Become a leader who values building trust within their team.

How to Build Trust
Presented and developed by John Barclay
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Understand Your Influence

Appreciate the true scale of your shadow across your team.

Build Trusting Relationships

Understand how high performing teams emerge from trust.

Utilise Effective Accountability

Hear what makes accountability work well and what destroys it. 

Recognise the Trust Elements

Understand what can make trust and what can undermine it.

Discover relationship roles

Using the relationship diamond, recognise different relationship roles.

Set Clear Expectations

Set expectations and follow through with appropriate consequences.

Are you a leader who wants to improve trust within your team?


Developed by culture change expert, John Barclay, this course will increase your understanding of the elements that build trust while acknowledging your influence and power as a leader. For several years, John has delivered this course to leaders with outstanding results. Now, for the first time, this course is available in an online format for everyone to access.

Frequently asked questions

Why is building trust important?

Without trust there is no possibility for a high functioning team to form. All examples of high performing teams demonstrate high trust as the foundation for everything else. For a team to work together, they must be open with each other and feel safe enough to speak candidly. This requires a high-level psychological safety (trust).

How will building trust motivate my team?

Impacting people’s motivation and performance starts with whether they trust you and others. Without trust there is no opportunity for openness and honesty. For people to have a sense of belonging they require a sense of trust. With trust people feel like they can thrive and reach their full potential. To push ourselves we must embrace failure as learning and to be able to do this we need to trust those in our circle to not judge us and help us grow and learn. 

Can I build trust among team members?

Anyone can build trust with others. Some people will trust others until trust is broken, some people won’t trust anyone until trust is earned. Either way, to keep trust or earn trust you need to be trustworthy. This requires understanding on how to be trustworthy, increase self-awareness around how we interact with others and social intelligence. It takes a focused effort in learning to treat others the way they like to be treated.

How long does it take to build trust?

Building trust and the time it takes depends on people’s relationship with trust and in trusting others. Some people inherently trust people until trust is broken, while some don’t trust anyone until trust is earned. So, depending on the personality types in a group you may have high trust from the start, the test will be maintaining the trust. If the group is mostly those who wait for trust to be earned, then it may take time for high trust to be established. There is never a set amount of time for building trust as it is built over many different interactions and experiences.

What do you need to do to build trust?

To build trust you must be trustworthy. Trustworthy means being reliable, honest and truthful. Some people will say the most important thing is keeping your promises and keeping things in confidence. David Master described trustworthiness as Credibility + Reliability + Intimacy / Self-Orientation. Or in other words can “I believe what you say”, “know that you will do what you say”, “that you will keep what I say in confidence” and “you will put others before your own self-interest”.


Is trust the same as credibility?

Credibility is one part of trust or being trustworthy. Being credible isn’t enough to be trustworthy it requires a combination of credibility, reliability, intimacy, and low self-orientation.

Meet Your Instructor

John Barclay

John has over 15 years’ experience in safety management, behavioural safety and culture change across a variety of industries. He has a genuine passion for helping Leaders and businesses develop and implement sustainable safety solutions and business transformation.As with all members of the Barclayss® team, John has a client-first approach, focussing on the end game and positive outcomes for you.John and the Barclayss® team can help you get your business to where you want it to be.
Patrick Jones - Course author