In Harvard Business Review, John Blakey argues that “leadership trust is a measurable, manageable business asset,” and that organisations must start treating it like any other strategic variable. It needs to be “visible, monitored, acted upon, and benchmarked.” It’s a logical idea. And on paper, it makes sense: if trust is so important, measure it. But in practice, trust isn’t an input or an output: it’s a living consequence of everything else you do.
The risk of trying to measure trust is that you turn it into theatre. A score. A dashboard. Something you can game. When Blakey writes that “many organisations still treat trust as a gut feeling rather than a trackable variable,” he’s right, but maybe they should. Because trust is a feeling. It’s not a KPI you can set quarterly targets for. It’s not a behavioural checklist. It’s the sum of consistency, honesty, and competence over time. Once you formalise it, you start performing for it.
Trust doesn’t live in the spreadsheet
Blakey cites his Leadership Trust Index and others like Paul Zak’s neuroscience-based “Organizational Trust Index,” all designed to translate perception into data. But the moment you start quantifying something like honesty, humility, or vulnerability, you change the behaviour you’re trying to measure.
People act trustworthy rather than being trustworthy.
When leaders know their “trust score” will affect their pay or promotion, they start to manage perception. As Blakey himself admits, “CEOs tend to rate themselves as significantly more trustworthy than those who report to them by as much as 29%.” You can imagine what happens when trust becomes a target: it becomes another space for bias, spin, and manipulation.
That doesn’t mean measurement is worthless, just that it’s the wrong first move. You can’t audit your way to trust any more than you can survey your way to culture. The most trustworthy organisations aren’t the ones with the best trust dashboards; they’re the ones that make fewer promises and keep all of them.
The false comfort of metrics
The line that stands out in Blakey’s piece is this: “Imagine handling financial risk or cybersecurity threats in such a casual and subjective way.” The comparison sounds persuasive but misses the point. Finance and cybersecurity operate on binary truths – an invoice is paid or it isn’t, a server is breached or it isn’t. Trust is the opposite. It exists in gradients, built through context, emotion, and narrative.
When you treat it like risk, you build bureaucracy. You measure compliance, not confidence. You create a system where the appearance of trustworthiness replaces the real thing. It’s the same reason employees often score “engagement” highly on surveys while feeling utterly disconnected from their work. The measurement becomes the mask.
What to do instead
Instead of measuring trust, leaders should practice it. Make fewer pledges, communicate clearly, and act visibly. Own mistakes. Build systems that reward truth over polish. Trust can’t be forced into a metric, but it can be reinforced through experience and small, consistent signals that you mean what you say.
The paradox is that the more you try to prove trust, the less you actually have it. People don’t trust you because you’ve benchmarked it. They trust you because they can see you’ve earned it.
At Underpin
We don’t measure trust. We build it by doing the work in daylight. We write plainly. We deliver when we say we will. We keep clients in the loop, not in suspense. That’s what earns belief. Not a survey or a score — just the quiet, repeatable pattern of doing what we said we’d do.
Because if trust ever fits neatly in a spreadsheet, it probably isn’t trust anymore.