Week 15 Day 7: Assignment: Run Your First Trust Audit

Using the five questions from Day 2, schedule a 20-minute one-on-one with each team member this week. Run the Trust Audit. Take notes. Do not defend yourself. Then compile the results into a trust profile for your team. This profile becomes a permanent artifact in your Leadership Operating Manual from Week 13 -- it is the baseline against which you will measure every trust-building effort for the rest of this course.

Here is the full process. Step one: schedule the conversations. Do not announce them as 'trust audits' in the calendar invite -- that creates anxiety. Instead, title them 'team health check-in' and explain the purpose at the start. Step two: ask the five questions in order. Write down answers verbatim, not your interpretation of answers. Step three: after all conversations, compile the data. Average the disagreement score. List the common themes from opinion-withholding responses. Categorize mistake-response instincts. Group unexpressed change requests by theme. Aggregate the 'what makes trust harder' responses. Step four: identify the top two patterns. You will see them clearly -- the same issues will surface across multiple conversations. Step five: share the aggregate results (not individual responses) with the full team. 'I ran a trust audit this week. Here is what I learned about us as a team. Our disagreement comfort averages 5.2. Several people reported holding back opinions about sprint scope. And the most common thing I do that hurts trust is interrupting people before they finish their thought.' Step six: commit to one specific action. 'Based on this audit, I am going to stop interrupting in meetings. I am asking you to hold me accountable.' Add the trust profile and your commitment to Section 6 of your Leadership Operating Manual. You will run this audit again in Week 30 to measure progress. This concludes the trust and transparency section. Starting next week, we shift to how leaders communicate -- not just what they share, but how they say it.

The Trust Audit process prescribed here follows the action research methodology (Lewin, 1946), which cycles through planning (designing the questions), acting (conducting the interviews), observing (compiling results), and reflecting (identifying patterns and commitments). Lewin's foundational insight -- 'you cannot understand a system until you try to change it' -- applies directly: the act of running the audit itself changes the team's trust dynamics by signaling that the leader takes trust seriously enough to measure it. Research by London and Smither (2002) on 360-degree feedback demonstrates that the effectiveness of feedback interventions depends on three factors: source credibility (the leader asking personally rather than delegating to HR), specificity (concrete behavioral observations rather than general ratings), and follow-through (visible action based on results). The instruction to share aggregate results publicly reflects what Hackman (2002) calls 'team-level feedback' -- information about collective patterns that enables collective improvement. The one-action commitment follows Gollwitzer's (1999) research on implementation intentions: committing to a specific behavior ('I will stop interrupting') produces significantly higher follow-through than committing to a general goal ('I will be a better listener'). The cross-reference to Week 30 for a follow-up audit creates what Kaplan and Norton (1996) call a 'leading indicator' -- a measurement taken early that predicts later outcomes. The transition to communication in Week 16 is structurally intentional: trust is the foundation that makes effective communication possible, not the other way around.