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Episode 163: Trust That Works with guest, Charles Feltman

• Garry Schleifer

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Trust shouldn’t be a mystery you feel in your gut and argue about later. We sit down with executive and leadership coach Charles Feltman to turn a loaded word into concrete moves you can see, measure, and improve. Charles shares his four-domain model—care, sincerity, reliability, competence—and shows how it transforms the unhelpful “all or nothing” mindset into targeted, fair assessments that help teams move faster with less drama.

We dig into the real risks people take at work every day: reputations, deadlines, standards, and even health in high-stakes settings. Through vivid examples, Charles maps where trust breaks and how to repair it without overreacting. You’ll hear why an apology boosts sincerity, how early renegotiation strengthens reliability, and why admitting “I don’t know” can raise your competence score. We also explore feedback cultures—what leaders must do after asking for candor—and the quiet signals that prove you hold others’ interests alongside your own.

The conversation builds to a bold claim: sustained trust creates the conditions for joy and even love at work. Not the soft, sentimental kind, but the energy that appears when people can risk their best ideas, be seen clearly, and know their commitments are honored. Along the way, we point you to Charles’s Thin Book of Trust, his Trust at Work Certification Program, and the Trust on Purpose podcast for deeper practice. If you’re ready to replace vague vibes with precise language and practical tools, this is your field guide.

Watch the full interview by clicking here. 

Find the full article here.

Learn more about Charles Feltman here. 

Grab your free issue of choice Magazine here - https://choice-online.com/

Garry Schleifer:

Welcome to Beyond the Page, the official podcast of choice, the magazine of professional coaching, where we bring you amazing insights and in-depth features that you just won't find anywhere else. I'm your host, Garry Schleifer, and I'm excited to expand your learning as we dive into the latest articles, have a chat with this brilliant author. Let's see, no, I always do it wrong. The mirrored image of the screen, you know? While you have a chance, join our vibrant community of coaching professionals as we explore groundbreaking ideas, share expert tips and techniques, and do what we like to do, make a real difference in our clients' lives. Remember, this is your go-to resource for all things coaching. But in the meantime, let's dive in. In today's episode, I'm speaking with executive and leadership coach Charles Feltman, who's the author of an article in our latest issue, "Trust. Why is it intrinsic to coaching?" The article itself is entitled "The Four Domains of Trust: getting to trust, joy, and love at work." Three words you don't hear often in the sentence, right? A little bit about Charles. He holds an MA, he's a PCC, and has an NCOC, as I mentioned, an executive and leadership coach, with more than 25 years of experience serving hundreds of leaders and teams worldwide, helping people become the most effective leaders and best human beings they can be. He is the author of the Thin Book of Trust, an essential primer for building trust at work, now in its third edition. He is the owner of Insight Coaching. He owns a BA in psychology and an MA in Organizational Communication, and is certified in the Leadership Circle Profile, MBTI, DISC, and the Transcendence Trust Assessment for Leaders and Teams. That's a lot, Charles. Thank you for joining me today.

Charles Feltman:

Thank you, Garry. It's a pleasure. Really appreciate your taking the time to chat with me.

Garry Schleifer:

So thank you again for not only contributing to the magazine with an article, but also in the fact that you were so helpful in developing the questions, the ideas, reaching out to the writers and curating the articles as they came in to make this an absolutely fabulous issue. So thank you very much for your help.

Charles Feltman:

You're very welcome. And yes, I agree with you. This is a great issue. There's some really good articles in here. Well worth reading and applying because it's a lot of applied, appliable, useful information. So yeah, great. Thank you, Garry, for putting it together.

Garry Schleifer:

No worries. So Thin Book of Trust. I don't know why, but I always want to say The Thin Little Book of Trust. But it's not little, it's very robust, even though it is a tiny book. What got you on the path of writing about and and expressing your love for trust?

