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Trust Battery

Lito Lupena

This self-assessment activity allows you and your team members to reflect on the ‘trust battery’ they individually have towards each person on the team, and encourages focus on actions that can charge depleted trust batteries.

A trust battery is a summary of all our interactions to date. If you want to recharge the battery, you have to do different things in the future. Only new actions and new attitudes count.

By measuring the charge on the trust battery, we have the context to frame any potential conflict. A low trust battery is the core of many personal disputes at work. When the battery is drained, things quickly get judged harshly.

A trust battery is personal – Person A may be at 85% with Person B, and 40% with Person C. While Person B may be at 25% with Person A and 60% with Person C. The point of this exercise is to give you and your team an honest assessment about what is your trust battery with other people on the team.

Here’s how to do it –

  1. Explain the concept of trust battery to your participants

  2. Hand out the trust battery worksheets and ask people to write the name of their co-workers on the sheets.

  3. Give a few minutes for everyone to reflect and fill in the trust battery worksheets based on the interactions they had with each person in the past: How much charged is your trust battery towards this person?

  4. Ask participants to reflect on how they may improve the relationship with those people where the battery is out of charge.

  5. Debrief the exercise


In debriefing, you can ask the following questions –

  • Why did you place some people's trust battery lower than others?

  • Are there relationships where you perceive that your mutual trust batteries are at different levels of charge?

  • What actions can you apply to improve on a low trust battery?

  • As a leader or a colleague, what can you do to help your colleagues to succeed in charging their trust batteries?


This exercise was inspired by a chapter from the bestseller management book It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work, written by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson