Trust is the foundation of effective workplace relationships. When it’s strong, work moves faster. Decisions accelerate, conflict becomes productive, and relationships hold up under pressure.
Yet, trust at work is often treated as intangible; either you have it, or you don’t. In reality, trust isn’t a personality trait or byproduct of time. It’s a capability that can be developed through specific behaviors and intentional choices.
This guide outlines five strategies to build workplace trust that strengthens performance, supports difficult conversations, and helps teams deliver results.
5 Strategies to Build Workplace Trust That Lasts
1. Be Clear About What You Can and Can’t Do
Predictability is a core driver of trust. People feel more confident working with you when they understand your strengths, limitations, and boundaries. Clarifying these early creates shared understanding and sets the stage for effective collaboration.
This principle is illustrated in Negotiation Mastery, an online course led by Harvard Business School Professor Michael Wheeler. The course explores a negotiation between Vericampos, a paper manufacturer, and Rijas, an environmental services company, as they work toward a long-term contract to comply with new environmental regulations.
Both sides entered the negotiation with real constraints. Rijas faced cost structures that varied by service level, while Vericampos operated within strict budget limits. When those realities were unclear or misinterpreted, progress stalled. Momentum emerged only when both parties became explicit about what they could and couldn’t offer.
“If the parties can develop trust at the outset, they may be better positioned to constructively handle problems and opportunities that arise later,” Wheeler says in Negotiation Mastery.
Being clear about your constraints doesn’t require sharing every internal detail. It means being honest about the boundaries that matter—whether related to budget, timing, policy, or capacity—so others can stop guessing and start achieving goals. Trust takes root when others understand what’s possible.
2. Balance Creating and Claiming Value
Navigating workplace relationships requires clarity about what you want while still building a partnership around shared goals. As HBS Professor Jim Sebenius explains in Negotiation Mastery, this tension sits at the heart of the negotiator’s dilemma: the strain between creating value together and claiming value for yourself.
Collaboration and self-interest aren’t opposite. But when the balance between them is mismanaged, trust erodes quickly.
Value creation often takes the form of win-win problem-solving, where both parties expand what’s possible. Value claiming focuses on how that value is divided once it exists—a process that can feel zero-sum if handled poorly.
Trust isn’t built by avoiding this tension, but by managing it deliberately. In practice, this means seeking mutual gains first, sharing information with intention, and then addressing allocation openly and fairly.
As Sebenius emphasizes in Negotiation Mastery, “Focus on building trust, improving communication, and getting both sides to open up so you can figure out what’s jointly possible.”
That process begins with curiosity and measured openness. Asking thoughtful questions surfaces what matters most, while selective sharing invites reciprocity. Over time, these exchanges shift conversations from guarded positioning to creative problem-solving, allowing people to navigate friction without damaging relationships.
3. Focus on Interests, Not Just Positions
Looking beyond stated positions to underlying interests can unlock trust. What people ask for often masks what matters most, and treating requests as fixed demands can create unnecessary conflict.
A familiar example is conference room access. What appears to be a dispute over space may reflect different needs—one team requires mornings for client calls, while another works best later in the day. When those interests are surfaced, the conversation shifts from competing claims to allowing everyone to feel heard.
This pattern appears in a Negotiation Mastery scenario involving HSC, a fictional company, and a long-tenured employee following a termination tied to declining performance and allegations of age discrimination. While the conflict initially centered on compensation and legal risk, progress emerged only when emotional concerns were acknowledged.
For the employee, financial demands reflected a need for dignity, recognition, and continued connection after 15 years with the organization. For the company, priorities included financial sustainability and organizational precedent. The resulting solution—a five-year consulting arrangement with modest upfront pay, ongoing compensation and benefits, and work aligned with the employee’s expertise—addressed both sides’ priorities without requiring either to sacrifice what mattered most.
Focusing on interests calls for emotional intelligence: listening for what goes unsaid, recognizing emotional stakes, and responding with empathy rather than defensiveness. Over time, this approach builds psychological safety and strengthens trust across workplace relationships.
4. Lead With Fairness and Mutual Understanding
Disagreement alone rarely diminishes trust. It stalls when decisions feel opaque or when people believe the process excludes them. In workplace negotiations, perceptions of fairness are shaped less by outcomes and more by whether the path to those outcomes feels transparent, consistent, and respectful.
As Wheeler notes in Negotiation Mastery, internal negotiations carry added complexity because they unfold within ongoing relationships. “In professional settings, it’s common to encounter concerns about fairness and precedent,” he explains, pointing to the hesitation managers often feel when granting exceptions that could ripple across an organization.
One Negotiation Mastery scenario highlights this tension in a negotiation between an employee, Caitlin, and her manager over a bonus and promotion. Beneath the discussion of compensation were concerns about readiness, precedent, and broader organizational impact—issues magnified by the power dynamic at play.
Acceleration emerged only when those concerns were addressed directly. By clarifying advancement criteria and proposing a structured review process, Caitlin reframed the conversation around shared standards rather than personal judgment. That shift reduced defensiveness, increased clarity, and helped preserve trust on both sides.
Fairness depends not only on what decisions are made, but on how they’re made—and how similar decisions will be handled in the future. Clear, visible processes create confidence in the system and build trust over time.
5. Reinforce Trust Through Consistency and Follow-Through
Trust at work is rarely built in a single interaction. It develops through repeated conversations—how reliably commitments are honored, how consistently decisions are revisited, and whether people feel confident re-engaging as circumstances change.
Kim Driscoll, former mayor of Salem, Massachusetts, featured in Negotiation Mastery, offers a clear example. When she sought to tackle the city’s approach to providing healthcare coverage to employees, the process took years.
“It wasn’t something that we had success with in one bargaining cycle,” Driscoll explains in Negotiation Mastery. “Frankly, it took six bargaining cycles to get to a point where people fully understood that health insurance was a cost factor, and we needed to wrestle it together.”
As Wheeler emphasizes in Negotiation Mastery, “The success of that negotiation depended on winning trust on all sides. Relationship-building was a long process, but it was essential for success.”
Progress came through consistency. Leaders repeatedly shared information, revisited hard choices, and demonstrated good faith. “We showed our employees that if we could modify some of these plans, we could provide higher wage increases,” Driscoll says in Negotiation Mastery. Over time, employees came to understand the benefits they valued and the financial realities behind them.
Ultimately, trust is built when people believe they can rely on you—not just today, but next time. And the time after that. Consistent behavior and follow-through transform individual negotiations into catalysts for long-term growth.
Build Trust That Moves Work Forward
Workplace trust turns coordination into commitment. It allows teams to surface tensions early, make trade-offs transparently, and stay engaged when decisions are difficult or outcomes are uncertain. Leaders who build trust don’t avoid conflict—they create the conditions to address it productively.
The most effective organizations treat workplace trust as a capability, not a sentiment. They invest in predictability, navigate competing priorities openly, look beneath surface demands, design fair processes, and follow through consistently. Over time, these behaviors reinforce one another—accelerating decisions, strengthening relationships, and improving performance.
Ready to transform how you build trust and navigate workplace relationships? Explore Negotiation Mastery—one of our leadership and management and entrepreneurship and innovation courses—and download our leadership and management e-book to expand your perspective and amplify your leadership impact.
