Refreshed | 2026 | What’s changed in this version. The thirteen behaviours are unchanged — they’ve held up. What’s new is the evidence behind them, a corrected attribution, and one behaviour I’d now write differently. Ten years is long enough to admit a second thought.
There is one thing that, removed from a team, destroys it.
Trust.
Not strategy. Not talent. Not the org chart, the incentive scheme or the offsite. Teams survive all sorts of structural nonsense as long as the people in them believe each other. Take that away and nothing else you install will hold.
The most useful map I’ve found of what trust actually looks like in behaviour — not in values statements, in behaviour — is Stephen M. R. Covey’s thirteen. (Not Stephen R. Covey of The 7 Habits — the son, not the father; more on that mix-up in the references.)
I wrote about them here in 2016. A decade on, they’re still the most read thing I’ve published, and they’re still the framework I open with in a room full of leaders.
Here they are, refreshed.
Why this list has lasted
Covey’s thirteen come from a consulting practice, not a peer-reviewed study — worth saying plainly, because the credibility here runs one direction. What makes the list worth taking seriously isn’t that it’s independently validated. It’s that it maps unusually closely onto a construct that is.
Mayer, Davis and Schoorman’s model of organisational trust — the most cited in the field, and empirically tested across several decades of subsequent research — says we judge someone’s trustworthiness on three factors: their ability, their benevolence and their integrity. Can you do it, do you mean well by me, and do you hold to a set of principles I can predict?
Line that up against Covey’s tree and the correspondence is closer than a loose analogy. MDS ability maps to Covey’s capability. MDS benevolence — do you care about my interests — maps to Covey’s intent. And MDS integrity maps to Covey’s integrity: literally the same construct, named the same way, in an unrelated academic model published a decade earlier.
That’s the finding worth sitting with. Not two equal traditions converging — a validated psychological construct lending an unvalidated practitioner taxonomy far more credibility than the taxonomy could claim on its own.
The second finding matters more for anyone reading this at work. Dirks and Ferrin’s meta-analysis pulled together four decades of research across 106 samples and found that trust in leadership predicts a long list of things organisations care about — performance, citizenship behaviours, commitment, satisfaction, intention to stay.
And the referent that mattered most wasn’t the executive team, the brand, or the organisation. It was the direct leader. The person you report to.
Which is either sobering or energising depending on where you sit. Your team’s experience of trust at work is mostly your doing. Not the CEO’s. Not HR’s. Yours.
A limit worth naming. Dirks and Ferrin’s 106 samples are drawn overwhelmingly from Western, English-speaking organisational settings, and Covey’s thirteen were never tested as a set — only argued for. “Talk straight” in particular carries different social risk in a high-context culture than in an Australian workplace. Treat the list as a strong starting map, not a universal law.
Start with yourself
Covey’s first instruction isn’t about your team at all. It’s about you, and it’s the part most people skip on the way to the list.
“If we can’t trust ourselves, we’ll have a hard time trusting others. Personal incongruence is often the source of our suspicion of others.”
He draws it as a tree, and the picture does real work. Four parts, and the two that matter most are the two you can’t see directly.
Roots — integrity. Who you are when nobody is watching. Congruence, humility, courage. Nobody sees it directly and everybody feels it.
Trunk — intent. Your motive and your agenda. Whether you genuinely care about the other person’s interests or only your own. Also largely invisible, also entirely felt.
Branches — capabilities. Talents, attitude, skills, knowledge, style. Visible, and the thing people most often mistake for the whole tree.
Fruit — results. Your track record. The most visible part of you, and the last part to change when something goes wrong underground.
Integrity and intent are the roots and trunk. Capability and results are the branches and fruit. People read you through the visible half and form conclusions about the invisible half. That’s not unfair — it’s the only information they have.
Character-based behaviours
1. Talk straight
Say what you mean. Tell people what you’re thinking and why, and leave no room for them to invent a second version. Don’t manipulate, don’t spin, don’t shade the facts to make a conversation easier for yourself.
