Managers: Trust Is What Makes Accountability and Feedback Work

Trust at work is often talked about as a value or a personality trait.
But in practice, trust is something people experience through how work is set up, guided, and responded to.

In this episode of The Career Edge, Leslie Ferry explores why trust is the condition that makes accountability possible and feedback acceptable, and how managers quietly build or erode trust through everyday actions.

You’ll hear:

• Why accountability without trust feels like pressure
• Why feedback without trust is often ignored
• How predictability, not likability, builds trust
• Where trust is most commonly eroded without anyone intending it
• What managers can do to make expectations, context, and interpretation visible

This episode isn’t about becoming a “high-trust leader.”
It’s about understanding how trust is created, or lost, in the normal flow of work.

Key Themes

• Trust as predictability, not warmth
• Accountability as shared commitment to outcomes
• Feedback as contextual guidance, not correction
• Ability, integrity, and benevolence in daily managerial behavior
• Reducing ambiguity so people don’t have to guess how to succeed

Reflection Question for Listeners
Where might your silence be creating ambiguity, not because you don’t care, but because you assume clarity that isn’t actually shared?

https://myzandra.ai

Transcript

Welcome back to the Career Edge, a podcast for professionals who want to strengthen the human skills that shape their careers, especially in a world where how we think, decide and connect matters more than ever. I'm your host, Leslie Ferry, founder of Brize and creator of Zandra. Today we're going to talk about how trust is what makes accountability and feedback work. In the last episode, we reframed accountability.

as shared agreement and commitment to outcomes or the destination.

And we talked about feedback, not as correction, but as contextual route guidance, timely information that helps someone adjust how they're working while they're still on their path to the destination. We likened it to a GPS system. If you didn't hear that episode, the distinction still matters. Accountability answers where we're going. Feedback answers how to get there.

Here's the key connection to trust. Accountability without trust feels like control or pressure. Feedback without trust feels like judgment or being wrong. So it can often be ignored.

When trust is present, accountability feels like ownership to team members. Feedback feels like support and care for their growth. When trust is absent, even well-intended actions land very differently. So trust isn't a separate topic, it's the condition that determines how everything else is interpreted. One of the most common misconceptions is that trust comes from being likable. It doesn't.

Trust is built through consistent signals of ability, integrity, and benevolence. And those signals show up as predictability in everyday work. People trust you when your communication and actions help them reliably answer questions like, what does success actually look like here? How will decisions really be made? When something goes wrong, what happens next?

And we'll feedback

come when it's helpful or when it's too late. Notice, none of these are about warmth or personality. They're about clarity, follow through and care, expressed through action. Managers can be kind, friendly and

and still be experienced as untrustworthy. If expectations shift without warning, reactions surprise team members, or guidance arrives only after negative consequences.

is rarely broken in dramatic moments. It erodes in patterns that feel small in isolation, but compound over time.

Here are a few common examples. One is vague accountability. When outcomes are described loosely, like just do your best, make sure stakeholders are happy, take ownership of this. People will naturally fill in the gaps with their own assumptions on expectations. And when those assumptions don't match to what the manager had in mind, correction feedback feels unfair.

The manager may believe the desired outcome was obvious, but how was it shared to ensure the other person's

From the team member's perspective, they'll think, if this was the destination, why didn't you just say so earlier? Trust erodes not because expectations are high,

but because they are unclear. Over time, this weakens belief in a manager's ability to set direction.

Another common impact is when feedback comes too late. If feedback arrives only after a mistake, it can feel like judgment, not guidance. And judgment doesn't feel like care or benevolence.

if it's presented calmly, even if it's reasonable from the manager's viewpoint. Because what's communicated is, I was watching, I just didn't help. So over time,

People learn that feedback isn't something that supports success. It's something that explains failure after the fact. That's a trust problem.

Another quiet trust breaker is when priorities or standards shift without being named. Work that was good last quarter suddenly isn't strategic enough this quarter. Decisions that were once encouraged are now questioned. When context changes but isn't made explicit, the systems feel arbitrary. So this erodes trust in a manager's integrity, not because they're dishonest.

but because the logic behind decisions feels inconsistent or invisible. And unpredictability is one of the fastest ways to lose trust.

So what actually builds trust? Not charisma, not constant reassurance.

but a few grounded, repeatable behaviors.

Trust is built when managers make the invisible visible. That means naming what good looks like before work starts, explaining why something matters in this context, offering contextual feedback early in the flow of work while adjustment is still possible, and closing loops, not letting work disappear into silence. And when decisions are made, sharing how you arrived there, your reasoning, the trade-offs you had to make.

and other constraints. This is managerial ability in action. It also helps your team members build their judgment and reasoning so trust and capability grow together. When people understand how their work is being interpreted as it unfolds, they don't have to guess. And when guessing is removed, anxiety drops and ownership rises. Here's the deeper layer many organizations miss.

But notice how it ties directly back to trust.

Trust isn't about good intentions. It's built through daily actions that strengthen belief in a manager's ability, integrity, and benevolence. When those signals are missing, people often feel uncertain, not because they fear failure, but because they're unsure how their work is being interpreted.

They want confidence that they're focusing on the right things, their ideas and messages are landing as intended, and that they're taking initiative without overstepping. When managers don't provide regular interpretive signals, people either over-optimize for safety and only do things that feel defensible or over-index on their own assumptions about what matters, and neither builds trust. Trust grows when feedback helps people calibrate

how their actions are being read and offer small, actionable adjustments in real time.

If you manage people, here's a question worth sitting with. Where might your silence be creating ambiguity? Not because you don't care, but because you assume clarity that isn't actually shared. Ask yourself, what outcomes am I holding people accountable for that I haven't fully articulated? What information does each individual need to ensure understanding? Where do I tend to give feedback? Only in formal moments,

or in the day-to-day flow of work?

What context do I understand that my team doesn't and needs to? How can I share it? And how often do I repeat expectations, my thinking, goals, and values? Trust doesn't require perfection. It requires intentional visibility.

Trust isn't built by declaring it. It's built by designing work environments where people don't have to guess how to succeed.

destination, where feedback functions as guidance toward that destination, and where interpretation is surfaced early, not discovered too late. This is the kind of trust that compounds.

It's also the kind of trust Zandra is designed to help managers build by strengthening how they clarify expectations, reflect on how their actions are interpreted, and adjust in real situations. And it's one of the clearest career edges there is.

Thanks for listening. I'll see you next time on the Career Edge.