Define trust from your own experience.
Think of someone you trust. Why do you feel this way about them? We run a simple discussion in breakout groups where participants identify people they trust and why. We collect a set of Trustable Traits from the group.
The session opens with a simple prompt: think of someone you genuinely trust, and ask yourself why. Working in small groups, participants surface the specific qualities that make someone trustworthy in their experience: the behaviours, the patterns, the things they do and don't do.
The facilitator collects responses and draws out the common themes, noting where the group converges (reliability, honesty, follow-through tend to appear across most groups) and where individual responses reveal something more specific to the team's context. This produces a shared set of Trustable Traits that belongs to the group, earned through the conversation itself.
The session is designed to ground the conversation in lived experience before any framework is introduced. The traits the group generates become the reference point for the rest of the workshop.
Trust is often described in general terms. This session makes it specific. By surfacing what trust actually looks like from participants' own experience, the group arrives at a shared set of traits that feels genuinely theirs. Participants leave with a clearer, more grounded understanding of what building trust in their team actually requires.
This lets the group build its own definition of trust from real experience, which tends to land more honestly than a definition handed to them. Set it up without steering the answer, reflect individually, discuss in small groups, collect a shared list, then close on the point that most of it is behaviour.
Introduce the session without framing what the right answer looks like. Avoid listing what trust is before participants have had a chance to surface it themselves, because the value here is that the group generates its own definition.
Ask people to think of someone they genuinely trust, personally or professionally, and write down three to five reasons why. Ask them to be specific about what it actually looks like in practice for that person, with concrete detail.
In groups of three or four, each person shares their traits and the group discusses where they overlap and where something comes up that the others had not considered. Ask each group to agree on their five most important trustable traits.
Go around the room and collect one trait from each group in turn, building a shared list, then ask groups to add anything on their list not yet mentioned. Note where there is strong convergence. Common themes to expect are follow-through, honesty, consistency, genuinely listening, and not having a hidden agenda. If a trait is vague, ask the group to make it specific: what does that look like in practice, and what would you see someone doing?
Reflect the list back, and note that most of it is about behaviour. These are things people do, which means they can be worked on. Bridge to the next session: now that we know what the traits are, what does your own profile look like?
Use Trustable Traits when a team discusses trust in general terms and you want a definition grounded in its own experience. Each person thinks of someone they genuinely trust and why, and the group builds a shared set of traits that feels its own.
Using this tool with a skilled facilitator means that discussions are focused, time is used efficiently, and the group moves toward consensus, making the session productive and impactful.
