Information is a commodity. The real challenge is establishing trust in today’s world of content overload and automated answers. How can you tell who, among an array of self-proclaimed experts, really understands a topic? And more importantly, how can you instill that trust in others?
It starts at the top.
According to the 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer, 75% of respondents said CEOs are obligated to help bridge trust divides, but just 44% do so well. That’s a huge gap that highlights a leadership credibility challenge, playing out externally with customersand inside the workplace.
3 TRUST-BUILDING STRATEGIES
These are three core principles I lean on to establish trust.
1. Transparency: Be honest and open to what you don’t know.
Authenticity builds connection. Leaders who admit they don’t have all the answers and show vulnerability earn deeper trust. This openness creates a culture of accountability that resonates with both employees and customers.
One thing we do at Scribd, Inc. is quarterly employee pulse surveys. As you might imagine, scores across various topics fluctuate. But we share all of them in company meetings, using it as an opportunity to discuss what’s going well and dig into how we can improve. This has led to higher engagement.
Transparency means also sharing the bad as well as the good. If someone tells me everything is going great and is perfect, I’m not likely to trust them. There is always something we can do better. It’s the same when you communicate with the employees—share the misses as well as the wins.
2. Communication: Clarity and humanity over bulk.
Always clearly articulate your intent, purpose, and vision. Don’t give your teams or your audience an opportunity to second-guess or fill in the blanks of what you don’t say.
How you share is equally as important as what you share. We all sound better since we learned to bulk up our messages with AI. It’s personally been a great copyeditor for me, but I don’t want it to take my voice. The best technique I’ve found is reading messages aloud. It sounds simple, but it really helps me catch when I sound authentic or like a robot.
The best ways to add weight to your messages are by using personal or firsthand examples that showcase your reasoning and citing your sources, elevating from machine-driven meh opinion towards fact-based messaging.
3. Teamwork
Building a strong team is one of the most important leadership skills I’ve learned. When hiring, prioritize good judgment and cultural fit over purely technical skills; judgment is crucial in ambiguous environments like the one we live in.
The most effective leaders succeed because of the team around them. I am [formerly!] a finance guy, so I look at things through a specific lens. If I didn’t have creative and technical people around me viewing things from a different perspective, the company might not be doing as well. To operationalize this, try developing an internal committee to ensure those closest to the facts inform your strategy.
Teamwork extends outside the workplace. Customers are skeptical. The content you put out is a way to meet them. Reduce the noise and share things that genuinely provide help. Consumers increasingly look to real people, so instead of claiming you’re an expert, bring in actual experts.
PIVOT FROM INFORMATION TO UNDERSTANDING
Reliable, quality, human source content is increasingly becoming a scarce resource. Real value comes from helping people understand and make sense of that information.
This is a challenge I deal with every day. Scribd, Inc. has an abundance of information, hundreds of millions of pieces of content, built over nearly two decades. Just downloading that content has been crucial to our business success in the past. But now, accessing content isn’t the issue; that’s easy. It’s making sense of it all.
Like many companies, we’ve pivoted our approach. We’re finding new ways to provide trust and value, which led us to update our mission. Our new North Star is to advance human understanding. The future is not about who has the most information, but who has the credibility to translate the plethora of it into something actionable.
The ultimate goal for every leader must be to protect and invest in the one thing AI cannot replicate: genuine human understanding.
Tony Grimminck is the CEO of Scribd, Inc.