Senior Leaders: Your Team Needs You to Know This

The culture of a team is shaped less by policies or strategy than by how senior leaders trust, speak about, and advocate for their staff.

There’s a particular vantage point that comes from serving in what leadership literature often calls the second chair. You’re close enough to the senior leader to understand the weight of their decisions, but close enough to the day-to-day work to see how those decisions land on staff and teams.

Over the years, I’ve watched many leadership teams flourish, and others quietly fracture. The difference is rarely talent. It’s rarely vision.

More often, it comes down to something simpler and harder to practice: how senior leaders steward trust with their team.

From that vantage point, I’ve come to believe there is a leadership loop that healthy organizations depend on. When it’s functioning well, trust grows and teams thrive. When it breaks, the damage spreads quickly.

The loop begins here.

Trust Your Team

Your team is your single most valuable asset.

If you have hired capable, thoughtful people, the most important thing you can do is trust them to do their work. Trust allows senior leaders to focus on the macro work of vision, strategy, and direction without slipping into micromanagement.

But trust isn’t always easy.

If you find yourself unable to trust your team, you need to get curious about why that’s the case.

Is it because expectations were never clear?
Is it because someone made a mistake that hasn’t been processed?
Or is it because, deep down, you don’t actually trust the people on your team?

If that’s the case, the real work may not be tighter oversight; it may be building a team you genuinely trust.

Trust isn’t just a leadership value. It’s a leadership strategy.

And once trust is in place, it requires something equally important to sustain it.

Never Speak Negatively About Team Members Behind Their Backs

Senior leaders hold power, whether they intend to or not.

That power shows up most clearly in how they talk about the people who report to them.

The fastest way to erode trust within a staff culture is for a senior leader to speak negatively about their team to others, especially when the team member isn’t present.

It may feel like venting.
It may feel like problem-solving.
But for the people listening, it signals something deeper: if this is how you speak about them, you might speak about me the same way.

Constructive feedback belongs in direct conversation with the person involved.

When concerns are addressed openly and respectfully, trust can grow. When criticism circulates indirectly, teams begin to fracture.

But what if you realize you’ve crossed that line before?

It’s not too late.

Apologies from leaders matter. Naming the harm and choosing a different way forward can begin to repair what was damaged.

Which leads to the third part of the loop.

Share Team Member’s Wins Publicly

One of the best senior leaders I ever worked with had a simple habit: every time they were in a leadership meeting, every time their own supervisor was present, every time our work intersected with the broader organization, they praised their team.

They shared our ideas.
They named our accomplishments.
They made sure people knew who was doing the work.

Sometimes we were in the room. Often we weren’t.

But the message was always clear: these people are excellent, and I trust them.

That kind of public advocacy changes everything.

It builds confidence within the team.
It strengthens credibility across the organization.
And it reinforces the trust that allows leaders and teams to do their best work together.

The Loop

When senior leaders trust their team, speak about them with integrity, and celebrate their contributions publicly, something powerful begins to happen.

Trust grows.
Teams take healthy risks.
Leaders can focus on the work that only they can do.

And the loop strengthens itself.

Second-chair leaders don’t expect perfection from the people they serve under. They know leadership is complex and often lonely.

But if there’s one thing many team members quietly hope their senior leader understands, it’s this:

Trust us.
Speak about us with care.
And when we do good work, help others see it.

The health of the whole system may depend on it.

In the coming months, I’m going to spend time reflecting on each part of this loop. The health of a team is rarely determined by just one thing. It’s shaped by quiet habits practiced over time.