David Kreeger: Why Trust Breaks Down Between Leaders and Teams

David Kreeger: Why Trust Breaks Down Between Leaders and Teams

July 14, 2026 · 21 min · Season 2 · Episode 217

About this episode

David Kreeger discusses the importance of trust in leadership and how traditional methods of building trust may be counterproductive.

"Alignment has to come from them. It can't come from the top down." — David Kreeger Most CEOs think trust gets built by casting a clear vision. David Kreeger says that's backwards — vision is a one-way broadcast, and if nobody on your team has pushed back on it lately, that's not alignment. That's silence dressed up as consensus. David spent nearly a decade practicing law (DC firm, then in-house at IBM and Lenovo) before 14 years as an entrepreneur — a franchise painting business, an MMA gym, two companies in the RC hobby space. Across all of it, the throughline was the same: nothing moves without trust, and most leaders are building it wrong. What you'll walk away with: Why "vision casting" can quietly kill trust instead of building it The Hyundai 10-year/100,000-mile lesson — how to make promises your reputation can actually back up The Trust Triangle: character, competence, and common sense of purpose — and the piece most executives skip Why asking better questions builds more authority than having all the answers How to build real organizational alignment from the bottom up, not the top down #H2H #HumanConnectionPodcast #StartupLeadership #CompanyCulture #B2BRelationships ===…

People in this episode

Host: Karl Pontau

Guest: David Kreeger

Topics covered

Keywords

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: IBM, Lenovo, Hyundai, The Human Connection Podcast, Vouched Connections

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