Building Trust on Pharma Teams: Key to High Performance

Building Trust On Pharma Teams: The Foundation of High Performance

Let’s say someone on your team makes a mistake—misses a regulatory deadline or enters a critical piece of clinical trial data incorrectly. These are high-stakes errors with real consequences.

Does your teammate come to you right away so you can fix it together? Or do they try to fix it on their own? That moment says a lot—about them, but also about you and the level of trust you’ve built.

In our industry, trust is everything. Patients need to believe in their doctors or risk poor medication adherence, missed vaccinations, and lower quality of life. Healthcare providers must trust the science underlying medications. And pharma teams must trust each other to get things right the first time, every time.

But pharma organizations move fast. Regulatory shifts, agile strategy planning, reorganizations, and onboarding new teammates are just part of the business. Under pressure to deliver, pharma teams often don’t have time to build the trusted long-term relationships that once formed the foundation for success.

Fortunately, trust doesn’t hinge on grand gestures. Rather, it’s built through small, consistent behaviors: being clear, following through, listening well, having deeper conversations, and speaking honestly. These everyday actions can quickly create trust—especially when everything else is shifting.

Measuring Personal Trustworthiness for Pharma Team Leaders

To build trust intentionally, leaders need a practical way to understand where they stand—and where to focus.

One useful tool is The Trust Equation developed by David Maister, Charles Green, and Robert Galford. It helps us calculate our interpersonal trustworthiness.

Each element—credibility, reliability, intimacy, and self-orientation—influences how others perceive your trustworthiness. Think of someone you work with regularly. Then, rate yourself on a scale of 1 to 10 in each of the following areas:

• Credibility – Do they believe what you say? (10 is excellent)
• Reliability – Do they trust you’ll do what you say you’ll do?
• Intimacy – Do they feel safe sharing with you?
• Self-Orientation – Do they believe your motives are primarily focused on their needs, or your own? (1 is more about them, (10 is more about you. For this element, a lower score indicates higher trustworthiness.)

Add up your scores for the first 3, then divide by your self-orientation score (higher is better). That’s your Trust Quotient (TQ)—like IQ or EQ, but for how that person experiences you.

Want deeper insight? Ask someone you trust to rate you, too. Try questions like:
“Do you think I’m reliable?” or “Do you feel safe sharing important things with me?”

For perspective: nurses consistently rank among the most trusted professionals, according to the Ipsos Global Trustworthiness Monitor. Why? Because they tend to score low in self-orientation and high in intimacy; they connect with people in vulnerable moments.

If you’ve scored yourself honestly in the exercise above, you’ve likely identified at least one area where you can increase your trustworthiness with the person you reflected on.

Building Trust Through Conversation

One way to strengthen trust is through purposeful conversation.

Robert Dilts, a pioneer in neuro-linguistic programming, developed The Pyramid of Logical Levels to diagram where human behavior can be changed.

It can also guide us to go deeper in conversation and connect more meaningfully. As you move through the levels, you build intimacy, a foundation for trust.

• Environment (E): Start with the setting—the ‘where‘ and ‘when‘. It’s the safest, most surface-level topic and helps establish common ground. On a Zoom call, you could ask, “Where are you based?” and “How do you like living there?”
• Behavior (D): Next, explore actions—the ‘what‘ the person is doing or has done. Think about behaviors you’ve observed in meetings or past actions from their work history. This is still relatively external but starts to reveal more about them. Ask something like “How did your team handle that project rollout?”
• Capabilities and Skills (C ): Go deeper by exploring the ‘how.’ Discuss their abilities and skills. Notice moments when they excel—how they approach tasks, solve problems, or manage challenges. This level reflects their competence and problem-solving style. You might ask: “That turnaround was fast—how did you manage it?”
• Beliefs and Values (B): Now you’re getting to the why. This is where conversations deepen, and emotions start to surface. Exploring someone’s beliefs and values reveals their core principles and motivations. A thoughtful question could be: “What drew you to this line of work?”
• Identity (A): Finally, and only when trust is at its peak, you can explore the who—your conversational partner’s sense of self. What does it mean to them to be able to do or be this? How do they see themselves in relation to their work, their purpose, or their impact? This is the deepest and most personal level. You might ask: “What part of your work feels most meaningful to you?”

Purposeful conversations help people feel seen, heard, and understood.

Try it in a low-stakes setting first—with a friend or family member. Notice how quickly the connection grows when you move from what they do to why they care.

Trust: Driving Pharma Team Performance

Trust isn’t magic. It’s measurable and can be purposefully improved.

What’s more, trust is good for business. In The Neuroscience of Trust, Paul Zak writes, “Employees in high-trust organizations are more productive, have more energy at work, collaborate better with their colleagues, and stay with their employers longer than people working at low-trust companies.”

And when trust grows, performance follows. Indeed, building trust in pharma teams is the ultimate differentiator that drives success.

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Do you want your team to perform better, move quickly, and excel at problem-solving? Amplity Learn has transformed the lives of hundreds of pharma industry team members through our engaging, interactive workshops on building trust. Don’t just talk about it—experience trust with your team.

About The Author: Charlie Welch has for the past 10 years facilitated and coached academics and pharma and medical affairs professionals, both in the capability development space and on leadership and development programs. She particularly enjoys helping Amplity clients develop trust in their teams, build their ability to truly listen well, bring their stories to life, and present them with confidence.