn’t undermine your authority.
It strengthens it.
Because it signals:
Humility
Confidence without ego
And a willingness to listen
From there, you can ask some simple, powerful questions:
What’s worked well with previous managers?
What hasn’t?
What would you like more of?
What would you like less of?
This isn’t about collecting gossip.
It’s about understanding the system you’ve stepped into.
Leaders who rush to change things before understanding them often break trust without realising it.
Observe first. Act second.
Another common mistake new leaders make is going in all guns blazing.
New role.
New title.
New energy.
So they change processes, reset priorities, reassign work — all before they truly understand what they’re changing.
A far better approach is to be explicit about your intention to observe before acting.
You might say something like:
“For the first couple of weeks, I’m going to focus on understanding the people, the work, and how things actually operate day to day. Then I’ll pull together a 30-60-90 day plan, with your input, and we’ll review it together.”
This does three things:
It buys you thinking time
It lowers anxiety in the team
And it positions change as collaborative, not imposed
Trust grows when people feel involved, not managed at.
The five things that actually build trust as a new leader
Once you’ve listened, observed, and got your bearings, trust is built in the everyday leadership moments.
Not through speeches. Through behaviour.
1. Be explicit about how you work
Don’t expect people to “work you out”.
Tell them:
How you like updates
What needs sign-off
Where they have full autonomy
Clarity builds trust far faster than good intentions.
When people know how decisions are made and where responsibility sits, they stop second-guessing and confidence grows.
2. Don’t rewrite the work in silence
If you change a proposal, a deck, or a client email without explaining why, you might improve the output, but you damage trust.
People don’t trust leaders who quietly take over. They trust leaders who help them think.
If you’ve changed something, explain the reasoning. Turn it into learning, not a takeover.
3. Be consistent under pressure
Agency and consultancy life is pressurised by default.
Deadlines move. Clients change briefs. Urgency creeps into everything.
Your team is watching how you behave when things get messy.
You don’t need to be calm all the time — but you do need to be predictable.
Consistency builds trust. Emotional whiplash erodes it.
4. Do what you say you’ll do
Follow-through matters more than charm.
If you say you’ll:
Unblock something
Speak to a client
Come back with a decision
Do it.
Early trust is fragile, and reliability strengthens it quickly.
5. Hold the line - kindly
Trust doesn’t come from being liked.
It comes from being fair, clear, and willing to have the slightly uncomfortable conversation when standards slip.
Teams trust leaders who protect the bar, not lower it.
Ask how you can support them without getting in their way
One simple question builds an enormous amount of trust:
“How can I support you without getting in your way?”
That sentence tells people you’re not here to micromanage, rescue, or control everything.
It opens up conversations about:
Autonomy
Decision-making
Escalation
Boundaries
And it stops you defaulting to what you would find helpful, rather than what they actually need.
Learn how they like to work - not just how you do
New leaders often do this backwards.
They explain how they like to work, how they like updates, how they make decisions.
That’s fine, but it’s only half the picture.
Trust deepens when you also ask:
How do you like feedback?
What helps you do your best work?
What gets in the way when things feel pressured?
This matters even more in hybrid and remote teams, where misalignment is easy and assumptions are costly.
Get out of the building (literally or metaphorically)
Some of the most effective trust-building doesn’t happen at desks or in formal meetings.
It happens:
On a walk
In a virtual coffee
In a quiet corner of a café
In small group conversations away from the usual environment
Not every one-to-one needs an agenda.
Not every conversation needs an outcome.
Sometimes trust is built simply by being human together.
Common mistakes new leaders make
Let me be direct about the ones I see most often:
Trying to prove yourself instead of learning
Making changes too quickly to show impact
Taking work back instead of coaching
Avoiding difficult conversations to stay liked
Or swinging the other way and “showing them who’s boss”
None of these build trust.
They create uncertainty, defensiveness, or quiet disengagement.
A delicate situation: managing someone who applied for your role
This comes up more often than leaders admit.
If someone you now manage went for the role you got, don’t ignore it.
You don’t need to over-apologise or over-explain.
But quiet acknowledgement goes a long way.
Something like:
“I know you went for this role. I want to acknowledge that. I value what you bring, and I’m keen for us to work well together. If there’s anything you want to talk through, my door’s open.”
That shows maturity and respect.
Avoid overcompensating, tip-toeing, or asserting dominance.
Trust grows when people feel seen, not sidelined.
A final thought
Trust isn’t built through grand gestures.
It’s built through:
Clarity
Consistency
Curiosity
And the courage to say, “I don’t know yet, but I’m learning”
As a new leader, your job isn’t to be perfect.
It’s to create the conditions where other people can do great work, without fear, confusion, or unnecessary interference.
That’s what real trust looks like.
If you’d like to strengthen your leadership in a way that actually sticks, you’ll find details of my coaching, programmes - including the Leadership Accelerator Premium - and practical resources at waterfallhill.co.uk.
Because knowing how to lead isn’t the same as leading well.
