Trustworthiness Is Not a Character Trait

Most managers I know would describe themselves as trustworthy. And, in most cases, they probably are.

They keep their word, know their business, don't deliberately mislead people and care about their teams. If asked whether people can trust them, they have plenty of evidence to say yes.

Yet trustworthiness is slightly more inconvenient than that, because it is not entirely yours to declare.

The Trust Equation, developed by David Maister, Charles Green and Robert Galford, captures this rather elegantly:

Trustworthiness = (Credibility + Reliability + Intimacy) / Self-Orientation

This first article in the series is about the denominator: Self-Orientation.

The term is easily misunderstood. Self-Orientation does not simply describe selfishness or an obvious tendency to put your interests ahead of everybody else's. It refers to how much of your attention, while dealing with another person or a business situation, remains occupied by yourself: how you are performing, how you are being perceived, whether you are adding enough value and what the outcome will eventually say about you.

For managers with a strong Hyper-Achieving tendency, this deserves particular attention. Hyper-Achievement makes performance and achievement important sources of self-respect and self-validation. Success therefore starts doing two jobs. It produces the business result the manager is working towards, while a visible and recognised result also reassures them that they are valuable, relevant and making a difference.

After enough years of professional success, these two functions can become difficult to separate. Achieving something valuable for the organisation and receiving confirmation of one's own value happen through the same event.

Here is where Hyper-Achievement starts feeding Self-Orientation.

When success becomes evidence about the self

Hyper-Achieving professionals are enormously useful to organisations. They are typically driven, pragmatic, goal-oriented and self-directed; they learn what helps them perform, adapt quickly and know how to mobilise themselves and others around an important objective. It is easy to understand why this pattern can travel quite far up the hierarchy.

The complication appears when results acquire personal significance beyond their business value. A successful presentation moves a decision forward and also provides another piece of evidence that I am good at what I do. Recognition from senior management says something about the quality of the work and can also say something about where I stand.

The manager consequently monitors what is happening in the business while also monitoring where they stand within what is happening. Their contribution, relevance and visible impact remain part of the mental picture.

This becomes particularly important when they move into roles with greater authority. Many arrive there after years of being rewarded for solving, knowing, producing and becoming the person others call when something difficult needs to be handled. The new role changes the nature of their contribution much faster than it changes this internal reference point.

They are no longer supposed to be first violin in every piece, yet playing exceptionally well is still the most familiar way they know to create value. The deeper transition is learning to be comfortable with a growing proportion of organisational value being created by other people without carrying their fingerprints.

Until that happens, achievement keeps pulling attention back towards a familiar question: Where am I in this result?

That is Self-Orientation, and it can coexist perfectly well with genuine commitment to the organisation.

When you need to be a visible part of the success

Consider Robert, a senior leader with an impressive professional history. He is experienced, fast, commercially astute and accustomed to delivering. Difficult assignments have often ended up with him because people know he can move them forward.

Certain situations, however, provoke more intensity than their business importance seems to justify. A recommendation he strongly supported is rejected. A colleague challenges his reasoning in front of others. One of his managers solves a significant problem without involving him. A successful initiative receives enthusiastic recognition while Robert's substantial contribution is barely mentioned.

These are very different events, but for Robert they interrupt the familiar connection between his contribution, the outcome and the recognition of his value.

He has legitimate business arguments available: the decision needs to be robust, relevant experience should not be ignored, risks deserve proper consideration and credit should reflect contribution. Alongside those arguments, however, Robert is also establishing what the event says about him.

That question affects his behaviour. He may defend a recommendation longer than the decision requires, add context that restores the importance of his contribution or enter a discussion his team could have completed without him. Another person's independent success can produce both satisfaction and a sense of personal displacement. Even I don't know can become slightly harder to say when being the person who knows has been part of your professional identity for twenty years.

When achievement has become evidence of value, situations in which that evidence is absent, ambiguous or attached to somebody else redirect some of Robert's attention from the issue towards himself.

His colleagues cannot see that mechanism, but they can experience its consequences. They encounter a leader who seems to need his judgement, contribution or relevance acknowledged as part of the outcome. With enough repetitions, important conversations begin to contain an additional stakeholder: Robert's relationship with his own value.

How Self-Orientation changes other people's behaviour

A manager rarely enters a meeting consciously demanding validation. Many senior leaders have considerable professional confidence and ample evidence of their competence. Yet people around them become very good at noticing where their attention repeatedly goes.

They learn that challenging a strongly held view requires more effort than agreeing with it, that an idea may return carrying an additional layer of the manager's contribution, or that success receives a different response when the manager can recognise some of their own judgement in how it was achieved. They do not need to understand the psychology behind these reactions. Repetition is enough.

