Mistakes Don’t Break Trust. Defensiveness Does.

Building trust in the moments after we get it wrong.

I’ve made decisions throughout my career that felt like the right only to appear significantly different shortly.

Not necessarily dramatic ones, just decisions I made when moving quickly, perhaps a little too quickly. Sometimes they were judgement calls I made in the absence of enough information or without engaging all the right people. There’s been many times I’ve made a decision that seemed perfect in my head only to land awkwardly with the people who then had to put that decision into action. In the moment, those errors of judgement are easy to justify, and unfortunately, they’re a part of leadership that’s grounded in progress rather than perfection. You rarely have the luxury of all the right information, at the right time, with the right people present, so you just do the best you can.

The genuine test of leadership is what happens after that bad decision is made. Once a leader realises they’ve made a poor decision, the first instinct is rarely noble and that’s an aspect of human nature I touched on with an everyday example in my recent article, The Power of a Quick Sorry.

At times when I’ve made a poor decision, and there has been many, my first instinct is often far from noble. I wish I could claim it always was, but sometimes my first impulse is to explain, add context or, at my worst, subtly shift the blame, while emphasising “I don’t mean to blame” while clearly doing so.

I don’t like admitting that, but it’s true.

There have been many times when feedback on a decision has come to me, and rather than show curiosity my position has been to protect my competence and the version of me that I want people to see.

Between a poor decision and correction of that decision there is a space where trust can grow, or rapidly descend in the opposite direction. Trust does not erode in that space because a leader got something wrong, because people can live with that. Reasonable people acknowledge that leadership is messy, and they know decisions get made under pressure, with scant information and trade-offs. What they struggle with is the performance that follows the mistake. They grow cynical when a poor decision is followed by a long explanation and staged or disingenuous apology.

Glassdoor’s Worklife Trends 2026 report was recently released and it highlights the point I’m driving at here. There’s a growing use of words like “disconnect,” “miscommunication,” “distrust,” and “misalignment” when people mention senior leadership or management. In fact, from 2024 to 2025, Glassdoor reviews showed a 149% increase in the use of the word “misalignment” when describing leaders (Glassdoor 2026) and that points to something we should all take notice of.

Trust doesn’t drop in one single moment but happens when people keep noticing a leader won’t take accountability for poor decisions. When a team raises a concern and gets an explanation instead of a hearing, they may not react in isolation. However, when it happens enough, people begin to question the leader’s authenticity. Eventually in these situations, the leader stop hearing the truth early enough to do anything useful with it.

Certainty and credibility are not interchangeable. Certainty in leadership emphasises strength, commitment to decision-making and absence of doubts. While there is a place for this, certainty without self-awareness can make any challenge feel like a threat to leadership and have you protecting your pride while believing you’re protecting the team. That’s a deception of the ego, and most of us are more vulnerable to it than we think.

Real self-awareness is practical and not the version we talk about in leadership programs. Self-awareness is noticing when your body tightens because someone has challenged you and catching the moment before you build your defense rather than listening.

That sort of self-awareness is not soft, rather it is peak emotional intelligence.

Progress over perfection, a phrase I use routinely, applies, but only if we use it with honest intent. Progress over perfection emphasises progress, implying that there is an intent and movement towards the right outcomes. The phrase cannot be called upon as a convenient excuse for poor decisions or failing to be openly accountable for them.

To grow trust from our people, our learning must be real, visible, and lead to a change in behaviour.

Private reflection matters, but it doesn’t always repair the public impact of a poor decision. If you made the call in the room, then some part of your learning may also need to happen in that same room. That public learning can’t be some performative and awkward leadership confession. The learning must have enough honesty and vulnerability that people believe change is possible.

Such a moment can be as simple as; I’ve thought more about yesterday’s decision and recognise that I moved too quickly. I didn’t have enough of the right people in the conversation, and I can see that created confusion. We’re going to pause, get the right input, and reset the approach.

That kind of statement does not make a leader look weak; it earns them easier trust.

The Edelman 2026 Trust Barometer adds another useful layer to the discussion, reporting that 70% of people globally are unwilling or hesitant to trust someone with different values, facts, problem-solving approaches, or cultural backgrounds. Edelman also argues that employers are well-placed to help broker trust because workplaces still bring people together across these differences (Edelman 2026). And that matters because workplaces are full of different pressures, perspectives, values, and backgrounds.

A leader’s job is not to bulldoze through all those differences with confidence and hope people follow. Their job is to create enough trust that people can tell the truth before the damage is done, and that takes humility from them.

I am better at this than I used to be. I’m far from perfect but getting better.

Your team does not need you to be flawless. They need to know that when you get it wrong, truth has a better chance than your pride.