Trust on Purpose

Send us a message - we'd love to hear from you After four years and nearly 100 episodes of exploring what it means to build trust on purpose, we're coming to you today with a different kind of conversation; one that's deeply personal and one of the hardest we've had. Ila shares why she's stepping away from the podcast, and Charles reflects on what these four years of partne...

Send us a message - we'd love to hear from you You've messed up. You know it. Your team knows it. A lot of leaders know that sinking "Oh sh!t" feeling of realizing they've done something to break their team's trust.  In this episode, we dig into a real story of broken trust: the situation, the impacts, and what ultimately turned things around. We walk through the moves...

Send us a message - we'd love to hear from you What if moving faster with AI didn't mean giving up your judgment? We sit down with Lindsay Semas, an AI leader who's spent years building trustworthy technology at scale, to explore the gap between what AI can do and what we should let it do - from drafting emails to shaping customer strategy. We start with the quick wins: smarter resea...

Send us a message - we'd love to hear from you What if trust didn't depend on heroic one-to-one fixes, but on the environment you design every day? In this new episode, we explore what it means to shift from "I build trust with you" to "I build a space where everyone can build, maintain, and repair trust with each other."  Through real stories and practical moves, we m...

Send us a message - we'd love to hear from you What happens when your early life didn't teach you how to trust? How do you learn vulnerability and honesty when those skills were never modeled for you? We sit down with Andy Vasily - Leadership / Performance Coach, Podcast Host and Educational Consultant - to explore how trust is a learnable competency, not something you're born with....

Send us a message - we'd love to hear from you Overwhelm never asks permission. When it hits, our reflex is to work harder and push through. Yet that often distracts us from the one thing that restores clarity: pausing. In this new episode of Trust on Purpose, we dive into the difference between a nourishing pause and disassociation, how awareness of our sensations helps us return from checkou...

Send us a message - we'd love to hear from you What happens when you choose long-term trust over short-term speed? Psychologist Susan David's powerful question launches us into a revealing exploration of how trust-building decisions fundamentally transform outcomes. This episode contrasts two dramatically different approaches to organizational change. On one hand, a team that prioritizes...

Send us a message - we'd love to hear from you What if the secret to breakthrough results isn't working harder but making better promises? Bob Dunham, founder of the Institute for Generative Leadership, reveals the power of trustworthy commitments in creating extraordinary outcomes. Dunham challenges the mechanistic approach dominating today's workplace, where employees are treated a...

Send us a message - we'd love to hear from you "I shouldn't have to explain this." Sound familiar? A lot of leaders feel this way about making clear requests of people. It creates a destructive cycle: vague directions lead to poor results, which fuel resentment and reinforce the belief that explanation shouldn't be necessary. The hidden cost is teams divided between mind-re...

Send us a message - we'd love to hear from you What happens when we trust life enough to put down our armour and show up authentically? Poet Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer takes us on a journey through the transformative power of creative practice and how it builds the muscle of trust - in life, in ourselves - that we need in our most challenging moments. Rosemerry opens our conversation with her p...

Send us a message - we'd love to hear from you What truly makes a good leader? We dive into this question by challenging ourselves to identify the qualities that matter most – and then getting real about how we're actually doing. We share some of our own leadership strengths and blind spots, but the conversation quickly evolves into something more interesting: How do you even know if you&...

Send us a message - we'd love to hear from you Have you ever felt that weighty silence in a team meeting when dissatisfaction hangs in the air but remains unspoken? That silence might be eroding trust beneath the surface of your relationships and organizations. In this conversation, we explore how dissatisfaction manifests across different contexts - from personal relationships to large organi...

Send us a message - we'd love to hear from you Could love be the key to workplace innovation, productivity, and social change? Amy Elizabeth Fox, CEO of Mobius Consulting, thinks so. We have a fascinating conversation with her in which she advocates integrating healing practices and psycho-spiritual transformation into organizations, challenging the idea that caring connection and high perform...

Send us a message - we'd love to hear from you Psychologist Dr. Jody Carrington joins us to discuss the paradoxical nature of being human: we are biologically wired for connection, yet struggle to truly see each other. Drawing from her work with first responders and children, she explains how emotional regulation builds trust and why distrust often stems from trauma rather than choice. We expl...

Send us a message - we'd love to hear from you Trust-building isn’t just a nice concept; it can be identified as a key performance indicator that can reshape how consistently people build and maintain trust within an organization and even with external stakeholders. We're joined by Sandra Rose and Leonie von Uthmann from NRICHED, who introduce their groundbreaking tool, TrustY - an innova...

Send us a message - we'd love to hear from you In our latest episode, we talk about the often-overlooked but game-changing aspect of flexible leadership with Kevin Eikenberry, a well-known author and leadership expert. As leadership gets more complex, knowing how to be flexible gives leaders the tools they need to handle uncertainty. Kevin shares how leaders can develop an adaptive mindset bas...

Send us a message - we'd love to hear from you How often do you blame yourself for not doing enough to support the people who work for and with you? If you do, it turns out you aren’t alone. In this episode, we look at what happens to leaders when they carry the belief they aren’t doing enough—for the teams they lead and the teams they are on. We consider examples of people we’ve coached who l...

Send us a message - we'd love to hear from you What happens when you pour your heart into work only to be met with silence? Or have you ever felt the sting of being ignored after applying, and even interviewing, for a job? You’re not alone. In a new episode of Trust on Purpose, we unravel the silent killer of workplace trust - ghosting. The frustrating reality of unacknowledged contributions a...

Send us a message - we'd love to hear from you Join us as we explore a field-tested framework for building and repairing trust. Drawing from "The Thin Book of Trust," we break down the four essential assessments that shape our choice to trust others. Discover why some relationships feel like safe harbours while others leave us constantly on guard, and learn how to navigate the comple...

Send us a message - we'd love to hear from you Every broken New Year's resolution leaves a crack in something far more precious than our goals - it fractures the trust we hold with ourselves. In this episode, we confront the damage of making promises we never truly intended to keep, and how these seemingly small betrayals ripple through our lives, relationships, and leadership. Our own pe...

Send us a message - we'd love to hear from you Ever wondered how avoiding difficult conversations could be sabotaging your relationships and your career? Join us as we explore the art of timely communication, inspired by insights from Joseph Grenny's "Crucial Conversations." We delve into the reasons we shy away from those essential talks, whether it's fear, procrastination...

Send us a message - we'd love to hear from you In a world that demands constant multitasking and perfection, it’s easy for self-trust to slip through the cracks. In this episode of Trust on Purpose, we dive into what it really means to trust yourself and how it shapes both your personal and professional life.   We share an honest conversation about how life’s changes can shake our confidence a...

Send us a message - we'd love to hear from you Get ready to dive deep in this episode of Trust on Purpose, where hosts Charles Feltman and Ila Edgar tackle big questions around trust and artificial intelligence - starting with a curious twist! It kicks off with the story of a school project involving AI-generated sloth images - yes, sloths - and quickly jumps into a thought-provoking conversat...

Send us a message - we'd love to hear from you Today, we’re diving into a question that strikes at the heart of workplace dynamics: can a truly great workplace happen without a team-wide effort, or is it solely the leader's responsibility? We draw inspiration from Tom Geraghty's insightful perspective from a recent conversation: "A great workplace is worth working for." We’...

Send us a message - we'd love to hear from you In Part 2 of our conversation with Tom Geraghty, we explore the critical role of psychological safety and how leaders can model it for their teams. He explains how creating a psychologically safe environment isn’t just about good intentions, but about understanding how your team's lived experiences shape their perception of safety. Tom outlin...