Charles Feltman:

Well, a long time ago, when I was working as a leader, had my own uh leadership roles in companies in Silicon Valley, I recognized that trust was not always present. Sometimes I was untrustworthy, other times I saw other people behaving in ways that I thought was untrustworthy. I wanted to build trust in the teams that I led, and also just build trust with my, you know, people I worked with and our customers. And I found that challenging because I didn't know how the heck to do it. I mean, I had some you know, the beyond the basics, you know, don't lie, do what you say you're gonna do, etc. I really didn't know how to do that. When I left that world and went out on my own as a first as a consultant, and then not long after that as a coach, I took a coach training program in which one of the things that was given us was a kind of framework, if you will, for how to take this kind of amorphous word trust, which can be interpreted in a hundred different ways and make it much more specific and useful in terms of how people can talk about it, how people think about it, how they can look at themselves and say, Am I being trustworthy? Look at other people and say, are they trustworthy? And if not, where are they falling short? It had three trust domains. As you know, my current model, which I've been working with for about 20 years, has four trust domains. So I added one along the way. But I found that as I worked with clients, so often trust was an issue. It came up in one-on-one coaching and working with teams. And applying this framework really helps people figure out how to build and sustain and even repair trust when they need to.

Garry Schleifer:

Well, before we get too much further, so the issue of Trust is now in print. Get it? Issue of trust? No? Oh, okay. Nice. Yeah, nice segue. B ut let's get right into what's a common misperception about trust.

Charles Feltman:

So this is one that I find often, not always, but often, people see trust, even you know, people who've been kind of talking about and thinking about trust themselves for a while, they see it as binary. That is, either I trust this person completely, everything's good, or I don't trust them at all. And there's no middle ground, there's no nothing, no gray area of trust. It's either all or nothing, which leaves us with very few choices. If I trust someone, I think I trust this person, and then he do something that looks untrustworthy to me, right away I become. Maybe I can't trust this person anymore at all, in any way. And one of the things that I try and get across the bridge to people, actually, it's part of whenever I work with a group or an individual, this is kind of like the one of the core pieces. Trust is not binary. It's dynamic, there are different aspects of trust, and I can trust you or anyone else in one of these or two of these or four of the three of these aspects and not trust in one of them. And I can do that and work okay with you as long as I understand that, as long as I'm not shutting you off, you know, cutting you off completely because you've violated my trust in one specific area or in one specific way.

Garry Schleifer:

Right. Well, thank you for that. It's a good reminder when I took the time to read your book, and I found it to hear that about that misconception. And I have to be honest, I held that as like either trust you or I don't trust you, and I could have trusted you, but now I don't. And uh, but thank you for the insights that you gave in that book on that it doesn't have to be black or white, on or off, yes or no.

Charles Feltman:

Yeah, yeah. And it doesn't have to be, in fact, it's much more useful and effective for people working together if they see it differently than that.

Garry Schleifer:

Yeah, yeah, no kidding. And there's opportunity, right? There's opportunity to build trust. And so that's great. So we're talking trust, trust, trust, trust. What's the how do you define it and what's important about the definition of trust?

Charles Feltman:

So one of the things if I work with a group of people, either it's a group of leaders or maybe a team, and I ask, you know, what you know, how do you define trust? I'll get the very specific actions or behaviors that are relevant to each different individual. You know, somebody will say, Oh, trust is, you know, trust is keeping your word, trust is being honest, trust is not sharing confidences, trust is, so they have you know their own very personalized understanding of trust coming from their own experience, which is all great, but then you have this big long list of different behaviors and actions that kind of gets unwieldy, and not all of them pertain to everybody. So what I look for is a definition that kind of covers all of them and goes beyond all of them. So my definition is trust or trusting, I should say, trust is choosing to make something you value vulnerable to another person's actions. Trust is choosing to make something you value, to risk making, so choosing to risk making something you value vulnerable to another person's actions. So there's risk, well, it's choice, first of all. We can choose, and there it is in a magazine. There's choice, we can choose to trust or not, or partially, right? Um, so we can choose to trust wisely, or we can choose to go to sleep and trust completely unconsciously, often a problem. So there's trust is choice. There's a risk involved because we cannot control or foresee every behavior another person might enact. So I'm taking a risk when I'm entrusting them with something that's important or valuable to me. I'm making that vulnerable. So I'm being vulnerable to another, and it's inherent in trusting. We're inherently vulnerable when we trust someone. So obviously we want to make a bit of a risk assessment. Is this person actually going keep my whatever it is that I value safe? They're not going to harm it or harm me in some way if I trust them. So one of the things that comes out of this when I'm working with either individuals or teams, somebody comes to me and says, I don't trust so-and-so. Well, so let's look at what it is that you are making vulnerable to them, or would would be making vulnerable to them if you did trust them. And then we can ask the question, is that something that's really important to you? Moderately important to you? It's just kind of a little thing. Is it big enough thing to really distrust them around, or is it, you know, so let's talk about that and what does that mean to you and why is it important? And what if you chose to trust this person, even though this is a big and important thing that you may be making vulnerable to them. What if you chose to trust them? What might happen? What's the upside? What's the downside? You can talk about it in some very useful ways, yeah. I would say.

