Trust Is Earned. Respect Is Borrowed. Know the Difference.

Finding yourself in a noisy world is hard. That’s why I’ve always liked the discipline of choosing five words to define who you are — or who you’re striving to be. And no, you don’t share them. People love to critique what they didn’t build.

Long before I had five words, I knew one of them had to be trusted. Probably because, like every teenager, I’d stress-tested my parents’ faith in me more than once. So I started working on trust early:

Say what you mean.
Mean what you say.
Be consistent — without calcifying.
Be fair where fairness is possible.

Where trust gets tested

When I stepped into governance roles, trust wasn’t just personal anymore — it became structural. Every word mattered. Every silence mattered. And every time I refused to “toe the party line,” I paid for it professionally. But I also strengthened something far more important: my own internal alignment.

Trust isn’t loud. It’s predictable in the best way.

Management taught me that again. After raising serious concerns about an employee, the senior partner decided it would be a growth experience for me to fire them. I did.
They told me they weren’t surprised — because I had always been straight with them.
No surprises. No ambushes.
That’s trust in its least glamorous, most necessary form.

The classroom version of trust

Teaching made it even harder. Not every student loved me — teaching 40 teenagers at once is basically parenting with 10 times the eye-rolling. But the compliment I valued most was:
“She’s tough, but fair.”
Students didn’t have to like me. But they had to believe me when I said: “We’ll get through this. I’ll do the work if you will.”

Where respect goes off the rails

And then there was a dean — the perfect case study in the difference between trust and respect.

He demanded respect. Enforced it, even. Formal emails. Rigid protocols. Reprimands for imagined slights. People complied because of the title — sometimes out of fear — but not because of him.

People respected the role.
No one trusted the person.

The uncomfortable truth

You can respect someone you don’t trust.
But you cannot trust someone you don’t respect.

Trust is earned through behaviour.
Respect, when demanded, becomes performance art.

A leader who insists on respect but doesn’t cultivate trust gets:

• compliance, not commitment
• deference, not dialogue
• silence, not truth

Respect gets you silence. Trust gets you honesty. Only one of those helps you lead.

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