Straight talk is not the same as blunt talk. The difference is intent: if your reason for speaking is that you want this person to be better, that reads clearly, even when the message stings. Most people think worse of you during the conversation and better of you a week later.
2. Demonstrate respect
Behave decently. Be fair, be civil, be kind — and be those things when it costs you something, because that’s the only time anyone’s counting.
The old line is “treat others as you’d like to be treated.” I’d sharpen it now: treat others as they need to be treated. Your preferences aren’t a universal standard. Some people want the detail; some want the headline. Respect is noticing which.
And when you catch yourself being short with someone, it’s worth asking why. Is it something they’ve genuinely done that breaches a team standard — in which case have the conversation? Or is it a belief you’re carrying that they’ve done nothing to earn? One of those is a performance issue. The other is yours.
3. Create transparency
Be real. Say things people can verify. Drop the hidden agendas — they’re never as hidden as you think, and the effort of maintaining them is visible even when the content isn’t.
Share where the business is going and, specifically, where this person fits in it. Vague optimism is not transparency. Neither is announcing a decision after it’s been made and calling it consultation.
4. Right wrongs
Don’t just apologise — make restitution. Fix the thing. Reverse the call. Return the credit you took.
And never cover up. The cover-up is always more expensive than the error, because the error is a mistake and the cover-up is a choice. If your team is dysfunctional, name your own contribution to it first and say what you’re going to do differently. Trust rebuilds in small increments, and this is one of the fastest.
5. Show loyalty
Give credit generously and specifically. Speak about people as though they’re standing there — because eventually they will be, and someone in the room will tell them exactly what you said.
Defend the absent. It’s the cheapest trust you’ll ever buy and the most reliably repaid.
This is the one I’d write differently now. See Second thoughts below.
Competence-based behaviours
6. Deliver results
The fastest way to quiet a sceptic is to do the thing you said you’d do. Not to explain it better. Not to reframe it. Do it.
Results establish your track record, and a track record is trust you don’t have to argue for. It’s also the one form of credibility that transfers cleanly into a new team, where nobody knows you yet.
7. Get better
Keep learning, visibly. A leader who is obviously still developing gives their team permission to be developing too — and reassurance that you’ll adapt when the ground shifts.
Build real feedback channels and then, crucially, act on them. Asking for feedback and doing nothing is worse than never asking, because you’ve taken something from people and given nothing back. What your team believes about you becomes the working reality, whether or not it’s fair.
8. Confront reality
Take the hard issue on directly, early, while it’s still small and cheap. Name the thing everyone is already discussing in the car park.
Leaders often avoid this in the belief they’re protecting the team. They’re not. The team already knows. What’s actually being protected is the leader’s comfort, and everybody can tell the difference.
9. Clarify expectations
Agree upfront what good looks like. Be specific to the point of feeling pedantic. Renegotiate openly when things change, rather than quietly moving the line and hoping nobody notices.
Most teams don’t fail because people didn’t care. They fail because the person delegating assumed a shared standard that was never actually shared. If you can’t hear the expectation repeated back in their words, it hasn’t landed yet.
10. Practice accountability
Hold yourself to account first, out loud, in front of the people you’re about to hold to account. In that order.
Then be clear about how progress gets reported and what happens if it slips. Accountability isn’t a punishment system — it’s the reason a commitment means anything.
Behaviours that need both
11. Listen first
Understand before you diagnose. Genuinely — not the version where you’re assembling your reply while they finish their sentence.
Listening is the behaviour most often faked and most reliably detected. People can see it in your face. And the moment they conclude you’re not really listening is the moment they stop bringing you problems while those problems are still small.
12. Keep commitments
This is the quickest way to build trust that exists, and the quickest way to burn it. Make keeping your word the thing you’re known for.
Which means making fewer commitments than you’d like to. Every casual “leave it with me” is a withdrawal against a balance you may not have. No surprises.
