Imagine a startup with 3 people in it. You need 3 connections to make sure everyone trusts each other. Easy enough to move quick as a squad.
Now bump that up to 5 people, suddenly it’s 10 connections. At 10 people? 45. At 14? You’re stitching together 91 different relationship threads to make sure people aren’t second-guessing each other’s motives and maximising the value of collaboration.
Welcome to the Trust Bottleneck.
Trust is the bottleneck for cross-functional work
Inside a team of six or less, trust builds fast. Daily contact. Shared wins. Jokes in the group chat. You know who’s good under pressure and who disappears on Fridays.
But once you step out of your own team or leave a startup, and start working across a larger business, the game changes. You're no longer building trust in a petri dish. You're trying to grow a tree in a wind tunnel.
You lose the rituals. You lose context. You lose the easy read of someone’s intent. And then people start treating your priorities like spam.
You could be a high performer with a great track record and still hit a wall here. Why? Because you’re interfacing with people who don’t know you, don’t owe you anything and might not see the value in dealing with you. The kicker; without trust, your 'strategic initiative' can be mistaken as a land grab. Your support; a shadow-function coming for their jobs. Your cross-functional meeting; a calendar tax.
Trust is Built on Four Quiet Signals
You won’t find this in your onboarding pack, but every person 'feels' trust through four things when you show up in their orbit:
Care: Do you actually give a damn about me and my world?
Competence: Can you do what you say you can, or will I have to mop this up later?
Reliability: Will you show up when it matters, or will I be ghosted mid-project?
Sincerity: Do your actions match your pitch?
Each one is hard enough to signal in a close-knit team. Across departments, with limited facetime? It’s like miming across a freeway, and hoping the drivers understood what your true objective was.
How Innovators Scale Trust (Without Burning Out)
You can’t be besties with 50 people. Heck, its darn near impossible to have more than 150 actual friends. But you can design for trust signals to travel further than your Slack emoji game. Here's how:
Care: Lead with curiosity, not asks
Empathy is the key.
Ask what others are trying to solve. Not what they can do for you. Lead with that in every interaction. It's often a natural fit for innovators, or easily applied until it becomes inseparable from the way people feel about you. Your reputation scales to meetings you’re not in.
Competence: Show actions, not ego
People trust transparency more than a perfect slide deck. Given them reason to believe you, when you say what you'll do.
Share work in progress. Say “I don’t know” before something blows up. Share stories and lift up others who complement your weaknesses in the process. Storytelling scales.
Reliability: Be the person who closes loops
Small commitments kept > big ones broken.
It’s the little things. Show up on time for the meetings. If someone provides insight on your new idea, do the boring follow-up (even if the outcome isn't great). Send the recap. Thank others for their contributions while explaining how they've helped towards the result.
You know that General Manager you’re having a hard time meeting? They’ll read the email you cc them into thanking one of their team. You’ll increase your relevance to them, and reshape their perception about you.
Sincerity: Align in public, not just in private
Trust dies in inconsistency.
This is a death trap for innovators. We pivot quickly, which can seem like inconsistency to others. Not everyone follows what you’re up to as closely as you hope. Closing the communication loop lets you say the same thing to different teams. Let your actions echo your words.
What Not to Do
Don’t fall for these traps:
Authority ≠ credibility. Don’t think your title builds trust. Don’t mistake a CEO’s endorsement as a full licence to operate. Authority gives you access, not belief.
More meetings = more noise. Don’t mistake communication volume for connection.
Don’t wait until you need a favour to build the bridge. That's called a toll, not a relationship.
Ask yourself: What move can I make today?
Working across a business is one of the most high-leverage things a leader can do. But it’s also one of the hardest.
Trust doesn’t scale by accident. It scales when someone chooses to build it, even when it’s inconvenient. So, here’s the challenge: What’s one thing you can do on Monday morning to build trust across your business?
Send a thank-you message that gives credit where it’s due?
Own up to a missed deadline before it’s brought up?
Ask someone in another team what they’re solving for this quarter?
Whatever it is, make it small, specific, and consistent. Practice it until it becomes a habit, and then stack on a new habit.
Because the people who scale trust are the ones everyone else wants to work with. And in a company full of noise, that is how your cross-functional innovations gain traction.