By Eric Mahler Author, The Center of the Compass | Keynote Speaker | Founder, Aretos Advisory
Early in my career, I spent a few years at a firm most of our prospective clients had never heard of, competing for work against firms they’d trusted for a decade. Nobody owes an unfamiliar vendor anything. You don’t get points for showing up with a good pitch deck and confidence. You get evaluated, skeptically, from zero.
That experience taught me more about trust than anything I learned later, once I had a track record to lean on. When you have no history with someone, you find out fast what actually earns trust and what just sounds good in a meeting.
Here’s what I came away with: trust isn’t one thing. People talk about it like it’s a single quality, you either have it or you don’t. In practice, it’s four separate things, and most people are only strong in one or two of them.
Credibility. Do you know what you’re talking about? This is the easiest one to fake in a first meeting and the hardest one to fake over time. Credibility gets you in the room. It’s necessary, but it’s also the most overrated of the four, because everyone eventually figures out whether it’s real.
Reliability. Do you do what you said you’d do, when you said you’d do it? This is where most professional relationships quietly break down, not through some dramatic failure, but through a slow accumulation of small misses. A meeting moved without notice. A deliverable that arrives “close enough.” Reliability is boring to talk about and expensive to lose.
Care. Do you actually have the other person’s interests in mind, or just your own outcome? This is the one people are worst at demonstrating, because it has to show up in moments that don’t obviously benefit you, flagging a problem that costs you the engagement, saying “this isn’t right for you” when it would be easier to say yes.
Consistency. Are you the same person in the good meetings and the hard ones? This is the quiet multiplier on the other three. Credibility, reliability, and care all mean less if they disappear the moment things get difficult. Consistency is what makes the first three durable instead of situational.
Add them together, Credibility, Reliability, Care, Consistency and you have something closer to a real definition of trust than “people who trust each other.” Each one is necessary. None of them is sufficient on its own.
Where this actually gets tested
Trust is easy to think about in the abstract and hard to build under pressure, which is exactly when it matters most. I’ve seen this show up clearly in boardrooms during a regulatory reset, a moment when directors ask management to put everything on the table, with no spin, no managed narrative. That’s not a credibility test. Everyone in that room already has credentials. It’s a test of the other three: will you be reliable when the easy thing is to shade the truth, will you show care for the institution rather than just your own position, and will you be consistent, the same person in that hard meeting that you were in the easy ones.
What I’ve noticed is that people default to whichever piece of the equation comes most naturally to them, and stop there. The credentialed expert leans on credibility and never quite builds care. The relentlessly reliable operator delivers everything on time but never demonstrates they’re thinking about anyone’s interests but their own. Neither one is untrustworthy, exactly. They’re just incomplete.
A way to use this
If you want a genuinely useful exercise, don’t just read the four words and nod. Pick a specific relationship, a client, a boss, a team you lead and rate yourself honestly, one to five, on each of the four. Not how you’d like to be seen. How you actually think you’d score if the other person were being honest.
Most people find one clear weak spot. That’s useful information, because it tells you exactly where the relationship is vulnerable, not just that trust “could be better.”
The four pieces aren’t equally visible, either. Credibility and reliability show up in normal operating conditions. Care and consistency show up specifically when something goes wrong, which is exactly why they’re harder to build and easier to lose. If you want to know how much someone actually trusts you, don’t ask them during the easy stretch. Watch what they do the next time something goes sideways.
About Eric Mahler
Eric Mahler is the founder and Managing Partner of Aretos Advisory, an executive advisory firm focused on transformation, AI governance, and leadership coherence. He has spent thirty years advising boards and executive teams across industries, including roles at Merrill Lynch, Southwest Airlines, Northwest Airlines, and Cap Gemini, and as the founder of Fulcrum Consulting, which he built and exited in 2024.
He is the author of The Center of the Compass, forthcoming from Amplify Publishing in December 2026, endorsed by Marshall Goldsmith, David Horsager, and Josh Linkner. He is also a keynote speaker on leadership, AI governance, and organizational resilience.
ericmahler.com | aretosadvisory.com
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