Trust is the one thing every leader says they want more of, and the one most are quietly getting wrong. The instinct is to build it through competence or charisma: prove yourself, earn people's confidence, move on. Then the team goes quiet, the executive room gets political, and the organization stops believing what leadership says.

Executive coach Andrea Butcher has spent years inside executive and leadership teams watching this play out. The breakdowns she sees most often are not dramatic betrayals. They are unmet expectations, unspoken assumptions, and leaders too caught in the grind to notice the small moments where trust slips. Her reframe is direct: every communication, every email, every text, every Slack message is either building trust or eroding it.

Andrea Butcher is the founder of Abundant Empowerment and host of the Being at Work podcast. Her work centers on the being of leadership rather than the doing, and on the difference between predictive trust and the vulnerability-based trust that actually builds connection. In this episode, Kim Bohr continues a conversation that began when she joined Andrea on Being at Work to discuss SparkEffect's organizational trust research, this time focusing on how trust gets built.

Andrea Butcher:

“Every communication, every email, every text, every slack, everything I put out there is either building or eroding.”

Kim Bohr:

“When I think back in my own career, I've grown the most" from the more challenging situations. That's where I tell people that sometimes when they're going through those situations... this is where you're growing the most.”

Courage to Advance explores how visionary leaders are building the organizations they wish existed through trust, transparency, and the willingness to challenge what no longer works. Hosted by Kim Bohr, CEO of SparkEffect. New episodes drop every second, third, and fourth Tuesday of each month. Subscribe at https://sparkeffect.com/sparkeffect-podcast-courage-to-advance/.