Garry Schleifer:

And okay, so these things. Give us an example, something that you've come up with recently or common, or yeah.

Charles Feltman:

So people in workplaces, and I'll ask people this, you know, what do you see people risking? They're everything from my job, my reputation, big things, right? Down to oh, this is the way I like to do things. And you know, if I trust you, I'm trusting that you'll either follow the way I like to do things or at least help me be honest with me and help me accept that you might do them a little differently and that's okay. Trusting with a deadline, you know. You know, can I trust you with a deadline? Can I trust you to do the presentation at the level or standard that I'm expecting?

Garry Schleifer:

Wow. That's big.

Charles Feltman:

Yeah. So lots of different things, some of them big, some of them small. I had a conversation with a fellow this morning who is in a hospital or a care unit actually, recovering from something, and he talked about a doctor coming in to talk with him, spending about two or three minutes, then saying, Oh, I need to go do something. I've got a call to go do something. I'll be back in five minutes. And didn't come back for about an hour and a half. Now, so this person, I said, So what was it you're risking here? What are you making vulnerable to this person, this doctor? And he said, Well, my health. Yeah, that's a big, big thing. And the doctor was clearly not coming up to his meeting his satisfaction or you know, standard of satisfaction for taking care of his health, in his opinion, in that case. So yeah, you can risk really big things if you trust somebody. So he was no longer trusting of that doctor.

Garry Schleifer:

Yeah. Well, and that's one of the key things around trust, too, is honoring your word. Do what you say. So nothing frosts me more than doctors that you've got to be there at a certain time, but they don't.

Charles Feltman:

Yeah, you show up in the waiting room, you sit there, and you sit there 15 minutes in the waiting room. Then then you get to the inner room where you sit and wait for another 15 or 20 minutes, and then the doctor runs in, spends five minutes with you, and is gone.

Garry Schleifer:

Yeah.

Charles Feltman:

Wait a minute.

Garry Schleifer:

Well, and that can shift. So that's a great example. You get there on time, wait, wait, wait. And then for me, should the doctor spend a good amount of time, like satisfactorily to answer all my questions and show empathy and actively listening, I could trust, my trust is restored, my anger goes down, my trust is restored, and away we go. Because then I think, oh, he's late because he treats his patients well. Yes, his customers. It takes the time. Well, they are customers, he is getting paid to be real, but even up here in Canada in socialized medicine.

Charles Feltman:

Yeah, but yeah, you're right, absolutely. I have a uh my buddy, GP, my regular physician, is like that. I have to wait for a while to see him, but then he spends, you know, 15, 20 minutes with me. And make sure I have all my questions answered and that I'm leaving with everything that I should be leaving with.

Garry Schleifer:

So yeah, that's great. In the article you break trust into those different assessment domains. Do you want to tell us a little bit more about that, especially for the people are listening that haven't read the article yet?

Charles Feltman:

Yes, yes, because this is really where the the rubber hits the road.

Garry Schleifer:

I was hearing that coming. Yeah.

