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You've messed up. You know it. Your team knows it. A lot of leaders know that sinking "Oh sh!t" feeling of realizing they've done something to break their team's trust. 

In this episode, we dig into a real story of broken trust: the situation, the impacts, and what ultimately turned things around.

We walk through the moves that reopened honest dialogue and rebuilt psychological safety; from the leader acknowledging their oops without making excuses to co-designing a repair plan with the team. You'll hear practical guidance for leaders to work through a sticky situation: prompts to surface the problem, ways to structure the repair conversation, and tools to prevent repeat breaks.

Above all, this conversation emphasizes the foundation that makes repair possible: care. When people feel considered before decisions are made, they'll give you grace when you stumble and they'll stand with you as you repair.

If you listen and it helps you lead with more courage and care, follow the show, save it, share it, and leave a quick review to help others find us.

We want to thank the team that continues to support us in producing, editing and sharing our work. Jonah Smith for the heartfelt intro music you hear at the beginning of each podcast. We LOVE it. Hillary Rideout for writing descriptions, designing covers and helping us share our work on social media. Chad Penner for his superpower editing work to take our recordings from bumpy and glitchy to smooth and easy to listen to episodes for you to enjoy. From our hearts, we are so thankful for this team and the support they provide us.

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What if moving faster with AI didn't mean giving up your judgment?

We sit down with Lindsay Semas, an AI leader who's spent years building trustworthy technology at scale, to explore the gap between what AI can do and what we should let it do - from drafting emails to shaping customer strategy.

We start with the quick wins: smarter research, better first drafts, fewer browser tabs. Then we get into the harder stuff: how to earn trust in AI outputs by asking for sources, questioning what's missing, and matching your scrutiny to the stakes. Lindsay introduces a sliding-scale approach: lean on AI for synthesis, but keep humans in the loop when outcomes touch customers, compliance, or your reputation.

The real heart of the conversation: Governance. Lindsay walks us through how her company built a cross-functional trust council, complete with checklists, accountability structures, and clear guidelines on when AI decisions need human oversight. We also tackle the anxiety around job displacement and the pace of change.

Whether you're leading a team or just trying to use these tools better, this one's for you.

Subscribe, share with a colleague, and let us know what resonates.

We want to thank the team that continues to support us in producing, editing and sharing our work. Jonah Smith for the heartfelt intro music you hear at the beginning of each podcast. We LOVE it. Hillary Rideout for writing descriptions, designing covers and helping us share our work on social media. Chad Penner for his superpower editing work to take our recordings from bumpy and glitchy to smooth and easy to listen to episodes for you to enjoy. From our hearts, we are so thankful for this team and the support they provide us.

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What if trust didn't depend on heroic one-to-one fixes, but on the environment you design every day?

In this new episode, we explore what it means to shift from "I build trust with you" to "I build a space where everyone can build, maintain, and repair trust with each other." 

Through real stories and practical moves, we map out the leadership behaviours that make trust the default: intentionality in how you bring your team together, asking questions instead of solving problems, surfacing values, and creating structures for reliability and repair.

If you're ready to lead a team where honesty is safe, accountability is normal, and collaboration moves faster because people feel respected, this one's for you.

Listen, subscribe, and share with a leader who needs to hear this.

We want to thank the team that continues to support us in producing, editing and sharing our work. Jonah Smith for the heartfelt intro music you hear at the beginning of each podcast. We LOVE it. Hillary Rideout for writing descriptions, designing covers and helping us share our work on social media. Chad Penner for his superpower editing work to take our recordings from bumpy and glitchy to smooth and easy to listen to episodes for you to enjoy. From our hearts, we are so thankful for this team and the support they provide us.

Send us a message - we'd love to hear from you

What happens when your early life didn't teach you how to trust? How do you learn vulnerability and honesty when those skills were never modeled for you?

We sit down with Andy Vasily - Leadership / Performance Coach, Podcast Host and Educational Consultant - to explore how trust is a learnable competency, not something you're born with. We dig into the neuroscience behind protective behaviors, why withholding information robs others of learning, and how naming emotions transforms defensive meetings into productive ones. Andy explains how leaders who seek to understand how experiences have shaped their team members, before jumping to solutions, create far more effective outcomes.

We examine the power of understanding our own propensity to trust, our ability to repair when we fall short, and how practicing small behaviors until they become second nature allow us to create space in which trust can grow. You'll learn why vulnerability is a performance advantage, how eight seconds of genuine acknowledgment can make someone feel truly seen, and the practical steps that build psychological safety.

