David Horsager is the Founder and CEO of Trust Edge Leadership Institute, a Minnesota-based company that helps global leaders and organizations build trust. Since 1999, Trust Edge Leadership Institute has pioneered trust development through research, speaking, consulting, and training on trust and its proven impact on the bottom line. David has advised leaders and delivered presentations on six continents, with audiences ranging from FedEx, Toyota, and MIT to the New York Yankees and the Department of Homeland Security. His insights have been featured in Fast Company, Forbes, New York Post, and SUCCESS Magazine, and his latest book, Trust Matters More than Ever: 40 Proven Trust Tools to Lead Better, Grow Faster & Build Trust Now!, is available worldwide.
Here’s a Glimpse of What You’ll Hear:
- [2:45] David Horsager shares a childhood story that shaped his understanding of trust
- [6:23] The challenge of building trust in a virtual work environment
- [7:50] Five key steps to establishing trust remotely
- [11:04] Why David chose to focus his graduate research on trust
- [16:13] How to develop both character and competency for long-term trust
- [23:38] The Eight Pillars of Trust and how they drive success
- [28:52] How trust-building initiatives helped reduce suicide rates in the Navy
- [33:00] David breaks down the ‘ICE’ acronym to reveal his company’s philosophy
In this episode…
Trust is the foundation of strong leadership, effective teamwork, and business success. Yet, many leaders struggle to build and maintain trust, especially in virtual or hybrid work environments. How can organizations develop a culture of trust that drives engagement, performance, and long-term growth?
According to trust expert David Horsager, trust is not a soft skill but a measurable and strategic asset that impacts every area of business. Through decades of research, he developed the Eight Pillars of Trust, a framework that helps leaders build credibility, foster collaboration, and create high-performing teams. David shares insights on how clarity, consistency, and contribution play a critical role in trust-building, along with practical strategies for improving communication, leadership accountability, and organizational transparency.
Tune in to this episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast as John Corcoran interviews David Horsager, Founder and CEO of Trust Edge Leadership Institute, about the power of trust in leadership and business. David discusses his journey from launching his company in a basement to working with global brands like FedEx and Walmart. He also shares actionable tools for building trust remotely, improving performance reviews, and fostering a high-trust culture within organizations.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
- John Corcoran on LinkedIn
- Rise25
- David Horsager: LinkedIn | Website
- Trust Edge Leadership Institute
- Trust Matters More than Ever: 40 Proven Tools to Lead Better, Grow Faster & Build Trust Now! by David Horsager
Special Mention(s)
Quotable Moments:
- “If you act on what you say you don’t believe, you’ll lose trust in less than a second.”
- “Trust is built by these eight traits that we’ll talk about a little bit later.”
- “Increased trust in the content or the teacher, or the psychological safety or trust of the room.”
- “Clarity builds trust. We trust the clear.”
- “We tend to trust those that will stay committed in the face of adversity.
Action Steps:
- Communicate with clarity: Ensure your messaging is clear, concise, and actionable to build trust and eliminate misunderstandings.
- Demonstrate consistency: Follow through on commitments and maintain predictable behaviors to establish credibility and reliability.
- Foster genuine connections: Invest time in building authentic relationships by showing empathy, listening actively, and engaging with others meaningfully.
- Lead with integrity: Align actions with values and make ethical decisions, even when no one is watching, to strengthen trustworthiness.
- Measure and improve trust: Regularly assess trust levels within your team or organization using feedback and structured frameworks like the Eight Pillars of Trust.
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Episode Transcript
John Corcoran: 00:00
All right. Today we’re talking about the single most important asset in life. I’m not talking about courage. I’m not talking about sales chops. In business, it’s trust. And I have an expert in trust. His name is David Horsager. He’s going to tell us all about it and the research that he’s done in just a second. So stay tuned.
Intro: 00:20
Welcome to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast, where we feature top entrepreneurs, business leaders, and thought leaders and ask them how they built key relationships to get where they are today. Now let’s get started with the show.
John Corcoran: 00:37
All right. Welcome, everyone. John Corcoran here I am, the host of the show. And you know, if you listen every week that we have great founders, CEOs, entrepreneurs from all kinds of companies, we’ve had Netflix, Grubhub, Redfin, Gusto, Kinkos, YPO, EO, Activision Blizzard. Check out the archives. Lots of great episodes for you to check out there. And before we get into this, this episode is brought to you by rise 25, our company where we help businesses to give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. How do we do that? We do that by helping you to run your podcast. We are an easy button for companies to launch and run a podcast.
