7 Revealing Questions for Your Leadership Team Trust Audit

By Jonno White

Last updated: July 2026

Bottom line: if your leadership team's meetings feel calm but your decisions keep quietly falling apart three weeks later, the fastest way to find out why is a short, honest leadership team trust audit, not another strategy session.

Picture a leadership team wrapping up a two-hour planning meeting. Everyone nodded along. Nobody raised an objection. Three weeks later, half the room is working around the decision instead of executing it, and nobody can quite say why. If that scene sounds familiar, the plan is probably not the problem. Most leadership-team dysfunction that looks like indecision or weak accountability is actually an unresolved trust problem, and it can be tested with seven direct questions before anyone touches the org chart or the strategy deck. The trouble that looks like bad decision-making is usually unresolved distrust, because a team that does not trust each other's intent will not risk the honest disagreement good decisions require. Answer the seven questions below on your own, in writing, before your next leadership meeting, and you will know within twenty minutes whether trust is the real constraint.

Key Takeaways

Most leadership-team dysfunction that looks like a decision-making or accountability problem is really a trust problem sitting underneath it, and treating the symptom instead of the cause wastes time and goodwill.

A trust audit works because it asks about specific behaviour rather than general feelings, which is much harder for a team to answer vaguely or politely.

Answered individually and in writing before any group discussion, the seven questions below surface exactly what a normal, well-mannered meeting is built to hide.

Wide variation in how your team answers the same seven questions is itself the diagnosis. It does not need to be a uniform disaster to be real.

This diagnostic can name the problem accurately, but it does not replace facilitated work once the dysfunction is severe or long-standing.

Why a Leadership Team Trust Audit Beats a Guess

A leadership team trust audit works because it forces specific, comparable answers instead of a general vibe check. Most leaders already sense when something is off in their team. What they usually lack is a way to test that instinct against something more concrete than "the energy feels off in meetings."

The scale of the problem is bigger than most leaders assume. DDI's Global Leadership Forecast 2025, a study of nearly 11,000 leaders and HR professionals across more than fifty countries published in January 2025, found that trust in immediate managers had fallen to just 29 percent, a 37 percent decline since 2022. A related DDI-based analysis reported the same month found that only 32 percent of leaders expressed confidence in their organisation's senior leadership. Those numbers describe trust flowing down and up an organisation. The leadership team itself, the small group of people who are supposed to trust each other most, is rarely measured at all, which is precisely why a targeted audit is useful.

Patrick Lencioni's Five Dysfunctions of a Team, first published in 2002, places absence of trust at the base of a pyramid, with fear of conflict, lack of commitment, avoidance of accountability and inattention to results stacked on top of it in that order. The placement is not decorative. A team that cannot trust each other's intent will not risk open disagreement, a team that avoids disagreement will not reach genuine commitment, and a team that never truly committed has no standing to hold each other accountable. What looks like five separate problems is usually one problem wearing four different costumes.

The seven questions below are built directly on that logic. Each one targets a specific place where low trust hides in ordinary team behaviour, not a vague feeling about "culture."

1. Do we tell each other the truth before the meeting, or only after it?

This is the clearest single test of whether your team has real or artificial harmony. In a low-trust team, the honest opinions come out in the corridor, in a side message, or in a one-on-one with the most senior person in the room, never in the meeting itself where the decision is actually being made.

Answer this one honestly and specifically. Think about the last three genuinely contentious decisions your team made. In how many of them did every person's real view get said out loud, in the room, before the decision was locked in? If the honest answer is one out of three, your team has an artificial harmony problem, and it will keep producing decisions that look agreed but are not.

2. When did someone on this team last change their mind in front of the others?

Changing your mind in a meeting, visibly, is one of the more reliable signals of psychological safety a team can produce, because it requires admitting your first position was not the best one, in front of your peers. Forbes reported in May 2025 on practical ways leaders can track psychological safety through real-time behavioural signals rather than relying only on an annual survey score, and a visible change of mind is exactly the kind of signal that shows up in the room rather than on a form.

If nobody on your team can remember the last time this happened, that is worth sitting with. It usually does not mean your team is always right. It more often means the cost of being seen to be wrong is higher than the cost of quietly staying wrong.

3. If I disappeared for a month, would this team make the same calls I would?

This question tests whether the team has genuine shared clarity or whether alignment is really just deference to whoever is most senior in the room. A team with real trust and real clarity does not need the most senior person present to make a good call, because the team has actually internalised the same priorities and the same reasoning, not just the same conclusion.

