Challenge your thinking #1: mastering the trust equation 

“Trust is personal, not institutional” – Charles Green 

Trust underpins every great business relationship you have ever built. 

Trust is personal to you but it’s not about how clever you are; it’s about how you show up. 

In a world obsessed with expertise, David H. Maister and Charles Green managed to cut through the noise with a deceptively simple idea: The Trust Equation. 

The Trust Equation explains why some professionals become trusted advisers while others remain technicians: 

Trust = (Credibility + Reliability + Intimacy) ÷ Self-Orientation 

Here’s what that means in practice: 

• Credibility is what you know. Your qualifications, experience, and technical competence. It might be your ‘ticket to the game’ but, on its own, it doesn’t keep you in the game. 

• Reliability is what you do. Do you deliver, consistently? Do you do what you say you will, when you say you will? 

• Intimacy is how safe people feel with you. Are you authentic? Can they speak openly? This is emotional, not transactional. 

And then there’s the demon denominator … Self-Orientation. 

Self-Orientation is about who the interaction is really for. The more it’s about you (your expertise your status, your cleverness) the more trust is eroded.  

Lower self-orientation doesn’t mean you don’t want anything for yourself, of course, it just means you have the other person’s best interests at heart.  

Here’s the insight: 
You don’t build trust by trying to look trustworthy. You build it by being genuinely useful, human, and focused on your client’s interests. 

In advisory work, leadership trust isn’t a soft skill. 

It’s the whole game. 

At gunnercooke, our model puts our people at the heart. Partners have the freedom to develop their own client relationships and the flexibility to put clients first in everything they do. Trusted by over 45,000 businesses, our lawyers truly are trusted advisors to their clients and that’s because first and foremost, they are real people.  

Want to work together? We’d love to hear from you.  

Contact Darryl Cooke here.

For inspiring stories from guests such as John Amaechi, Jake Humphrey and James Timpson, catch up on The Inspiring Leadership Podcast here.