Why Small Behaviours Make or Break Trust

When someone holds authority, their behaviour doesn’t just land, it echoes.
Words, tone, timing, and even silence are interpreted differently once power is involved. This insight is grounded in the research of social psychologist Adam Galinsky, who works on power and leadership.

This has important implications for anyone responsible for learning, enablement, or performance, whether in L&D, or broader business leadership. Behaviour change doesn’t happen primarily through training or messaging. It happens through the conditions people operate every day: the clarity they receive, the signals leaders send under pressure, and the degree of confidence or caution those signals create.

When signals are missing, people don’t stop working, but they stop taking initiative

In my work with teams and senior leaders, I see this pattern constantly. People are busy. They’re delivering. They’re doing what they believe is expected of them.

But underneath, there’s often quiet uncertainty:

Am I adding value?
Is this the right priority?
Am I on the right track?

This happens when expectations, direction, and feedback remain implicit rather than explicit. When signals are unclear, people may not disengage immediately. But they play it safe.

They second-guess themselves, avoid risk and may stop raising issues early. That’s not a motivation or skills problem. It’s a condition problem. People are responding rationally to the environment they’re operating in, one where the cost of getting it wrong feels higher than the reward for taking initiative.

And no amount of training will increase initiative if the surrounding signals quietly discourage it.

Inspiring leadership shows up in everyday behaviour, not big moments.

Galinsky’s research across thousands of accounts found three patterns that differentiate inspiring leaders from frustrating ones. These are simple patterns that show up in everyday behaviours:

Visionary:
Inspiring leaders make direction concrete and help people see the bigger picture. They don’t assume alignment, they reinforce it consistently and repeatedly. People know what matters this week, not just what mattered at the town hall three months ago.

Exemplar:
They stay steady when things get messy. That doesn’t mean being upbeat at all costs and having toxic positivity, it’s more about how they respond to pressure. Teams take their cues from tone, pace, and what leaders choose to amplify or ignore.

Mentor:
They create ownership rather than control. They offer boundaries and choice, not micromanagement. They empower and elevate and also empathise with their teams.

None of these behaviours are extraordinary and they don’t require charisma, seniority, or formal authority.

They show up in:

how requests are framed
how feedback is given (or delayed)
how decisions are explained
how uncertainty is acknowledged

In L&D, this often shows up as whether leaders actively reinforce priorities after a programme, or quietly move on, signalling that the learning was not important. For example, how leaders respond to risk will shape whether teams are encouraged to surface concerns early or learn to manage exposure silently.

These behaviours are easy to underestimate precisely because they feel small. But over time, they shape whether people feel confident enough to act, or careful enough to hold back.

That’s why leadership impact is less about defining the right behaviours on paper, and more about how consistently those behaviours are modelled in the moments that matter most.

Training alone won’t fix what the system keeps reinforcing

If leaders unintentionally send confusing, risk-laden, or contradictory signals every day, training becomes compensatory rather than enabling.

You can design excellent learning experiences to build skills or raise awareness, but behaviour is ultimately shaped by the environment in which people apply those skills.

When the system rewards caution or speed, even implicitly, people adapt accordingly. They don’t ignore the training, they override it in favour of what feels safest in context. This is why we so often see strong learning programmes struggle to translate into sustained behaviour change.

For example, behaviour change won’t happen when teams are trained on brand risk, governance, or customer-centric decision-making, but leadership reactions only reward speed, output instead.

For L&D leaders, this reframes the work.

The question is no longer: “Did the training land?”

But: “What behaviours does the system make easiest to perform?”

Until those two align, learning will continue to look good on paper, and underdeliver in practice.

People don’t act on what they’ve learned in isolation. They act within systems, shaped by signals, incentives, and the behaviours leaders model every day.

So what can we do with this?

Here are a few practical ways L&D teams can apply this thinking.

1. Design for signals, not just skills

When scoping programmes, don’t focus only on the people expected to apply new skills or behaviours. Design for the environment they’ll be applying them in, especially the signals coming from leaders.

Before focusing on content, pressure-test three things:

Leadership signals:
What messages do leaders currently send, intentionally or not, about what’s valued, risky, or worth time and attention?
Signal gaps:
Where might silence, ambiguity, or inconsistency from leaders quietly undermine the behaviours the programme is trying to build?
Reinforcement mechanisms:
What simple prompts, artefacts, or talking points could help leaders reinforce the desired behaviours in day-to-day work, rather than unintentionally blocking them?

This might mean equipping leaders with:

framing language they can reuse
decision principles to reference under pressure
or a small number of explicit behaviours to model during and after the programme ends

The aim is to ensure the system around the learner makes the new behaviour easier to sustain.

2. Help leaders see the “micro-moments”

Rather than isolating leadership behaviour in standalone programmes, use every learning or enablement moment as an opportunity to surface the micro-behaviours that shape trust day to day.

Invite leaders to reflect on things like:

how they frame requests
how much context they provide (or withhold)
how they close loops
how they respond when things feel pressured or uncertain

These moments determine whether people feel clear or cautious, confident or exposed, and whether they’re willing to take initiative or stick rigidly to what feels safe.

3. Build reflection into leadership development

One practical tool Galinsky suggests is a simple, repeatable reflection cycle he calls REIP. Not as a workshop exercise, but as a regular leadership habit you can do once a month:

Reflect
When did or did not I inspire? What were the circumstances and context that led me to behave that way?
Emulate
Whose behaviour lifted me up, and what can I copy?
Intention
Take the reflection and emulation and turn them into a simple intention.
Practice
Repeat it often enough that it becomes automatic.

Final thoughts

Sustainable behaviour change often comes less from adding content, and more from creating structures for reflection and practice.

Our role is not just to design better learning experiences. It’s also to shape the conditions in which behaviour actually happens. People don’t act on what they’ve learned in isolation. They act within systems, shaped by signals, incentives, and the behaviours leaders model every day.

So a useful question to leave you with is this:

Where in your organisation might silence, ambiguity, or unspoken expectations be shaping behaviour more powerfully than any formal learning intervention?

That can be where the real work of impact begins.

Here’s a short YouTube video exploring the same insight through story and example.