In today’s engineering culture, we celebrate the tangible: product velocity, code quality, sprint metrics. But what often powers that momentum isn't in the data—it's in the trust people have in one another. High-trust teams are faster, more resilient, more creative—and yes, happier. And the best part? Trust isn't magic. It's built intentionally.
The Core of High-Trust Teams
High-trust engineering teams don’t just communicate frequently they communicate openly. They assume good intent. They share feedback early and often. And they create a safe space where every team member can say, “I don’t know.”
I’ve worked in both low-trust and high-trust environments, and the difference is night and day. I ask bolder questions, feel more engaged, and am more productive when I’m working with people I trust. Even Scrum ceremonies like retrospectives become meaningful when there’s trust in the room. Giving tough feedback becomes less about confrontation and more about collaboration. Because when someone knows you’re trying to help, not hurt, everything shifts.
Psychological safety, a term coined by Harvard professor Amy Edmondson, is foundational. It allows engineers to experiment without fear, escalate problems before they become fires, and own mistakes as opportunities to learn.
Trust may be hard to measure. It might look different for each person. But some universal principles can shift your team dynamic.
I think about this often while we have plenty of metrics to measure employee performance, trust is much harder to quantify. Yet in many cases, it's one of the most valuable traits a person or team can have.
Simon Sinek - Trust vs Performance
Ingredients for Building Trust
- Consistency in Leadership Leaders don’t need to have all the answers. But they must be predictable in behavior, transparent in decision-making, and humble enough to admit when they’ve missed the mark.
- Accountability with Empathy Accountability builds trust when it’s delivered with clarity, compassion, and context. Supporting someone through a stumble says more than any performance metric.
- Celebrating Curiosity, Not Just Certainty High-trust teams reward questions as a sign of engagement—not weakness. Model it. Celebrate it. Normalize it.
- Repairing Trust When It Breaks Missed deadlines, heated reviews, awkward messages—we’ve all been there. What matters most is how quickly trust is acknowledged, repaired, and reinforced.
Building trust isn't a side project—it’s the work. It’s what transforms high-performing individuals into unstoppable teams. So the next time you’re optimizing a CI/CD pipeline or refining Jira workflows, pause and ask: What’s one thing I could do today to invest in trust? That’s engineering at its most human.