Building Trust ‘Inside Out’

In an age of AI, geopolitical volatility and deep socioeconomic divisions, trust in institutions—including business—remains at an all-time low.

At a recent Chief Executive roundtable, held during our 2025 CEO of the Year celebration in partnership with PURE Insurance, a group of current and former CEOs gathered to discuss this critical topic, with huge stakes for industry and society. How do you build trust? How do you measure it? And what can business leaders do—practically, pragmatically—to ensure they are creating trust inside and outside of their organizations?

The good news, thankfully, is that CEOs have a lot more power here than many may first think. “Trust is learned as a skill; it’s a competency,” said Stephen M.R. Covey, bestselling author of Speed of Trust and Trust and Inspire. “And getting good at this matters… especially today in a low-trust world, so that we don’t just drift toward distrust, but actually we counteract it.”

‘How Do You Act?’

For Dave Logan, president at PURE Insurance, the most difficult, stressful moments for customers and employees are the biggest opportunities to build trust muscle. “When people are going through the toughest times in their lives, and lots of times that happens when we’re interacting with them, they’re the most vulnerable, that is the time to build trust the most.” His advice in those times: Start by just showing up. During the Palisades fires in Los Angeles, for example, he said PURE made sure to meet whatever need their members had, from securing housing for those who were displaced to recovering koi fish. Ultimately, said Logan, it’s a question of “who do you want to be when this stuff’s happening?”

Dave Ricks, CEO of Eli Lilly and Company and Chief Executive’s 2025 CEO of the Year, agreed. “It’s not what you say. It’s what you do,” he said, “particularly in those pinnacle stress moments. What is the basis for how you treat people? Especially people more junior than you. What questions do you ask? How do you act? People mimic that, then. And that’s pretty powerful.”

Trevor Riggen, president, humanitarian services at American Red Cross, agreed. He encourages openness across the organization by routinely sharing errors he’s made. “They’re big things. They’re not small things,” he said. He finds it invaluable to be “very open to lay that out in front of our growing leaders, we try to model that for the rest of the management team. To say, ‘No, share your faults.’ And the same with our partners. We go into it with our partners and say we’re not perfect.”

It’s important for leaders to balance vulnerability and competency, without sacrificing one or the other. “Admitting vulnerability is very important for CEOs,” said Fred Hassan, chair of Caret Group and former CEO of Schering-Plough. At the same time, “if you don’t know how to lead the way, if people don’t think you are the right person to lead the way, you will never get their trust. So, we’ve got to do both. You’ve got to show you really are the right person to be in the saddle. But then, you have to build authentic connection with people.”

The AI Opportunity

We can’t have a conversation about trust today without discussing a major source of its disappearance: artificial intelligence. As employees feel anxiety about the technology’s impact on jobs, leaders can maintain trust by dispelling some of the mystery and bringing them into the discovery process.

Peter Moglia, CEO and chief investment officer of Alexandria Real Estate Equities, is doing just that, having invested in 150 licenses for ChatGPT for department heads. “We said to them, ‘Show us how this is going to make you better,’ not ‘How is this going to make us more efficient or replace people?’ But how can we do things now that we’ve never done before because this tool exists? And I’ll tell you, it’s overwhelmingly positive,” he said. “There’s a buzz in the office… And nobody’s really scared about their job because they’re saying, ‘We’re not going to be replaced. We’re just going to be better.’”

Riggen made a similar move, granting Copilot access to all 19,000 employees. “Now, we’re doing a massive education push, especially with managers,” he said. “What we found is a lot of people just didn’t understand machine learning, data analytics, agentic AI, they couldn’t separate all the pieces, and they’re looking for the magic box that would make their job go away.”

Taking Action

One thing is absolutely certain, agreed those attending the roundtable: Gone are the days of command-and-control leadership and rank-and-yank performance reviews where the “bottom” 10 percent of employees risk losing their jobs every year. Today, leadership is about creating cultures focused on transparency and collective success.

For Chris Pierson, CEO of Blackcloak, a provider of security services for executives and high-net worth individuals, building trust with his team means investing in his team. “Every single one of our executives has to use a coach. We set up the agenda each year as to what are the two, three things we want worked on,” he said. “In terms of trust, let’s talk about it. Let’s be open about it. Let’s be transparent about it. Then, let’s bring solutions to the table and let’s actually fund them. Let’s take it all the way.”

When furniture maker Ethan Allen had a 35 percent reduction in headcount, CEO Farooq Kathwari maintained trust by focusing on the people that were retained: “You have to treat them better,” he said. “If you don’t treat them well, they only worry about how well you treated others. You treat people well that you have, that’s what they’ll focus on.”

Others agreed that when it comes to evaluating talent, the focus is always growth. “We do use nine-boxes, always have used them,” said Pierson, referring to the well-known talent management tool in which employees are segmented into groups by performance and potential. “It’s a nine-box not until you’re out. It’s a nine-box back to the manager, back to the leader. What are you doing to inspire that individual to achieve their full potential?”

One point that each leader seemed to agree on was that while chaos outside the organization may be uncontrollable, there’s a huge opportunity and potential competitive advantage for companies who can get this right. “Start with our own people, our own team, our own culture,” said Covey. “If we can become a model of what’s possible or a better way to lead, where we get results in a way that inspires trust. It’s an inside-out process. That’s how a change will happen.”