If you've wondered whether you can learn to trust differently than you were taught, this episode offers the language, mindset, and next steps to start building trust you can count on.

Subscribe, share this with someone who needs it, and leave a review telling us the one trust behavior you'll try next.

We want to thank the team that continues to support us in producing, editing and sharing our work. Jonah Smith for the heartfelt intro music you hear at the beginning of each podcast. We LOVE it. Hillary Rideout for writing descriptions, designing covers and helping us share our work on social media. Chad Penner for his superpower editing work to take our recordings from bumpy and glitchy to smooth and easy to listen to episodes for you to enjoy. From our hearts, we are so thankful for this team and the support they provide us.

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Overwhelm never asks permission. When it hits, our reflex is to work harder and push through. Yet that often distracts us from the one thing that restores clarity: pausing. In this new episode of Trust on Purpose, we dive into the difference between a nourishing pause and disassociation, how awareness of our sensations helps us return from checkout mode, and how small rituals create the space where we can make better choices.

We share simple ways to practice pausing to regain calm and rebuild trust in your own inner wisdom. Then we connect the dots to leadership in unlocking a team’s intelligence, reducing decision anxiety, and sparking creativity in the uncertainty most leaders try to outrun.

You’ll hear candid stories about over-planning, the fear of not having all the answers, and how surrender-in-doses becomes a practical skill. We talk about listening to the uncomfortable answers that arise when we finally get quiet, and how to hold them without rushing into action. Expect grounded tools, warm honesty, and a reframe of uncertainty as fertile ground for innovation, trust, and more humanness in our work.

We want to thank the team that continues to support us in producing, editing and sharing our work. Jonah Smith for the heartfelt intro music you hear at the beginning of each podcast. We LOVE it. Hillary Rideout for writing descriptions, designing covers and helping us share our work on social media. Chad Penner for his superpower editing work to take our recordings from bumpy and glitchy to smooth and easy to listen to episodes for you to enjoy. From our hearts, we are so thankful for this team and the support they provide us.

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What happens when you choose long-term trust over short-term speed? Psychologist Susan David's powerful question launches us into a revealing exploration of how trust-building decisions fundamentally transform outcomes.

This episode contrasts two dramatically different approaches to organizational change. On one hand, a team that prioritizes rapid implementation, making unilateral decisions and forcing solutions on users can lead to active sabotage and project failure. Another that invests time upfront in building trust-filled relationships and understanding, creating psychological safety can enjoy dramatic success.

The surprising insight: Prioritizing trust building up front doesn't necessarily extend timelines. Strong trust foundations allow teams to move quickly when it matters most, while preventing the costly rework cycles that sink speed-focused strategies.

Listen to discover how trust conversations can transform your most important connections.

We want to thank the team that continues to support us in producing, editing and sharing our work. Jonah Smith for the heartfelt intro music you hear at the beginning of each podcast. We LOVE it. Hillary Rideout for writing descriptions, designing covers and helping us share our work on social media. Chad Penner for his superpower editing work to take our recordings from bumpy and glitchy to smooth and easy to listen to episodes for you to enjoy. From our hearts, we are so thankful for this team and the support they provide us.

Send us a message - we'd love to hear from you

What if the secret to breakthrough results isn't working harder but making better promises? Bob Dunham, founder of the Institute for Generative Leadership, reveals the power of trustworthy commitments in creating extraordinary outcomes.

Dunham challenges the mechanistic approach dominating today's workplace, where employees are treated as production units rather than humans with creative potential. "We've left out being human; everything's being mechanized," he explains. He goes on to explain that this blindness to our human capacity restricts the value that can be created, and waking up to this opens up a whole new world.

At the heart of Dunham's Generative Leadership discipline lies a powerful distinction between responsibility and accountability that transforms how we approach work. While many use these terms interchangeably, Dunham clarifies and contrasts them, leading us to reject blame and excuses, and focus instead on what can be done despite inevitable challenges.

Dunham shares how he applied these principles to turn around a Silicon Valley software engineering department that hadn't delivered products in two and a half years. The key wasn't superhuman effort, but rather creating systems that supported responsibility at all levels.

For listeners struggling with accountability issues, unmotivated teams, or untrustworthy commitments, this conversation offers practical wisdom on building cultures where people consistently deliver superior results by reconnecting our humanity with our work.

