Building teams that scale: The trust-adaptability connection

Fast Company

3 days ago

Early in my leadership journey, I learned a pivotal lesson the hard way.
I'd been brought in to help a company scale when we were hit with a sudden market pivot, and a core revenue driver evaporated almost overnight. In that moment, our ability to realign the business wasn't about having a perfect strategy. It came down to something far more fundamental: whether our leadership team trusted each other enough to have candid conversations, admit mistakes, and move decisively together.
That experience crystallized a fundamental truth for me. Adaptability is impossible without trust, because trust gives a team permission to move forward in the face of uncertainty. It allows for proactive flexibility—the ability to assess information quickly, make decisions with imperfect data, and course-correct in real time, all while staying anchored to the company's long-term mission.
And without that psychological safety, you get reactive chaos.
THE A.T.A. FRAMEWORK: AN OPERATING SYSTEM FOR SCALE
To consistently build the kind of trust that enables adaptability, I've learned leaders can't leave it to chance.
It requires installing a dedicated operating system for the team: a system of three interconnected pillars I call the A.T.A. Framework. And if one pillar is weak, the whole structure degrades.
Alignment (The North Star): This is the shared understanding of what the organization is trying to achieve. It gives the team a 'shared North Star,' an essential guide that clarifies what everyone is solving for so individual efforts become additive, not contradictory.
Trust (The Engine): This, to me, is the foundational element that allows for productive friction. At the executive level, where every decision has real financial and organizational consequences, pressure to appear certain can lead to guarded conversations. Trust is what counteracts this, empowering people to challenge ideas, debate outcomes, and surface problems early without fear of repercussion. Without it, alignment simply degrades into compliance, not true ownership.
Adaptability (The Steering): This is the team's operational capacity to shift tactics while preserving alignment to the mission, because it allows them to course-correct with both speed and discernment.
Together, these pillars form a powerful system on paper. But a framework is useless if it can't survive the realities of hypergrowth, as the very process of scaling is designed to tear this system apart.
WHY SCALING IS A NATURAL ENEMY OF TRUST
As a company grows, it naturally creates layers, distance, and inevitable gaps in communication. This is when foundational trust begins to erode, especially when people feel disconnected from decisions or believe agendas are hidden.
To counteract this decay, leaders must over-communicate context, not just decisions. I personally host monthly town halls where I walk through not just what we're doing, but why, including where I see risks.
That transparency allows trust to scale with the business and sets the stage for the practical application of the framework.
To translate these principles into a living part of the culture, I rely on three consistently effective mechanisms designed to make transparency the default:
Weekly 'Warts And Worries' Forums: We hold these to normalize transparency because when leaders are openly vulnerable, it gives everyone else permission to do the same.
Blameless After-Action Reviews: The focus here is on systemic learning, not individual blame, which is vital for accelerating collective improvement.
Structured Debate Sessions: These are designed to build the team's muscle for navigating uncertainty and providing a controlled setting for hard, ambiguous issues.
I saw the power of this approach firsthand while leading my team at FinQuery through a significant product expansion. The initiative created real tension across our product, sales, and customer success teams. But instead of forcing alignment, I paused to facilitate a series of uncomfortable, yet honest, discussions around assumptions and risks. By creating that space for trust and adaptability, we accelerated our roadmap by nine months and increased customer expansion revenue by 30%.
THE LEADING INDICATORS OF A RESILIENT TEAM
And while a dramatic turnaround like that is a powerful proof point, leaders can't afford to wait for lagging indicators to gauge their team's health. So, I've learned to watch for the subtle leading signals that show up in the daily rhythm of the business. Here's what I track now:
Pace Of Decision-Making: A slowdown is often the first sign that trust is fraying and people are avoiding difficult conversations.
Quality Of Escalations: It's not just volume, but what's being surfaced. Too many escalations can signal a lack of peer trust, while too few may mean people fear speaking up.
Leadership Stability: High senior-level churn is an unmistakable red light for breakdowns in executive trust.
Speed Of Course-Correction: A team that trusts itself admits and learns from mistakes quickly, rather than letting them fester.
Tracking these signals provides a real-time dashboard of your team's health and allows you to make adjustments before cracks become fractures.
TO SCALE FASTER, YOU MUST FIRST BUILD THE FOUNDATION
Ultimately, this all points to the most counterintuitive lesson I've learned about leading through hypergrowth: the temptation is always to sprint nonstop, but enduring speed only comes from slowing down first.
You have to pause to build the norms that allow a team to thrive under pressure—a discipline that's more essential than ever as distributed work strains informal trust-building.
In my experience, you don't win by simply moving faster; you win by being structurally ready for the journey.
And investing the time upfront to build the operating system of alignment, trust, and adaptability is the fundamental design choice a leader can make to ensure growth is not just rapid, but also sustainable and durable.