We do strategy, accountability, and full execution. And you know, David, I know that we like to joke that Rise25 is like the team of magic elves that run in the background and make it look easy for a company to go out and be there in front of the camera and to create amazing content and amazing relationships and build trust, which is what we’re going to be talking about here. So that is really the most important thing for me is building relationships. And that’s how I have done it for the last 15 years. If you have any questions, go check out our website, Rise25.com or email us at [email protected].
But let me tell you about David. So Doctor David is the CEO of Trust Edge Leadership Institute. He’s the inventor of the Enterprise Trust Index and Director of the Global Study Trust Outlook. He’s also a Wall Street Journal best selling author and senior fellow at Indiana Wesleyan University. He advises a range of companies that you’ve heard of before Delta, McDonald’s, Fedex, Toyota, Admirals in the Navy, you name it. Decades of research and his newest book is called Trust Matters More Than Ever for 40 Proven Trust Tools to Lead Better, Grow Faster, and Build Trust. It was released just a couple of months ago. And David, I’m really excited to dive into all these different topics with you. But first of all, you learned about trust. You know, some people that I have on this show, they had a bad experience, and that’s what taught them to be fascinated with their field of study. But for you, it was actually a good experience. You grew up on a farm in a poor county in northern Minnesota, and you observed your father, who actually was a trusted leader. Tell me a little bit about that.
David Horsager: 02:45
Well, I think my mom and dad both were. And of course, the research came later and all that. But I just think of why people love working for him so much, why he did the same thing we say on stage and off like one time, you know, we’re driving around the farm. It’s, you know, none of my older siblings are around. It’s the middle of the summer, and we’re checking the beans, and we’re checking the beans, kidney beans, Navy beans like you have in Chile.
And we’re on public dirt roads. Remember, our farm is eight miles from the nearest town of 500 people. You can’t see another farm from ours, but it’s public roads around dirt roads. And we’re in the far reach of the farm. Public dirt road. There’s some junk in the middle of the road, and I’m just like, there was some litter. And I knew something about my dad. He hates litter. He doesn’t say much. He’s a great guy, but he.
He swerved that pickup truck over in such a way that my door was immediately above the litter, and I knew what I was supposed to do. I opened the door. I’m 10 or 11 years old. I reached down and I picked up the Playboy magazine. And now I’m not. I’m. I’m not here to tell anybody on here what’s right and wrong. I used to be an ethics professor. I am here to say, if you act on what you say, you don’t believe you’ll lose trust in less than a second. And I knew what my dad said.
He believed in this kind of thing. I’d seen him mentor our rough, tough, hired guys. I’d seen him as a mentor, my older brother. I knew exactly what he thought, but today I’d see it because we. Some random time that morning we drove up to the home front, you know, up the dirt driveway, all that stuff, and he dropped me off at the house I played with.
I helped mom or whatever. No windows on that. That look back at where he drove out to the shop, started working on tractors and at some random time the phone rang and back then it was one phone with a cord attached, right? And mom took a message. Usually nothing was so urgent she’d put it on the message on dad’s lunch pot.
But on this day she said, David, go give this message to your dad. So I took the message. I ran out in the attached garage. Remember? No windows in the backside of the house. The shop is 100 yards away. No way. He’d hear, see, think I was watching. But instead of busting through the entry door, I paused inside and I peered through this one little entry door window silently. No way he would have thought I was watching, but I paused inside and silently watched my dad from 100 yards away, pulling himself out from under the tractor.
Walker on the other side of the combine. Walk between two trees without thinking of souls. Watching. I watched him open the door. The backside of the pickup. Reach under the seat. Pick up that Playboy magazine. And I watched him keep his arm outstretched. And without a glance. Walk 30 paces over to the furnace. Where are they? Where I saw him throw it into the fire. Do I trust my dad? Yes. Because he does what he says he’ll do even when no one’s looking.
That’s where he creates the habits for when someone just might be. So later, I learned what research around trust looked like. But I thought, why do people love working for him? Is he the best farmer in the world? No. But is he the best leader? Maybe in some ways. And those things that nobody sees, you know that that was one thing that I always think about. Wow. He is trustworthy. And people see that even when they don’t see that behind the scenes. Look.