We want to thank the team that continues to support us in producing, editing and sharing our work. Jonah Smith for the heartfelt intro music you hear at the beginning of each podcast. We LOVE it. Hillary Rideout for writing descriptions, designing covers and helping us share our work on social media. Chad Penner for his superpower editing work to take our recordings from bumpy and glitchy to smooth and easy to listen to episodes for you to enjoy. From our hearts, we are so thankful for this team and the support they provide us.

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"I shouldn't have to explain this." Sound familiar? A lot of leaders feel this way about making clear requests of people. It creates a destructive cycle: vague directions lead to poor results, which fuel resentment and reinforce the belief that explanation shouldn't be necessary.

The hidden cost is teams divided between mind-readers and the confused, while everyone wastes time "spinning," trying to guess what leaders actually want. What feels like giving creative freedom often creates anxiety and inefficiency instead.

We explore how cultural pressure to move fast reinforces communication shortcuts, yet spending time on clear requests upfront saves massive time fixing problems later. We'll challenge you to ask yourself: "Am I more committed to my belief that I shouldn't have to explain this, or to getting the result I want?"

Whether you're a frustrated leader or someone constantly guessing what your boss wants, this episode offers practical insights to break the cycle. Notice your own "shoulding" and consider whether it's serving you and your team.

We want to thank the team that continues to support us in producing, editing and sharing our work. Jonah Smith for the heartfelt intro music you hear at the beginning of each podcast. We LOVE it. Hillary Rideout for writing descriptions, designing covers and helping us share our work on social media. Chad Penner for his superpower editing work to take our recordings from bumpy and glitchy to smooth and easy to listen to episodes for you to enjoy. From our hearts, we are so thankful for this team and the support they provide us.

Send us a message - we'd love to hear from you

What happens when we trust life enough to put down our armour and show up authentically? Poet Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer takes us on a journey through the transformative power of creative practice and how it builds the muscle of trust - in life, in ourselves - that we need in our most challenging moments.

Rosemerry opens our conversation with her powerful poem "Growing Trust," asking why we would ever "slip back into armour" when life itself is waiting to move through us. She shares how her commitment to writing poems daily completely shifted her relationship with creativity, moving from perfectionism to valuing truth and authenticity above all else. This daily practice became about cultivating a way of being present with whatever arises.

The parallels between creative practice and leadership emerge throughout our discussion; when leaders do their own inner work, others can sense it, creating psychological safety without effort. As one of Rosemerry's students expressed, "I trust you because I can tell you've done your work." This embodied authenticity allows leaders to create spaces where vulnerability and creativity can thrive.

Rosemerry's wisdom offers a powerful invitation to trust what emerges when we get out of our own way and open ourselves to the inherent creativity of life itself.

We want to thank the team that continues to support us in producing, editing and sharing our work. Jonah Smith for the heartfelt intro music you hear at the beginning of each podcast. We LOVE it. Hillary Rideout for writing descriptions, designing covers and helping us share our work on social media. Chad Penner for his superpower editing work to take our recordings from bumpy and glitchy to smooth and easy to listen to episodes for you to enjoy. From our hearts, we are so thankful for this team and the support they provide us.

Send us a message - we'd love to hear from you

What truly makes a good leader? We dive into this question by challenging ourselves to identify the qualities that matter most – and then getting real about how we're actually doing.

We share some of our own leadership strengths and blind spots, but the conversation quickly evolves into something more interesting: How do you even know if you're leading well? Turns out, your body might have more answers than you think.

We wrestle with some of the trickier aspects of leadership – like how to balance your time and energy across your team, when to make tough calls about people, and why the idea of the all-knowing leader is pretty much a myth.

Leadership isn't something you figure out once or on in solitude. It's an ongoing practice that requires honest self-reflection, building the right support network, and a willingness to call for support when needed. And trust? It's woven into everything; trust in ourselves, in thought partners, in sources of feedback and in the feedback they offer, in our bodies, and our emotions.

We wrap up with a challenge, actually a "Double Dog Dare," that might sound simple but could change how you think about your leadership. Ready to take it on? We'd love to hear what you discover.

We want to thank the team that continues to support us in producing, editing and sharing our work. Jonah Smith for the heartfelt intro music you hear at the beginning of each podcast. We LOVE it. Hillary Rideout for writing descriptions, designing covers and helping us share our work on social media. Chad Penner for his superpower editing work to take our recordings from bumpy and glitchy to smooth and easy to listen to episodes for you to enjoy. From our hearts, we are so thankful for this team and the support they provide us.