Charles Feltman:

So if you if you imagine putting trust, the word trust in a cloud, you know, kind of a dark and murky cloud. That's where we usually are with trust. It's not well defined. So therefore I say trust, and if I've got five people in front of me, I can be 100% sure five different ideas of what trust is pops into their minds, right? Which makes it really difficult to talk about. And talking about trust is one of the things that actually helps us build it and maintain it. So if you take that one word and break it into different, what I call assessments. Remember the risk assessment I talked about back in the definition of trust? It's making a taking a risk. Well, we make an assessment about that risk. So we can assess the risk of trusting someone in four different domains. Or I use other people, use different words and different different numbers of domains. I use these four and these four particular words. So there's the domain of care, which is the assessment that I can trust that you have my interests in mind as well as your own when you're making decisions and taking action. You have my interests and my well-being in mind. You have my back. Or at the very least, if we're on a team together, at the very least you have this the same level of interest in our shared endeavor together. So there's that domain of care. Sincerity, you were talking about just a moment ago, you kind of keep your word. And in this case, sincerity is about both a combination of honesty and integrity. That is, you know, you don't have a different conversation going on in your head than the one we're having out loud. Okay. And that you say what you mean, mean what you say, and act accordingly. So if you say you, like for example, if you're a leader and you know, new leader to a team and you say to the team, hey, I want this to be a high feedback team. I want everybody to be able to give each feedback, useful, given again there's certain maybe ways that we'll be giving it to each other, but we give it in a way that's useful and constructive. Then the people on the team would expect. Well, what would you if you had a leader who said that? What would you expect?

Garry Schleifer:

Oh, I'd expect some conversation about it, some hesitation especially a new leader. I'd be like, how can I trust you gonna use this appropriately?

Charles Feltman:

Right. you're a little skeptical, but you're probably at some point gonna say, okay, I'm gonna try this out. Or maybe somebody else will, maybe someone else will step into the gap there and and try it out and give not just other team members, but give the leader some feedback, which is really where it comes down to it. If the leader as acting with integrity, if they're sincere, they're gonna respond to that feedback well. But if they don't, immediately people are gonna stop trusting their sincerity.

Garry Schleifer:

Yeah, and stop giving feedback.

Charles Feltman:

Yeah, stop giving feedback and you know, withhold and pull away from that later. So that's the domain of sincerity. There's the domain of reliability, which is meeting the specific commitments or keeping the specific promises you make. Like, I'll be there for this podcast. I'll be back in five minutes, or I'll be back in five minutes or whatever. But making a specific commitment or promise and keeping it. So that's around reliability. So I trust that if I see you doing that often enough, it may break down a couple of times, but if I see you doing that most of the time, I'll trust your reliability. That I'm and I will continue to and work with you in that in that way of trusting that. And then finally, competence, which is about your, you know, your knowledge, expertise, experience, capability, all that kind of stuff. And that you have what it's going to take to do either what you're proposing to do or what I'm asking you to do. Or if you don't, I can still trust you, I will probably still trust you if you say, you know what, I don't know how to do that. I need help. But that also builds trust in that domain. So the nifty thing about these four domains is now I can say, okay, I can ask a client. Client says, I don't trust so and so, but I can say, okay, let's look at the four trust domains. In which domain or domains are you finding it difficult to trust that person? So say the client says, I don't believe that they are being completely honest with me. Okay, so tell me about what's leading you to that belief. What specific actions or behaviors can you come up with and tell me about that would lead you to believe that he actually is not being completely honest with you? And then are there things that you've seen him do that and say that contradict that? And so we can have a conversation now that goes right down to very quickly from I don't trust this person to what are the behaviors and are these, you know, this is this a valid assessment? Um, or maybe you want to question that assessment.

Garry Schleifer:

Yeah. Well, thank you for explaining all of those and also weaving in that there are some overlaps there, right? Like it's not four quadrants, it's like because I heard, you know, I heard in sincerity and reliability connected in here, some of your examples and competency and reliability and things like that. So it's like you said, in the asking your client, so which one or more of these domains might work? Shifting gears, go back to the title of your article. Four Domains of Trust, getting to trust, joy, and love at work. Okay, where did that come from? Because I'm talking to a lot of people that aren't having a lot of love at work or joy.

