Trust is not a warm feeling added to engineering after the serious work is done. It changes the cost and speed of the work itself: whether people surface risks early, ask for help, disagree honestly, and recover together when a decision is wrong.
Treat trust as a set of observable team behaviors rather than a slogan. Explore how reliability, candor, follow-through, and room for dissent reinforce one another, and how small breaches accumulate into coordination overhead.
Build on Trust Is the Infrastructure and Psychological Safety.