Be honest about the gap between "they would guess what I want" and "they would reach the same answer through their own reasoning." The first is compliance. The second is commitment, and only the second survives contact with a decision nobody anticipated.

4. Whose recent failure have we actually discussed out loud, as a team?

Accountability cannot exist without a track record of naming failure without punishing the person who names it. If your team can immediately name whose failure was discussed openly in the last quarter, including the failure of the most senior person in the room, that is a strong sign. If the honest answer is nobody's, or only junior people's, that tells you something specific about where accountability is allowed to flow and where it quietly stops.

Teams that avoid this conversation are not protecting each other. They are protecting the fiction that everything on the team is working, which is a more expensive thing to protect than any single failure would have cost to admit.

5. Do we argue about the plan, or only about who gets blamed when it fails?

There is a real difference between conflict over ideas and conflict over status, and most leadership teams have far more of the second than they realise. Productive conflict interrogates the plan while it can still be changed. Unproductive conflict interrogates who is at fault after the plan has already failed, when the only thing left to decide is whose reputation absorbs the damage.

If your team's most heated conversations reliably happen after something has gone wrong rather than while a decision is still open, you have a team that has learned it is safer to withhold a real objection than to risk being blamed for raising it and being wrong.

6. What is each of us quietly protecting instead of the result?

Every leader on a team is protecting something, whether that is their department's budget, their own reputation, their relationship with one particular colleague, or simply the discomfort of not having to have a hard conversation this week. None of that makes someone a bad leader. It makes them human. The trust question is whether the team can name what is being protected honestly, including their own, rather than only noticing it in everyone else.

Lencioni's language for this is the "first team" concept: whether each leader treats the leadership team itself as their primary team, or quietly treats their own department as their real loyalty and the leadership team as a political arena they have to manage. A team where everyone privately answers "my own patch" to that question will always struggle to commit to decisions that cost their patch something.

7. Would every person here describe our top priority the same way, separately?

This is the simplest question on the list and often the most revealing. Ask each person on the team, individually and without conferring, to write down in one sentence what the team's single most important priority is right now. Then compare the answers.

Teams with genuine trust and clarity produce answers that are close enough to be recognisably the same priority, even if the wording differs. Teams without it produce answers that are all defensible, all reasonable, and all different, which means the team has been executing against several priorities at once without ever noticing, because nobody wanted to be the person who said out loud that everyone seemed to be rowing in a different direction.

How to Run This Audit With Your Leadership Team

The audit only works if it is answered honestly, and honesty is far more likely when the process itself is designed for it rather than left to chance.

Send the seven questions to every member of the leadership team individually, with a request to answer each one in writing, in two or three sentences, before a set deadline. Do this before any group discussion happens. If people answer out loud in the room first, the earliest and most senior voice will quietly shape everyone else's answer, which defeats the purpose of asking in the first place.

Collect every answer before anyone sees anyone else's. This matters more than it sounds like it should. The moment people can see how their peers answered, the honest outlier response gets quietly softened to match the group.

Bring the anonymised patterns, not the individually attributed answers, to the team conversation. The goal of the follow-up meeting is to look at where the team's answers cluster and where they scatter, not to hold a public trial over who wrote what. A team with low trust that suddenly has to defend individually signed answers in front of the group will simply produce more polite, less honest answers next time.

Pick one question, the one where the answers scattered the most or where the pattern was most uncomfortable, and spend your next leadership meeting on that single question rather than trying to fix all seven behaviours at once.

What Your Answers Actually Mean

If most of the team gives similar, specific, honest-sounding answers across all seven questions, including some uncomfortable ones, that is a genuinely healthy sign. It does not mean the team has no problems. It means the team can see its own problems clearly and say so, which is the precondition for fixing almost anything else.

If the answers are consistently vague, consistently positive, or suspiciously uniform, that is often a bigger warning sign than scattered or uncomfortable answers. A team where everyone independently reports that everything is fine is either genuinely healthy in a way that would be unusual, or has learned that the safe answer to any diagnostic is the reassuring one. Question six is often the most telling here, because "nothing, I am not protecting anything" is a much harder honest answer to give than most people expect.

If the answers scatter widely, particularly on questions three and seven, the team does not have a trust crisis so much as a clarity crisis sitting on top of a trust gap. People cannot commit to what they cannot see clearly, and they will not risk naming that gap out loud until they trust that doing so will not cost them.

