X-Model Series: Trust
We created the X-Model to help leadership teams understand how they’re really performing; not just in terms of outcomes, but in how they work together to get there.
The model evaluates four core dimensions of team effectiveness:
- Task (clarity of purpose),
- Trust (relational capital),
- Team (collaboration and challenge), and
- Traction (forward movement and results).
In this post, we’re focusing on one of the most critical – and often misunderstood – pillars: Trust.
Trust is what makes a team move
In most leadership teams, especially those that are newly formed, going through change, or under pressure to deliver, trust is the thing that determines whether the work gets stuck or gets done.
That includes:
- Making and keeping commitments
- Giving timely, constructive feedback
- Admitting mistakes and learning from them
When trust is low, even experienced teams lose momentum. Decisions stall, conversations get diluted, and feedback is withheld or sugar-coated. And slowly, the work drifts to the surface, because the real stuff feels too risky to say out loud.
The problem with how we talk about trust
In a lot of organisations, trust gets treated as a binary:
“Do we trust each other?”
Or as a personality style:
“Are you someone who gives trust freely or makes people earn it?”
These might be interesting to discuss, but they’re not useful when it comes to actually improving collective performance.
In teams, trust is contextual. It’s relational.
It’s built – or broken – moment by moment, in how people show up and work together.
So instead of asking “Do we trust each other?”, a better question is:
“What helps us build trust here?”
Trust is a willingness to act, even when things are uncertain
There’s a quote from Esther Perel that captures this well:
“Trust is the active engagement with the unknown. Trust is risky, it’s vulnerable, it’s a leap of faith.”
In many teams, there’s a sense that trust has to be fully established before good work can begin. But this is a utopian expectation that can actually end up hindering engagement.
Instead, there needs to be a willingness to take small, collective risks – to give feedback, to name a tension, to challenge constructively – and see what happens. That first shared step into uncertainty is what makes all the others possible.
It allows trust to be a dynamic capability, not a passive state; allowing people to move and relationships to flex within the system. This means the team can work with and through conflict, make decisions, and hold each other accountable without rupture.
What we measure in the X-Model
When we assess trust through the X-Model, we ask things like:
- Do people follow through on what they commit to?
- Can they admit mistakes and learn from them?
- Do they give each other timely feedback that supports accountability?
These questions give us a measurable, behavioural view of trust that’s grounded in how the team actually operates, not how they think they should.
That insight gives teams a baseline, and a place to start the work.
Because if trust is missing, no amount of strategic clarity or talent will carry a team forward.
But when trust is deliberately built – not assumed, not hoped for, but practised – performance becomes possible.
Find out more about the X-Model here: https://indigogold.com/x-model/