How to Engineer Trust in Integrated Project Teams

Trust is one of those dynamics between people that everyone knows is important and yet very few people think about beyond the obvious “do I or don’t I trust them”. At VISION Consulting, we think deeply about what it means to trust and be trusted. We believe that trust is something that can be engineered with the same care and intentionality as programme schedules, governance models, or technical designs.

This article offers a different way of thinking about trust on integrated project teams. Not as a soft, vague, or moral concept, but as something living, dynamic, and deeply practical.

Trust Is a Living Thing

The first thing worth saying plainly is this: trust only exists between living things. You don’t trust a programme plan, you trust that the project manager will make sure the teams keep to it. You don’t trust a risk register, you feel some security from the fact that project teams have taken the time to think through and record the risks so that they can be mitigated with actions. You don’t trust a contract, you trust that all parties will fulfil their commitments.

In short, you trust people.

That sounds obvious, but the implications are profound. Integrated project teams are often designed as if trust can be embedded structurally through meeting schedules, action decision logs, governance processes and clearly defined roles and responsibilities. These matter, but they are only scaffolding. Trust itself lives in the relationships between individuals, and relationships behave very differently from mechanical systems.

Trust Is More Quantum Than Newtonian

Isaac Newton described a world of solid objects, predictable forces, and linear cause and effect where things behave the same way every time. Whereas quantum mechanics reveals a world of relationships, probabilities, and context, where what you observe depends on how you observe it, and where things can exist in more than one state at the same time.

Most project environments are built on Newtonian assumptions: linear cause and effect, predictability, control. Trust does not work like that.

Trust behaves more like a quantum phenomenon. It is contextual and relational. It can strengthen suddenly, decay quietly, or exist in superposition i.e. it can present and absent at the same time depending on the domain and the moment.

This is why trust can’t be managed with checklists or dashboards. It doesn’t move in straight lines. It’s affected by tone, timing, history, mood, and interpretation. A single conversation can undo months of good intent. A small, well-timed act can restore confidence far beyond its apparent significance.

Trust Is Not Logical or Linear

Another common mistake is assuming trust is rational. It isn’t.

People do not calculate trust the way they calculate costs or durations. Trust takes emotion into account. It’s more like pattern recognition and often operates below conscious awareness. Teams don’t “decide” to trust; they find themselves trusting or not.

The Three Domains of Trust

Trust between people shows up in three distinct domains:

The domain of Care: Does she care about the same things as me? Are we aligned?
The domain of Competence: Is he skilled or experienced enough to do what he said he’ll do?
The domain of Integrity: Do they mean what they are saying?

Each domain can be strong or weak independently of the others. And each requires different behaviours to build and maintain trust.

Building Trust in the Domain of Care

Trusting someone in the domain of care answers a simple but fundamental question: Do you have the project’s interests at heart and do you care about mine?

Care-based trust grows when people feel seen, heard, and taken seriously. On integrated project teams, this does not mean being nice, agreeable, or conflict-avoidant. In fact, superficial politeness often erodes trust. Care-based trust is built through curiosity. It means actively listening to what is going on for other people on the project:

What are they worried about?
What pressures are they under?
What risks do they see that I don’t?
What are they dealing with in the background that I don’t see?

Just as importantly, it means telling them honestly what you see that they may not see. Care is not protection from uncomfortable truths; it is a willingness to surface them respectfully and early.

When people know that you are genuinely trying to understand their world and that you are prepared to share your own perspective without an agenda, trust grows quickly.

Building Trust in the Domain of Competence

Trust in competence answers a different question: Can you actually do what you are here to do?

Competence-based trust is built by owning your subject-matter expertise clearly and confidently. It’s about knowing your audience and adjusting how you explain things accordingly, being precise rather than performative. Equally important is being open about what you don’t know.

Nothing damages trust faster than pretending. On complex projects, uncertainty is inevitable. People are remarkably tolerant of not knowing provided it is named early and handled honestly. Saying “this isn’t my area of expertise” or “I need to check that” strengthens trust far more than bluffing ever could. We humans have built-in bluffing detectors and even if you’re not called out on it, it’s highly unlikely you’ve gotten away with it! You’ve probably just eroded trust.

Building Trust in the Domain of Integrity

Integrity-based trust asks: Will you do what you say you will do?

This is the domain where trust is most often lost and most easily protected. Trust in integrity is built by keeping promises, full stop. And when that is not possible, which will happen on every project, it is built by how you handle the breakdown.

If you are not going to deliver what you committed to:

Don’t fudge it
Don’t wait for it to reveal itself
Don’t hope it goes unnoticed

Get out ahead of it. Flag it early. Re-negotiate the commitment with the person or group involved. Treat promises as living agreements. Hold others to the same standard too. Allowing repeated unkept commitments to slide doesn’t make you flexible, it makes you untrustworthy by association.

Engineering Trust Is a Leadership Discipline

When trust is understood across these three domains, it becomes something that leaders and teams can work with deliberately. You stop asking vague questions like “do we trust each other?” and start asking where trust is strong, and where there is distrust.

This is what I mean by engineering trust. It’s not about controlling it, it’s about creating the conditions in which it can emerge and cultivating it continually to make sure it endures.

Conclusion

Integrated project teams don’t become adversarial because people don’t care about trust. They do so because trust is treated as an abstract virtue instead of a practical discipline that can and needs to be cultivated.

When you recognise trust as living, non-linear, and domain-specific, it stops being mysterious and becomes a bedrock that you can cultivate and repair.

Trust is not abstract; it is experiential to its core. As Ernest Hemingway once said “the best way to find out if you can trust someone, is to trust them”.

To explore how trust can be deliberately cultivated across care, competence, and integrity in integrated project teams, connect with Niall Hayden, Senior Consultant at VISION Consulting, at nhayden@vision.com