Building Trust: Exceptional Leadership in an Uncertain World

Losing someone’s trust is easy—building it back is much harder. In Building Trust: Exceptional Leadership in an Uncertain World, Darryl Stickel answers the key questions leaders face: what is trust, why is it essential to leadership, and how can I become more trusted?

Trust is a basic, intuitive human reaction; it holds the fabric of our society together. Unfortunately, trust is at an all-time low in our institutions, governments, healthcare, and law enforcement. Fewer people attend a place of worship than at any time in the last eighty-plus years. Citizens fear their votes are not being counted and that politicians are lying to them—that the system itself has no legitimacy. People fail to take life-saving vaccines because they don’t trust what medical professionals and policymakers tell them. In law enforcement, a lack of trust motivates non-cooperation, fear, and a breakdown in law and order. We are facing an unprecedented trust-deficit crisis.

In Building Trust: Exceptional Leadership in an Uncertain World, Darryl Stickel, one of the world’s foremost experts on trust, outlines his groundbreaking Trust Unlimited blueprint for building trust. Stickel moves away from the traditional approach of influencing people’s willingness to trust—the con artist’s tactic—to employing one or more of ten levers, which leaders can “pull” to close the gap between how much they are trusted and how much they should be. This approach also makes them more trustable and increases trust where it is deficient. Detailed case studies provide examples of his Trust Unlimited model in action.

Darryl Stickel holds a Ph.D. in Business from Duke University. He wrote his doctoral thesis on building trust in hostile environments and has devoted his career to helping people understand trust, how it functions, and how they can build it. He is a professor at the Luxembourg School of Business, teaching in the school’s MBA and executive education programs.

Before founding Trust Unlimited in 2001, he was a consultant at McKinsey and Company, the world-renowned global management consulting firm. He has helped leaders build trust in a wide range of business and personal environments, including financial services, telecoms, hi-tech, families, and the Canadian Military in Afghanistan.

Twenty years of applying and refining his trust model have made him one of the world’s leading experts on trust. People refer to him as a “Trust Savant” and an unshakeable force of positivity. Today, he is on a mission to help people understand and apply the TU model in their daily lives, whether in business or their personal lives.

Darryl, who lives in the Pacific Northwest, is legally blind and lives with his guide dog, Drake, a black Labrador who is also Trust Unlimited’s Director of Goodness. Darryl and Drake share the responsibilities of raising his sons Thomas and Alexander.