What is good Leadership?

How do I know if I am a good leader?

Over the course of my 20+ years as an executive coach, I’ve only ever had two clients ask me this question so bluntly. The first time it came from an individual who had been promoted too quickly and was floundering under the burden of unexpected responsibility. The second time was very recently — from an experienced CEO of a mid-sized company. We were in the middle of discussing challenges that had arisen with several new team members and he was feeling extremely frustrated by their lack of progress. Abruptly, he sat back and asked:

How do I know if I am good at this?

I asked him what he meant, and he clarified: he sat at the top of the power structure, and while he had observable metrics that indicated whether the company was financially successful, that didn’t necessarily indicate good leadership. In fact, the personality conflicts showing up on his team seemed to say otherwise.

So he rephrased the question:

How do I know if I am a good leader?

I was taken aback — and proud — by the vulnerability. He wasn’t looking for quick reassurance. He genuinely wanted to know.

The truth is, good leadership can mean different things in different moments. What works in growth doesn’t always work in crisis. What helps a small team doesn’t always scale. What inspires in calm times can fail under high pressure.

However, there is one aspect of good leadership I have found that people intuitively know: Trust.

So why is it so hard to engender trust?

A few years back, I worked with a client in the middle of a major transition. He was exceptionally capable, smart, and technically sharp — but he’d just left a large multinational because, in his words, “it was an Orwellian nightmare.” He felt constantly monitored, and management kept expecting him to mess up.

He moved to another company in the same industry and, not long after, ran into a huge problem. A component in one of their products kept failing — but only in Canada. Everywhere else in the world, it performed perfectly. No one could figure out why.

It was my client’s responsibility to fix it. He and his team spent months trying to solve it, to no avail. Eventually, a VP called and asked him to walk through what was happening.

My client showed up to that meeting fully armored, roiling with all the wrong feelings: defensive, nervous, a little combative. If his old job was any indication, this was going to be torturous. Reluctantly, he explained the issue — and braced himself.

Instead, the VP listened. Paused. And then said, simply:

This sounds extremely difficult. Please let me know if there’s anything I can do to help.

That’s it.

From the outside, it’s almost offensively basic. But inside the nervous system of someone trained by a punishing culture, it was revolutionary. In that moment, my client wasn’t just given support — he was given safety. The burden shifted from “prove you’re not incompetent” to “we’re in this together.”

This is what trust in action looks like.

When people feel unseen, unheard, or disposable, they stop offering discretionary effort. They withhold ideas and stop investing. When trust isn’t present, a workplace stops feeling like a place of collaboration and energy — and instead is dominated by compliance, calculation, and disengagement. In short: they stop caring.

High-trust cultures — those where leaders demonstrate care, fairness, and openness — report lower stress, higher productivity, greater engagement, and significantly less burnout. Neuroscience and organizational research converge on this point with remarkable consistency.

If you want a practical test for whether you’re building trust, start here: when something breaks, do people bring you the truth quickly — or do they try to fix it in the shadows first?

Trust is built during challenging moments, and empathy — real empathy — is one of the clearest tells. When people feel that you see them, they stop protecting themselves from you. They start collaborating with you. They take risks, speak earlier, and tell you what you actually need to know.

So, how do you know if you’re a good leader?

When the CEO I’m currently working with asked me that, I told him the truth: the fact that he was even posing that question was a good indication that he was doing something right. Good leaders do not assume trust is theirs by virtue of position. They are curious. They audit themselves.

In the end, good leadership is built through hundreds of small, supportive moments. I pointed out the progress we had made so far. One of his team members — a particularly anxious individual — had recently felt confident enough to tackle a problem with a peer rather than triple-checking with the boss. It was a small but significant sign that he was successfully making a shift, and that his team was beginning to trust him.

That’s what building a culture of trust looks like.