Welcome to Loden’s Leadership Conversations.

Today, let’s explore: Why competence is the trust pillar nobody wants to talk about, and what happens when it’s missing.

Gather Around, Growth Alliance Members.

This is the pillar that makes people uncomfortable.

Character, consistency, communication, those are safe conversations. Leaders lean into those. They’re willing to examine themselves honestly through those lenses because the feedback, even when it stings, doesn’t threaten their identity.

Competence is different.

Because questioning competence, your own or someone else’s, feels personal in a way the other pillars don’t. It feels like an attack on intelligence. On experience. On everything a leader has spent years building.

So most people avoid the conversation entirely. And the trust leak continues unaddressed.

Let me be precise about what I mean when I say competence, because this is where most leaders misunderstand the pillar entirely.

Competence is not about being the smartest person in the room. The leaders who believe they need to have every answer, master every domain, and never be caught not knowing something, they’re operating from a definition of competence that actually erodes trust rather than building it.

Real competence, the kind that builds lasting trust, is something more specific.

It’s the ability to execute on what you’ve committed to. To follow a decision through to its conclusion. To build systems that deliver consistent results, not just in the good weeks but in the hard ones. To surround yourself with people whose strengths complement your gaps and then actually trust them to lead in those areas.

That’s what your team is watching for. Not omniscience. Reliability.

Can this leader do what they say they’re going to do? Can they build something that works? Do they know enough to make good decisions, and enough about what they don’t know to ask the right questions?

When the answer to those questions is yes, consistently, over time, trust deepens in ways that are almost unshakeable.

When the answer starts to become uncertain, even quietly, even in one or two specific areas, something shifts underneath the relationship between a leader and their team.

Here’s the pattern I’ve watched play out more than once.

A leader is promoted, or hired, into a role that stretches them. Nothing wrong with that. Growth requires stretch. The best leaders I know have spent most of their careers operating slightly beyond their comfort zone.

But somewhere in that stretch they hit a gap they don’t acknowledge. A domain where they’re less equipped than the situation requires. And instead of naming it, instead of saying I need to bring someone in here who knows this better than I do, they manage around it. They stay vague in conversations about it. They make decisions in that area with confidence they don’t actually have.

And the team watches. They always watch.

At first they give the leader the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they know something we don’t. Maybe there’s a strategy here we can’t see yet.

But when results don’t follow, when the gap between the leader’s confidence and their actual capability becomes visible, the benefit of the doubt disappears. And it takes a long time to come back.

The leaders who never have this problem are not more talented than the rest. They’re more honest. They know what they know. They know what they don’t. And they’re not threatened by the difference.

That self-awareness, that clarity about their own capability, is itself an act of competence. And it builds more trust than pretending the gap doesn’t exist ever could.

There’s one more dimension worth naming.

Competence isn’t just individual. It’s organizational.

A leader is only as competent as the systems they build around them. If execution is inconsistent, if the same problems keep recurring, if results depend entirely on who happens to be working that day, the leader owns that. Not because they failed personally but because building reliable systems is part of the job.

The most trusted leaders I’ve been around don’t just perform well themselves. They build organizations that perform well without them. That’s the highest expression of leadership competence.

And it’s the one most leaders never fully reach because they’re too busy being personally indispensable to make their organization structurally sound.

The leaders your team trusts most aren’t the ones who know everything. They’re the ones who always deliver, and always know the difference between what they can handle and what requires someone better.

Reflection Questions:

• Where in your organization are you managing around a gap in competence, yours or someone else’s, instead of addressing it directly?
• If your team evaluated your organization’s ability to deliver consistent results without your personal involvement, what would they find?

May your leadership journey be rich with purpose, relationships, resilience, and discovery. I look forward to exploring new insights together in our next issue.

Lead Deliberately,

Gearl Loden

Superintendent  |  Executive Coach  |  Author, Before It Breaks