Charles Feltman:

I know. And I think personally, I think that there should be a lot more of it at work. And I believe that trust is um a fundamental, it's a precursor. It's a uh, you know, you have to have trust in order to really be able to participate in and experience love and joy with the people you're working with and doing the work that you're doing. There's a quote in my book right at the very beginning, in fact, from a guy named Walter Anderson. He says, We're never so vulnerable than when we trust someone. But paradoxically, if we cannot trust, neither can we find love or joy. And I've loved that quote I was looking for quotes to you know to put in my book, right? You know, you do those kinds of things. Yeah, yeah. Right. So and I came across that quote and I said, this is it. This is really what this is the big payoff from from developing and and maintaining trust, right? Is that we can actually get to experience joy and love that are built on top of trust. Yeah.

Garry Schleifer:

So it's possible.

Charles Feltman:

Yeah, it is possible. Um, and it's not possible without trust.

Garry Schleifer:

Yeah.

Charles Feltman:

So good reason to build it. And even if you don't ever experience joy and love, you'll still feel a lot better about yourself and the people you work with if there's a sufficient level of trust that you have in them and they in you.

Garry Schleifer:

Yeah. Well said. And well, thank you again for not just your book, but the article and this conversation. What would you like our audience to do as a result of all of your wisdom and trust?

Charles Feltman:

Well, I'd say first of all, just buy the book and read it and put it to use in your own life. I get emails or you know, notifications over in LinkedIn or whatever from people who have read it who just write to me to thank me for writing the book and putting it out there because it's an I don't know. Okay, great. But it's helped they they're saying that it's really helped them, it's been invaluable for them. And I would like it to be invaluable for all of the listeners here as well. I think trust is really important and it takes attention and intention to really honor it and and build it. So do that, get the book, read it. I'm not gonna get rich over selling books. The value for me is when somebody emails me and says, wow, this was really important to me, this book. So that's great. I run a program called the Trust at Work Certification Program and it's a five-week one an hour and a half a week program. And the fall program is just about to start, it will start on next Tuesday, but you can still register and you can find out about it on my website at insightcoaching.com. So www.insightcoaching.com. I think those are the main things. Just think about trust, pay attention to trust, be intentional about building it. Oh, and one more resource that I would like to mention. I have a podcast which I do with uh Ila Edgar. The two of us do it together, and we have guests periodically, and sometimes it's just the two of us. We call the podcast Trust on Purpose. And you can find it anywhere that you can find podcasts.

Garry Schleifer:

So like ours. Well, thank you. And just another credit to you. A number of authors referred to your book and the domains inside of their article to support their what they were talking about. So it's Charles Feltman and Trust and The Thin Book of Trust everywhere. And interestingly, obviously, that my computer is listening to me because in my Amazon list of picks today,, it had your book.

Charles Feltman:

Amazon is actually promoting my book. Yay, go Amazon!

Garry Schleifer:

You may make another dollar today yet.

Charles Feltman:

Yeah, that's about right. A dollar a book.

Garry Schleifer:

Yeah. Um, you just gave your website. Is that the best way to reach you?

Charles Feltman:

The website is great. You can also reach me on LinkedIn. Just you know, look for Charles Feltman. I think there's only one Charles Feltman on LinkedIn. Okay. No, actually, there may be another. I don't know. But I'm the Charles Feltman who is associated with The Thin Book of Trust. Yeah. So you can find me that way and it's also Charles@ insightcoaching.com

Garry Schleifer:

Charles@ insightcoaching.com. Awesome. Thanks again, Charles, for all of your work in curating and putting this together with us and to the world. I trusted you from the moment we started working.

Charles Feltman:

Sorry, I don't know if you hear that in the background. My dog is barking.

Garry Schleifer:

Oh no.

Charles Feltman:

Oh, good, it's good, good. Yes. Well, thank you, Garry. It's been it's been fun working with you. I've really appreciated it and hope to do it again.

Garry Schleifer:

I hope to have you back. That's it for this episode of Beyond the Page. As Charles said, for more episodes, subscribe via your favorite podcast app for ours as well. If you're not a subscriber to choice Magazine, you can sign up for your free digital issue by scanning the QR code in the top right hand corner, just over here. If you're listening and not watching, go to choice online.com and click the sign up now button. I'm Garry Schleifer. Enjoy the journey of mastery.