Building Trust in Business and Leadership

In a world shaped by speed, scale, and constant uncertainty, building trust has become one of the most under-examined assets in how we lead, run businesses and organizations. In conversation with Sheila Gujrathi — biotech entrepreneur and author of The Mirror Effect: A Transformative Approach to Growth for The Next Generation of Female Leaders — on the Women Emerging Podcast, Julia Middleton brings the focus back to what really holds companies together. 

“Trust is the foundation for all relationships,” Sheila says. And because business is built on relationships — between founders and investors, boards and CEOs, managers and teams — trust being important in business is not theoretical, it is structural. “Every aspect of running a company comes down to trust,” she adds. “You can’t do it by yourself. It takes a village.” For Sheila, trust is not a soft value. It is the operating system that decides whether people collaborate, take risks, and move forward together. 

Trust in business often sounds like strategy. But in reality, it is shaped by psychology. And one of the clearest ways this shows up in women’s experience of leading is through people pleasing. What begins as a conversation about organisations slowly becomes a conversation about the inner lives of women — about how the habits we bring into the boardroom are often formed long before we ever step into one.

How to Build Self Trust When Leading

This is where the conversation turns from principle to lived experience. Sheila speaks openly about sitting in rooms where confidence felt louder than competence — where she questioned herself despite experience. Over time, that self-doubt can turn into something many women quietly recognise: people pleasing. “I wasn’t even trusting people,” she admits. “But I needed their approval.” In that one line sits a hard truth: wanting other people’s approval often replaces self-trust. This is why people pleasing is a trauma response — not weakness, but conditioning. And while it may offer short-term safety, it creates long-term risk: the quiet dangers of misplaced trust, blurred boundaries, and patterns of leading shaped by fear rather than clarity. 

How to stop people pleasing

Sheila traces it back to early experiences where survival meant being agreeable — where being liked felt safer than being honest. Understanding where people pleasing comes from changes how women see themselves in positions of influence. It explains why so many struggle with how to stop people pleasing, even at senior levels. And it reveals why the dangers of mistrust can feel just as real: swing too far the other way, and people become guarded, cynical, closed. True trust, Sheila suggests, lives in discernment. “Not stop trusting,” she says, “but stop assuming.” This shift sits at the heart of how to build self-trust when leading — learning to listen to your inner voice, to practise trusting your instinct, and to follow the real steps to achieving self-trust: noticing red flags, naming boundaries, and choosing alignment over approval. 

Don’t stop trusting, stop assuming

From there, trust becomes a discipline, not a disposition. Sheila is clear: trust grows through structure, not sentiment. Through clarity, not charm. This is where accountability as a trust builder takes shape. “If we take accountability,” she says, “that’s a big trust builder.” How to build trust through accountability is simple to say and hard to live: say what you mean, follow through, own what doesn’t work. And because trust never exists in isolation, those who are leading must also do the work of understanding your environment, understanding relationships, and especially understanding relationship dynamics as a female founder. Not everyone operates from the same values, Sheila reminds us — so trust grows when we stop assuming alignment and start asking better questions. This is also why she speaks so powerfully about the importance of building community in leading. Trust is sustained in circles, not in isolation. By building your own network — peers, mirrors, and mentors — we create the conditions where trust stops being performative and becomes lived. 

By the end of the conversation, one truth stands clear: when trust sits at the heart of running a business, it changes everything — how decisions feel, how risks are taken, how leading is lived. In a world obsessed with speed and certainty, Sheila Gujrathi offers something more enduring: a reminder that trust grows slowly, through self-trust, discernment, accountability, and the courage to lead without performing. And when people choose that path, trust does more than improve outcomes. It changes what it feels like to lead at all. 

About Shiela Gujrathi

Sheila Gujrathi, MD, is a biotech entrepreneur, executive, champion for under-represented leaders, and author of the bestselling book The Mirror Effect: A Transformative Approach to Growth for The Next Generation of Female Leaders. Over the past 25 years, she’s had the privilege of developing life-changing medicines for patients with serious diseases while building and running private and public biotech companies—including some exciting exits. Today she’s a founder, chairwoman, board director, strategic advisor, and consultant to start-up companies and investment funds. She co-founded the Biotech CEO Sisterhood, a group of trailblazing female CEOs—because we’re all better when we support each other.