Building Trust on a Team That’s Been Burned Before

By Dr Ayobami Gideon Babalola • Leadership & Executive Development

Stepping into a leadership role after a predecessor who damaged trust — through broken promises, favouritism, or simple neglect — is one of the hardest leadership situations to navigate well. I have done this twice: once taking over a department after a Director of Studies who had lost the confidence of nearly the entire teaching staff, and once inheriting a business unit where the previous leadership had made commitments they never honoured.

Both times, I made the same initial mistake: assuming that being different from my predecessor, and having good intentions, would be sufficient to rebuild trust quickly. It was not. Here is what I learned about what actually works.

Why Good Intentions Are Not Enough

A team that has been burned does not evaluate a new leader on stated intentions — they evaluate on a track record they do not yet have with you, filtered through the lens of a track record they very much do have with whoever came before. Every promise you make will be silently compared against the last leader’s broken promises. Every piece of praise will be scanned for the favouritism the team may have previously experienced. This is not unfair or irrational — it is a completely reasonable response to prior harm, and treating it as an obstacle to be argued away rather than a reality to be respected is the first mistake most new leaders make.

Principle 1: Small Promises, Kept Completely

The instinct when trying to rebuild trust quickly is to make a significant, visible gesture — a big promise, a dramatic change, a public commitment to doing things differently. This instinct is usually wrong.

Burned teams do not trust big promises; big promises are exactly what burned them before. What actually rebuilds trust is a long series of small, specific commitments, kept completely and visibly. “I will have the schedule finalised by Friday at 5pm” — and then it is finalised by Friday at 5pm, without exception, without excuse. Do this consistently for small things, and the team’s evaluation of you slowly shifts from “let’s see if this one is different” to “this one actually does what they say” — a judgment that can only be earned through repetition, never announced into existence.

Principle 2: Name the Elephant, Once, Directly

Pretending the previous damage does not exist, or that everyone should simply move forward without acknowledgment, tends to backfire. In my experience, one direct, honest acknowledgment — without criticising the specific predecessor by name or detail, but naming the reality of what the team experienced — does more to build trust than months of implied “things will be different now.”

An approach that has worked for me: “I know this team has been through a period where trust was damaged. I’m not going to ask you to simply trust me because I say things will be different — I know that has to be earned. What I can tell you is what I will commit to, and I’d ask you to hold me to it.”

This does two things: it validates the team’s actual experience rather than dismissing it, and it reframes trust-building as something you expect to be held accountable for, rather than something you are asking to be granted on credit.

Principle 3: Overcorrect on Transparency, Not on Reassurance

A common mistake is overcorrecting with constant verbal reassurance — repeatedly telling the team that things are different now, that you can be trusted, that this time will be better. This reassurance, however sincere, tends to increase scepticism rather than reduce it, because it is exactly the kind of language a team that has been burned has learned to distrust.

What works better is overcorrecting on transparency instead: sharing more of the actual reasoning behind decisions than might feel natural, being explicit about constraints and trade-offs rather than presenting decisions as simply handed down, and being willing to say “I don’t know yet, but here’s how I’m thinking about it” rather than projecting false certainty. Transparency about process builds trust in a way that reassurance about intentions cannot.

Principle 4: Do Not Rush the Timeline

The hardest discipline in this situation is accepting that trust, once damaged, rebuilds on a timeline measured in months and consistent actions, not in weeks and good conversations. Leaders who expect a burned team to extend meaningful trust quickly, and who become frustrated or defensive when that trust is slow to materialise, tend to actively damage the process — because visible frustration at not being trusted yet reads, to a wary team, as exactly the kind of self-interested reaction they have learned to watch for.

Accept the slower timeline as the genuinely reasonable cost of prior damage that you did not cause but have inherited, and the process goes considerably better than fighting against that reality.

Principle 5: Address Favouritism Concerns Structurally, Not Just Verbally

If the previous damage involved favouritism specifically, verbal assurances of fairness are almost worthless — the team has already heard fairness promised before. What works is building visible, structural fairness into actual processes: transparent criteria for opportunities and recognition, consistent standards applied publicly rather than case-by-case, and decision-making processes the whole team can see rather than ones that happen behind closed doors.

Structural fairness that the team can observe repeatedly, over time, rebuilds trust far more reliably than any verbal commitment to being fair.

What This Looked Like for Me

In the department I inherited after a Director of Studies who had lost staff confidence, it took approximately eight months of small, consistently kept commitments before I noticed a meaningful shift — staff beginning to bring me problems proactively rather than working around me, a marker I had come to recognise as a genuine trust indicator. Eight months is a long time to lead patiently through scepticism. It was also, in retrospect, exactly the timeline the situation reasonably required.

Have you had to rebuild trust with a team that had been let down before you arrived? I would value hearing what worked — and what did not — in your own experience.

JRZP LEADERSHIP MASTERCLASS

Trust-building and team culture form a core module of the JRZP Leadership Masterclass. Register your interest at drgspeaks.jrzp.org/leadership