13. Extend trust
Give it before it’s been fully earned. That’s what makes it a gift rather than a transaction — and extending trust is how you become someone worth trusting.
It carries genuine risk, and occasionally it will cost you. It’s still the better bet. Leadership runs on followership, and nobody follows someone who has quietly decided they can’t be relied on.
Second thoughts: what I’d change since 2016
Ten years is long enough to reread your own work honestly. Two things.
On loyalty — I got the emphasis wrong
The original version said high-trust leaders never speak poorly of their organisation, that you should only have good things to say about the business that pays you, and that if you can’t, you should get off the bus.
I’d put that differently now. Loyalty means defending people who aren’t in the room and giving credit where it’s due. It does not mean silence about problems.
Amy Edmondson’s research on psychological safety — the shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking — found that teams with it learn more, and that learning behaviour is what drives their performance.
Edmondson’s study didn’t test loyalty or silence about the organisation directly — that inference is mine, not hers. But the underlying mechanism transfers cleanly: a team that believes raising a concern will be read as disloyalty behaves exactly like a team without psychological safety. It stops surfacing problems while they’re still small. Whatever you call the norm, the effect on learning is the same.
A culture where loyalty is understood as never raising a concern doesn’t produce loyal teams. It produces quiet ones, and quiet teams lose their early warning system.
So: manage up, absolutely. Don’t run your organisation down in the pub. But raise the hard thing internally, through the front door, and treat someone who does the same as an asset rather than a problem. The 2016 version risked reading as a gag order. That wasn’t the intent, but intent isn’t the point — which, as it happens, is the subject of the follow-up.
The 2016 original is still published on LinkedIn if you want to see exactly what changed.
On the golden rule
“Treat others as you would like to be treated” is a decent starting position and a poor finishing one. It quietly assumes everyone wants what you want. Treat others as they need to be treated — which requires you to find out, which requires behaviour 11.
Where this goes next
The uncomfortable thing about a list like this is that everyone reading it will recognise themselves in the good half.
Every one of these thirteen behaviours has a forgery — a version that looks identical from the outside and does the opposite work. Straight talk that’s actually just rude. Listening that’s actually waiting. Extending trust that’s actually abdication.
That’s the follow-up: The 13 Counterfeits of Trust. Read this one first, then that one, ideally not on the same day.
References and further reading
Covey, S. M. R. (2006). The Speed of Trust: The One Thing That Changes Everything. Free Press.
A correction. The Speed of Trust is by Stephen M. R. Covey — the son — not Stephen R. Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. My 2016 post credited the father. It’s a common mix-up and it’s now fixed.
Mayer, R. C., Davis, J. H., & Schoorman, F. D. (1995). An integrative model of organizational trust. Academy of Management Review, 20(3), 709–734.
Dirks, K. T., & Ferrin, D. L. (2002). Trust in leadership: Meta-analytic findings and implications for research and practice. Journal of Applied Psychology, 87(4), 611–628. doi:10.1037/0021-9010.87.4.611
Edmondson, A. C. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behavior in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383. doi:10.2307/2666999
Which of the thirteen would your team say you’re strongest on? And — the more interesting question — which one would they say you believe you’re strong on?
The 2016 original, as published. Left exactly as it was — a refresh only means something if you can see what changed.
Cite this article
Satterthwaite, M-J. (2026) '13 Behaviours of High-Trust Leaders', Scope Blog, 16 August. Available at: https://scopevision.com.au/blog/13-behaviours-of-high-trust-leaders (Accessed: [insert date]).
In text: (Satterthwaite, 2026).
Keep reading
- The 13 Counterfeits of Trust. Every one of these behaviours has a forgery, and you are the last person who will spot yours.
- The Value of Time. Why the ten minute conversation where trust gets deposited is the highest yield thing on your calendar.
- The Keys to Holding Great Coaching Conversations. Trust is what makes these conversations possible. This is how to run one.
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