Our Responsibility to Create Trusting Environments: Reflections on Week’s Episode with Anuradha Chugh

By Sandy Glanfield

This week on the Let’s Reboot the Future podcast, I had the joy of speaking with Anuradha Chugh. Her reflections on trust have stayed with me and I have found myself returning to them again and again. There was something quietly powerful in the way she described trust not as a strategy or a workplace competency, but as a way of being in the world.

Listening to her, I recognised something of myself. Like Anu, I have always been a trusting person. I have not pushed or milked the system in the ways that others sometimes advise. Instead, I have trusted that the quality of my relationships and the care I bring to them would guide people to act fairly and respectfully. It is not a perfect approach and it certainly has not protected me from disappointment. Yet it feels true to the world I want to help create. If I want to live in a world shaped by respect and generosity, then I feel compelled to show up in that way first.

There is a deeper truth sitting underneath this. Trust is not only about creating good conditions for work or cultivating positive cultures, although it certainly does that. Trust is about recognising the shared humanity between us. My life affects your life. My wellbeing, my choices and the way I speak to you all create ripples. When I acknowledge the life in you, and when I hold your circumstances with care, I am acting from a place that says your experience matters. That feels to me like the heart of the Golden Rule. It is the practice of treating you as I wish to be treated, not because I expect a guaranteed return, but because I believe our actions shape the social fabric we share.

Anu spoke about trust as a form of going first. It is a small leap of faith each time we choose to trust. We step into the unknown. We risk getting it wrong. We risk not being met in the way we hope. Yet trust offers us the chance to work things through together. It opens the door to collaboration, to repair, to deeper connection. Trust becomes not a transaction but a relationship in motion.

What I found most moving was the humility in the way Anu holds this. She sees trust as part of her service as a leader. Not a tactic, not a performance, but an ethical orientation. She works to create spaces where trust can grow, especially when people are at their most vulnerable. It is leadership that places humanity at the centre.

In a world that often rewards defensiveness and caution, her quiet insistence on trusting anyway feels courageous. It reminds me that the Golden Rule is not an abstract ideal. It is a lived choice. It is the willingness to act with care, even before we know how we will be met. It is the faith that our way of being can invite others into the same space.

I am grateful to Anu for this conversation. It left me hopeful, reflective and grounded in the belief that trust is still one of the most transformational forces we have.