Hey Friend,

I've been nerding out about trust and trustworthiness for years. However, this week, I realized that trust — both as a force and as a framework — is not only a foundational concept for leaders and organizations; it's also something that has come up in every project I've worked on since 2019.

This probably shouldn't have been a revelation, but it has changed the way I'm seeing and want to talk about some of my work.

I am still confident about the four intervention lanes I shared with you this summer:

1. Team Culture & Cohesion
2. Leadership & Management Development
3. Burnout Prevention & Professional Well-being
4. Conflict Transformation

AND none of these things can actually or sustainably shift without trust (undoubtedly why this has been such a consistent theme in my work).

To create real and lasting change, people, leaders, teams, and systems must be trust-positive.

The problem? We live in a trust-negative world, especially at work.

I'm usually a glass-half-full kind of gal. But the reality is that we’re experiencing a trust crisis that undermines not only individual well-being, but also the sustainability of our organizations and movements.

• People don't trust each other.
• Groups don't trust each other.
• Teams don't trust their leaders, and leaders don't trust their teams.
• People don't trust systems or organizations, and quite frankly? Those systems and institutions aren't really deserving of trust.

Compounding the issue:

• We’re repeatedly shown (by influential public figures and on TikTok) that dishonesty and manipulation are acceptable, even rewarded.
• We carry implicit biases that make us less trustworthy, often without even realizing it.
• And in workplaces, trust is often treated as a “nice to have” rather than the essential infrastructure that underpins everything.

Yes, there are trustworthy people and organizations.

Of course, it's not all bad.

No, I don't think anyone intends to build trust-negative organizations.
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But that's why I think it's time for a language shift from whole trustworthiness or untrustworthiness to net trust positivity.

Here’s my reframe: no one is ever 100% trustworthy all the time. We’re human. We inevitably make mistakes. We sometimes fall short. We will unavoidably behave in ways that depreciate our trustworthiness.

As such, we can't consider our goal to be about achieving perfection; the goal should actually be about cultivating and sustaining net trust-positivity. That means being more trustworthy than not, and regularly building our muscles to both earn trust AND extend trust to others.

When we are not trust-positive, everything becomes harder—collaboration, communication, innovation, conflict resolution, culture, retention, and even the confidence leaders have in themselves.

The data backs this up:

• Only 30% of employees who don’t trust their employers feel motivated to work (compared to 80% of those who do)
• Workers in high-trust companies report 74% less stress and 40% less burnout.
• High-trust cultures outperform the market by 2x in earnings.
• Trusted companies outperform peer organizations by up to 400%.
• In high-trust teams, the risk of quitting drops to 3% versus 12% in low-trust teams.

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​This is clearly not just about feelings or developing soft skills. Trust is the foundation, and building it is a business and mission imperative. No leadership, culture, or well-being effort succeeds without it.

The good news? Trust can be built, repaired, and strengthened, and with the right tools, leaders can learn to trust themselves, teams can learn to trust each other, and organizations can create cultures where trust is the expectation, not the exception.

Even better news? Reloveution is really good at helping you get there. For years, we’ve guided leaders, teams, and workplaces through the process of cultivating trust-positive leadership and culture.

Over the next several weeks (maybe months? maybe forever?), I’ll be sharing much more about this topic because I believe that creating a shared knowledge base around trust and trustworthiness is one of the first steps toward lasting change.

I want you (and everyone) to learn:

• How trust breaks down in real working relationships and organizations
• How to measure trustworthiness and your personal and organizational “trust factor”
• How to build trust from the ground up
• How to REBUILD trust when it’s been broken
• How to sustain trust through uncertainty, change, and crisis
• How to operationalize trust in teams and systems
• How to strengthen self-trust as a leader

And that's just what I've thought of so far!

Because this is THE work, and because when trust grows, everything else follows.
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​Are you with me? Let's build the Trust-Positive Movement together.

Below my signature, you'll find some questions for reflection and some upcoming opportunities to get started :-)

With big gratitude,
Marissa

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