Before We Ask People to Trust Us

I recently read about a new Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health poll, highlighted by PBS NewsHour, that found only half of U.S. adults trust the CDC’s public health recommendations.

Over the past several years, we’ve watched trust in public institutions become more fragile. Public health has found itself at the center of difficult conversations about vaccines, emerging diseases, food safety, extreme heat, wildfire smoke, and the role of science in public life. At the very moment many of our public health challenges are becoming more complex, confidence in the institutions working to address them appears to be declining.

Although the statistic didn’t surprise me, what arose for me was a question I’ve been wrestling with for some time:

How do you rebuild trust once it's been lost?

I’ve spent much of my career working with organizations through periods of change. In one leadership role, I inherited a team whose trust in leadership had been badly damaged. There wasn’t a singular egregious incident. It wasn't because the people on the team were unwilling to engage or were resistant to change. Rather, they had experienced decisions that felt opaque, promises that hadn't been kept, and a pattern that had taught them to be cautious.

My first instinct was to move quickly (see When There’s No Magic Wand). The team deserved better, and I wanted to provide it. I wanted a plan. I wanted to demonstrate that things were going to be different.

But I recognized that while trust can be lost in an instant, it takes much more intentionality to rebuild it. 

It clicked for me during a conversation with a colleague on the executive team who asked in frustration, “Why can't they just get on board?”

The answer, I realized, was surprisingly simple.

They couldn't “just get on board” because they didn't have the same information we did.

We had spent hours discussing alternatives, weighing tradeoffs, studying different scenarios, and grappling with difficult decisions. By the time we announced a decision, we’d already taken the journey.

The team hadn’t.

I recognized that people didn’t simply need new decisions. They needed to understand the thinking behind those decisions. They needed to see how priorities were being set, how tradeoffs were being considered, and why one path had been chosen over another. Taking the time to explain the “why” didn't eliminate disagreement, but it often created understanding. And understanding made it possible to move forward together.

I didn't need everyone to agree with every decision. I did need them to understand that their perspectives had been heard, that alternatives had been seriously considered, and that decisions weren't arbitrary. Understanding didn't guarantee agreement, but it made disagreement easier to navigate.

Looking back, I think that was one of the most important lessons I learned about trust. Trust isn't built by getting every decision right. It's built by helping people understand how decisions are made and by showing them that their concerns were genuinely considered in the decision-making process—even when they weren't reflected in the final outcome.

Organizational trust and public trust are obviously not the same. Public trust is shaped by politics, history, lived experience, media, culture, and countless other forces. Rebuilding it will require much more than any one leader or institution can provide. And it certainly takes more than saying, “Trust me, I'm the expert.”

But I do wonder whether there are lessons that carry across both contexts. 

I recently listened to a podcast reflecting on the U.S. response to COVID-19. One observation stayed with me: that many people felt their concerns about their ability to earn a living hadn't been meaningfully considered as public health decisions were being made.

Whether or not that perception was accurate isn't my point. What struck me was how central that perception is to trust. People are often more willing to accept a difficult decision when they understand that their concerns were heard, taken seriously, and weighed alongside competing priorities—even if the final decision isn't the one they preferred. 

Trust isn't just about whether people agree with the final recommendation. It's about whether they believe their concerns were taken seriously along the way.

When trust has been broken, our instinct is often to focus on the recommendation itself—to explain it more clearly, defend it more forcefully, or persuade more effectively.

Those things are certainly important. But trust also asks something more fundamental.

It asks us to make our reasoning visible. To help people understand not only what we've decided, but how we got there, what concerns we struggled with, what tradeoffs we deliberated, and why we ultimately chose the path we did. Making our reasoning visible doesn't guarantee agreement. But it can create understanding.

Public health has no shortage of difficult challenges in the years ahead.

Rebuilding trust may prove to be one of the most important.

I suspect that begins with listening—not simply to gather information, but to understand what people value, what they fear, and what they've experienced. From there, perhaps the work is to make the journey visible: to help people see not only the recommendations themselves, but the questions, tradeoffs, and values that shaped them.

Trust isn't built by asking people to accept the destination. It's built by helping them understand the journey.