John Corcoran: 05:52
I love the way you tell that story because, boy, that could have gone in a different direction. Or like, where’s what direction are you going with this story here? You know, but it had a happy ending, so to speak. Anyways, I want to ask you about how I have so many questions about that. But in this virtual world we live in, where we’re not often face to face unless we’re doing farming or something like that. How do you build trust when someone’s not going to see you, you know, from a distance and be able to judge the way you are?
David Horsager: 06:23
Yeah. So, you know, the eight pillars of trust. It’s in that book. You mentioned trust matters more than ever. And, you know, there’s five steps of trust that I thank you so much. She just saw that I tip my coffee over while I was talking to you there. So I’m just going to set that. Just stop the bleeding.
John Corcoran: 06:46
I love authenticity. Thank you. Good. Good. There we go.
David Horsager: 06:50
Oh, there it went.
John Corcoran: 06:50
I think you’re actually demonstrating the answer to the question, right?
David Horsager: 06:53
Yeah. So let me that’s that’s a big thing because you think in the pandemic, like all of a sudden the CEO went from the ivory tower and all of a sudden they also had, you know, cats jumping on their keyboards and kids in their undies behind them. Right, right. So that was one thing. But there’s more to it. And this, you know, I give five steps here. Now everything comes under. We’ll talk about the eight pillar framework. Trust is built by these eight traits that we’ll talk about a little bit later. That’s how trust is built.
Everything comes under those eight. Globally that’s been revalidated by outside universities. That’s how we’ve used it in, you know, pro sports teams and presidents of countries and companies. But I’ll give you a couple things right away. Let’s get into some tools. So very quickly, a few ideas for building trust remotely. Funny enough, my new book, the book that comes out next year, is called Trust at a Distance: How to Build, How to Manage Trust Remotely. So it’s kind of interesting. I’m thinking about this a little bit right now, but a couple of ideas specifically for this problem are, number one, you have to In a cape. And I mean over over over.
Communicate. Clarity number two. And we can talk about what that looks like in that situation. Number two, you have to have a space of connection as humans. So even this doesn’t mean you have to do what some people think. And that is oh, you got a whole hour, a whole, you know, all this time on kind of, you know, just talking meetings that just connect people. But you have to take a moment, like a minute, two minutes at the beginning. How are you doing? Like, what are you looking like? I remember in the pandemic, I was training all these nurses.
They were overwhelmed and overworked. And I said, okay, before we get into it, we only have an hour together. We have to deal with this. I know it’s tough. It’s terrible. It was the heart of the horror of the pandemic. And I said, just take a moment, 30s there. Maybe there were hundreds of nurses with me virtually. They said, pick up a pad of paper or a post-it note and just draw a picture of how you’re feeling right now. And they took a moment.
And sad faces, mad faces, crying faces. And I said, now just hold it up to the camera for a moment. And they all held up to the camera, and that moment allowed them to just breathe, be seen and move forward in training and development. Right. So that’s another thing, is somehow you’ve got to connect personally because people feel disconnected and isolated.
Number three, you have to have a predictable next meeting with your manager. People can handle stuff remotely, but if they don’t know, they can hold things for a time. But if they don’t know when the next meeting is, then they’re like, oh, I don’t know. They don’t. But if they know, even if it’s not till next week, they can hold that item, that thought, that problem, as long as they know.
And so many people are frustrated around the world and they don’t even know what I’m going to meet with them again. One more thing would be this. There’s a big tension between accountability, remote accountability and connection and trust. Excuse me. And so managers think or leaders sometimes think, well, I don’t even know if they’re in their seats.
I don’t know if they’re not doing the work. I don’t know if you know what’s going on there. And we, you know, people. Employees say, well, just trust me, I got it right. Just let me do my thing. Well, what do we know? Both have kind of kind of been wrong about this. We know at the most I heard of an employee having jobs during the pandemic without working any of them. Right. And they lasted a long time getting salaries.
And then on the other side, you have people micromanaging everything and saying, hey, I want to. I’m going to have a timer for every time I see your keystrokes virtually. So I know that you’re sitting in your chair doing your work. Both can be problems. So one tip around that one of many would be if possible, if you can pay, promote and and reward on results in a virtual environment, that can really help things. So there’s just a few quick ideas like if you can predict the next meeting reward based on results only so that it doesn’t matter if they’re doing their laundry while they’re doing the work or whatever. Right? Yeah, yeah. Communicate and make some space of connection.