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

What most leaders miss is that trust is not a milestone you reach and bank. Andrea Butcher, an executive coach who has spent years inside executive and leadership teams, names the real dynamic plainly: every communication, every email, every text, every Slack message is either building trust or eroding it. The breakdowns she sees most often are not dramatic betrayals. They are unmet expectations, assumptions left unspoken, and leaders who are too in the grind to notice the small moments where trust quietly slips.

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: equipping leaders to be more of who they already are, instead of performing against a list of competencies. In this episode, she joins host Kim Bohr to continue a conversation that began when Kim appeared on Being at Work to discuss SparkEffect’s State of Organizational Trust research. This time they flip it, focusing on how trust actually gets built.

Along the way, Andrea draws a sharp line between predictive trust (will you do what you said) and vulnerability-based trust, the messier, relational kind that actually builds connection. The conversation covers dropping the armor in the executive room, catching the stories we tell ourselves about difficult colleagues, circling back when something doesn’t land, and treating the hardest team dynamics as a portal to growth rather than a problem to manage.