The trust toolkit: Six capacities leaders need for a sustainable future

If trust is capital, then leaders are both its primary investors and stewards. Yet building trust is not just a technical exercise – it is often a deeply human experience.

Sustainability challenges now require leaders to cultivate inner steadiness, relational intelligence, and the ability to work across differences. These skills are rarely taught in traditional leadership curriculums, but they increasingly determine the difference between strategies that stall and those that succeed.

This essay outlines six essential capacities — a trust toolkit — and offers practices leaders can reflect and adopt easily. I have gained these practical insights from my change-making work while at Shell, as well as while doing transformational work with gang leaders on the streets of Los Angeles!

Why leadership must evolve

For decades, organisations selected and trained leaders for analysis, planning, and optimisation. These skills remain important, but sustainability challenges demand additional competencies: the ability to host difficult conversations, navigate tension without collapse, shape narratives of shared purpose, and maintain inner clarity throughout especially when the environment is turbulent.

I saw this firsthand at Shell. Some of our most promising innovation efforts stagnated not because of a lack of intelligence or resources, but because people didn’t feel safe enough to take risks together. When we introduced simple grounding and presencing practices through the EMPOWER programme that we designed — later featured by Fast Company — individuals and teams began collaborating with more courage and less defensiveness. The shift wasn’t conceptual; it was relational.

Leaders today need relational competence as urgently as strategic competence. The trust toolkit will offer a practical way to cultivate exactly that.

Six capacities of the trust toolkit

1. Conflict intelligence

Sustainability work brings competing values, resource tensions, and identity concerns into the open. Conflict intelligence is the ability to read these tensions early, name them without blame, and design processes that prevent escalation.

In a multi billion dollar energy project at Shell, two teams were in deep disagreement for months. It wasn’t until we surfaced the underlying tensions — one group prioritising safety, the other speed — that the conversation began to shift. Naming the real issues dissolved unnecessary defensiveness. Developing a shared vision requires us to go below the iceberg of what appears otherwise it can lead to tragedies like the BP Horizon disaster.

Practice: Before any high-stakes meeting, map three likely tensions (values, resources, identity). Name them upfront. People relax when they realise conflict is information, not failure.

2. Narrative competence

People do not act on ‘data’ alone but on ‘stories’. Stories about who we are, what is possible, and what the future holds. Stories that move the heart. Narrative competence is the ability to recognise the frames that people use and to reshape them without manipulation.

Sustainability narratives often oscillate between fear and denial. Leaders must craft narratives that acknowledge complexity while expanding collective imagination.

Practice: In your next stakeholder update, replace one deficit-based sentence with a “becoming” sentence: what future are we stepping into together? Notice how it shifts energy and engagement.

3. Deep listening & presence

Trust grows when people feel heard, not managed. Deep listening requires emotional regulation, attunement, and the ability to stay centred when conversations become charged.

For years, I’ve taught meditation to thousands ranging from corporate leaders, veterans from the Iraq war, social justice activists, police officers, youth from conflict-affected communities, etc. The pattern is always the same: when people settle internally, they listen with less defensiveness and more compassion and humanity. Meetings that once felt tight or adversarial can become more human, grounded and collaborative.

Practice: Begin meetings with one minute of silence and grounding. Invite participants to privately note one intention and one concern. It transforms the emotional climate almost immediately. Remind them during this silence that we are ALL going through life and it's associated challenges! And trust that everyone will value that one minute ‘time out’!

4. Boundary-spanning mindset

Sustainability challenges are cross-sector and require coalitions that have never worked together before. An inclusive mindset enables leaders to bridge silos, honour differences, and convene unusual allies.

When we developed EMPOWER at Shell, many breakthroughs came when people from diverse disciplines e.g. safety, engineering, HR, and retail co-designed problem statements instead of defending their own priorities. Understanding each other’s constraints turned competition into constructive collaboration. We also used artists and poets in our innovation workshops to ensure a balance of left and right brain activities!

Practice: For any major initiative, identify one partner outside your usual network and bring them into the problem framing phase as well.

5. Purpose-driven decision making

Purpose is not a slogan. It is a directional force that helps organisations stay coherent during turbulence. When difficult trade-offs emerge — and they always do in sustainability matters — purpose provides a moral compass.

Leaders who rely solely on metrics often default to risk aversion. Leaders anchored in purpose make clearer, braver decisions that stakeholders recognise as trustworthy even when outcomes are uncertain.

Practice: Create a one-sentence “purpose test” for decisions: Does this action move us toward the future that we say we are committed to? If the answer is unclear, pause.

6. Ecological humility — trusting the Earth

The most overlooked leadership capacity is the ability to see the Earth not as a passive backdrop but as a living, responsive system. Ecological humility shifts decision-making from extraction to regeneration.

Through my peacebuilding work, especially while leading journeys across India, I’ve seen indigenous communities treat rivers, forests, and soil as active partners. When organisations adopt this stance, their policies become more long-term, adaptive, and compassionate.The ‘inner climate’ change of leaders and organizations is equally important to actions taken for ‘outer climate change’!

Practice: For projects with ecological impact, add a “planet partner check”: What ecological process must thrive for this initiative to succeed?

How these capacities reinforce each other

These six capacities are not isolated techniques. They form an interdependent operating system for trust. Together, they allow leaders to hold complexity without fragmentation.

Where leaders can begin

Start small and be consistent. Learn, experiment, get feedback, empower others to lead and take ownership or bring new ideas to the table.

• A daily ten-minute reflective or meditative practice
• A meeting ritual that surfaces tensions early
• A narrative shift from risk to shared possibility
• A cross-sector conversation each month
• A “planet partner” check on new initiatives

Trust is built through repeated practice — the visible behaviours and more importantly the invisible ‘inner climate’ that enables them.

Trust as a leadership praxis

Strategy, technology, and capital matter. But without relational capacity, they remain brittle. The Trust Toolkit is not another leadership trend — it is a practical path for cultivating the human foundations of sustainability.

If trust is capital, then the investment begins inside leaders themselves. When leaders steward their attention, regulate their inner climate, and build these six capacities, they make it possible for teams, communities, and systems to move together.

This is the human work beneath the systems work.

And it is the work that our shared future now demands.

Let's hope that leaders will now embark on building their capacity to play this ‘inner game’ for the greater common good.

illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability & Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.

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