That adaptation is where Self-Orientation begins to affect trustworthiness.

If a manager repeatedly needs their judgement or contribution to remain visible, other people gradually spend attention managing that need. They prepare differently before challenging an idea, decide which disagreements are worth pursuing and become more deliberate about how they present results achieved without the manager's involvement.

An internal need for validation has now created an external behavioural consequence: other people are spending part of their attention managing the manager.

This is the connection that can be difficult to see from inside the Hyper-Achieving pattern. The drive to deliver results is closely connected to the need to remain valuable, which keeps personal contribution and recognition unusually present in the manager's attention. Other people perceive that preoccupation through repeated behaviour and adjust accordingly. Part of the relationship is then spent managing the leader's need to remain relevant rather than dealing with the work itself.

Nobody has lied, broken a promise or behaved dishonestly, yet trustworthiness has been affected.

Authority amplifies the effect. What primarily shapes personal performance in a specialist begins influencing how other people speak, decide and involve the manager once that person acquires authority. At senior level, people several layers away may adapt to what they believe leadership wants to see.

A leader can therefore believe they are simply demanding results while the organisation is learning a more complicated rule: results are especially welcome when they also preserve the leader's sense of relevance.

Self-Orientation has now entered the managerial system.

Moving from achievement to trustworthiness

Earlier in a career, personal achievement and professional advancement are closely connected. You solve the difficult problem, rescue the project or know the answer others don't, and the link between my contribution and the result is both visible and valuable. As authority grows, value is increasingly created through people who may know more than you, choose differently and succeed without your direct involvement.

For a Hyper-Achieving leader, the role can change faster than the internal measure of personal value. You delegate while still watching for your contribution in the outcome; you want autonomous people while feeling the impulse to improve what they produce; you value talented colleagues while discovering that their success feels different when the recognition is entirely theirs.

Moving towards greater trustworthiness requires separating achievement as an expression of capability from achievement as proof of personal worth. Capability can remain demanding, ambitious and strongly oriented towards results. What changes is the personal function the result is expected to perform.

Other people's independent success provides a useful test. Can an excellent decision remain excellent when you did not shape it? Can a meeting be successful when you added very little? Can somebody else's recognition feel complete without establishing your contribution to it?

And perhaps the most revealing question:

If nobody in the room needed further evidence of your value today, what would you do differently?

What may be sitting in your denominator?

Self-Orientation is often easier to experience in someone else than to explain. People may have no idea that a manager's strong need to achieve is connected to external validation. Yet, they can still sense when too much of the relationship revolves around that manager's contribution, judgement, relevance or recognition.

What they experience as self-interest may therefore originate in the internal pressure of a capable, committed person who has learned to confirm personal value through achievement. Understanding the origin helps explain the behaviour, but it does not remove its effect on trust.

Perhaps that is the uncomfortable usefulness of the denominator in the Trust Equation. Self-Orientation does not require bad intentions or a selfish character. It requires only that too much of me remains present while I am supposed to be dealing with you.

If this article has made you wonder whether Hyper-Achiever is one of the patterns operating in your own management, book your 1:1 strategic conversation and mention the word "DEBRIEF" in your booking. 

I will follow up with a personalised invite to complete the Saboteur Assessment. In your strategic conversation, we will debrief your results to examine which patterns are strongest for you, what activates them and how they may be influencing the way you lead and relate to others.

Over 90% of managers I work with have a significant Hyper-Achieving tendency (including myself), and that is perfectly normal. Think about a manager who is not able to achieve! This is highly undesirable and hopefully rare. You also may discover that Hyper-Achiever is important in your profile, or that something quite different is driving the behaviour you recognise here. The purpose is not to attach a label to yourself, but to understand what, in your own way of operating, may be increasing or unknowingly decreasing the denominator of your Trust Equation.

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On the Same Topic

As leadership responsibility grows, value becomes progressively less dependent on what the leader personally contributes. These three articles explore what happens when habits built around personal competence, availability and achievement continue shaping where a leader places attention — and how much space remains for others.

Have You Got a Minute?
Being available can look like generosity and good leadership. Yet when the leader repeatedly becomes the place where problems are solved, their helpfulness may also keep them more central to the work than either they or their team realise.

The CEO Approval Bottleneck
Staying close to important decisions can feel like responsibility. This article explores what happens when a leader’s judgement remains embedded in too many decisions — and the organisation learns that progress still requires the leader’s presence.

When Operational Strength Becomes a Strategic Limit
Operational strength creates results, credibility and often promotion. At a more strategic level, however, the same strength can keep attention anchored to where the leader can personally add value rather than to what needs to become possible without them.