Where This Diagnostic Ends and Real Work Begins

This audit is honest about what it is and is not. It is a structured way to surface a trust problem your team may already sense but has not named specifically. It is not, by itself, a fix.

Some teams will read their own scattered or uncomfortable answers and be able to address the gap directly, particularly if the team is otherwise capable and the dysfunction is relatively recent. If the pattern looks familiar alongside a wider set of symptoms, it is worth cross-checking against the broader list of warning signs your executive team is dysfunctional. Other teams, particularly where the pattern has been in place for years or where the most senior person in the room is themselves part of what is being quietly protected, usually need an outside facilitator. An internal leader is part of the system being diagnosed, which makes it genuinely difficult to run this process on their own team with full objectivity, however self-aware they are.

It is also worth naming the limits of the evidence behind this. The DDI figures cited above describe trust between managers and the people who report to them, not peer trust within a leadership team specifically, so the connection drawn here is a reasoned application of that broader trend rather than a direct measurement of leadership-team peer trust. Lencioni's model is a widely adopted practitioner framework built from years of consulting work, not a peer-reviewed causal study, and a smart, experienced operator could reasonably argue that some team dysfunction is genuinely a roles or capability problem with no trust deficit at all. This diagnostic will not distinguish those cases perfectly. It is a strong first filter, not a verdict.

Frequently Asked Questions

What exactly is a leadership team trust audit?

A leadership team trust audit is a structured self-assessment where each member of a leadership team answers a small set of direct, behavioural questions individually and in writing, then compares answers as a group to see where trust is genuinely present and where it is missing. It differs from a general trust-building exercise because it is diagnostic first, aimed at naming the specific gap before choosing how to close it.

How do I know if my team's real problem is trust rather than roles or strategy?

Run the seven questions above and pay attention to where the answers scatter. If the scatter concentrates on questions about honesty, conflict and protecting your own patch, trust is the more likely root cause. If your team answers those consistently well but struggles specifically with who owns what, the more likely issue is role clarity, which is a real and different problem that this particular audit will not fully diagnose.

Which of the seven questions should we start with if we only have time for one?

Question seven, about whether everyone would describe the top priority the same way, is the fastest and least confronting place to start, and it often reveals enough to justify going deeper into the rest.

What does it mean if everyone on the team answers all seven questions almost identically?

It usually means one of two things: either the team genuinely has strong, honest alignment, which is real and worth confirming with a follow-up conversation, or the team has learned that the safe, expected answer is the reassuring one. The best way to tell the difference is to look closely at question six. A specific, honest, slightly uncomfortable answer there is a good sign that the other answers are genuine rather than performed.

Final Thoughts

None of this requires a consultant, a survey platform or a two-day offsite to start. It requires seven honest, individually written answers and the discipline to look at where they disagree before deciding what to fix. Trust is only the first of the four disciplines that make up what Lencioni calls organisational health, so treat this audit as the entry point rather than the whole project. Most leadership teams already have a rough sense that something is not quite right in the room. What they usually lack is a way to test that instinct against something more specific than a feeling, and to see whether the whole team feels it too or only one person does.

If you are wrestling with this inside your own team, it is worth naming plainly rather than working around it for another quarter. A team that can look honestly at its own answers to these seven questions has already done the hardest part of the work.

About the Author

I am a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, certified through Patrick Lencioni's Table Group, and the author of Step Up or Step Out. I work with schools, corporates and nonprofits around the world, and I host The Leadership Conversations Podcast. More on my background is on the about page. If it would help to talk through what your team's answers reveal, you can reach me at jonno@consultclarity.org.

Sources

DDI, Global Leadership Forecast 2025 press release, January 2025 (trust in immediate managers and senior leadership confidence figures). UNLEASH, "Just one in three leaders trust senior executives in 2025, finds DDI," January 2025. Patrick Lencioni, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (Jossey-Bass, 2002). Patrick Lencioni, The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business (Jossey-Bass, 2012). Forbes, "Psychological Safety Drives Team Performance. Here's How To Track It," May 2025.

Next Read

If this audit revealed more than one gap, the patterns are usually connected. For the wider set of warning signs that sit alongside a trust problem, read 10 Warning Signs Your Executive Team Is Dysfunctional, and for the model this audit is built on, see 35 Vital Lessons from Five Dysfunctions Summary.