Most founders think trust is built in the big moments. The offsite. The pay rise. The speech after the bad quarter. It isn’t. Trust is built in moments so small you barely notice them happening, and it’s lost the same way. The Micro-Trust Protocol is the framework I use to make those moments visible, so you can build trust with your team on purpose instead of by accident. This page is the reference: what the protocol is, how the marble jar works, and what to actually do with it on an ordinary Tuesday.
01What is the Micro-Trust Protocol?
The Micro-Trust Protocol is a free framework for building trust through small, repeated actions instead of grand gestures. Its central picture is the marble jar: every small act of reliability adds a marble, every small breach tips some out. Trust is the level of the jar, never any single marble.
It’s one of the frameworks in The Source Code: Coaching Frameworks for Founders and Leaders, my open library of coaching tools. The full protocol, every step written out, lives at /source-code/the-micro-trust-protocol. This article is the map. That page is the territory.
02The marble jar, explained
The marble jar comes from Brené Brown. Her daughter’s teacher kept a jar on the desk. When the class did something good together, marbles went in. When they broke the rules, marbles came out. Full jar, class party. Brown’s insight, which she unpacks in The Anatomy of Trust, is that trust between people works exactly the same way. We trust the people who have filled the jar, one small marble at a time, over a long stretch of ordinary days.
What counts as a marble? Almost nothing you’d put in a leadership deck. Remembering that someone’s mum was in hospital and asking how she’s going. Turning up to the one-on-one you scheduled, on time, with your laptop closed. Keeping a small confidence. Saying “I don’t know” when you don’t. Giving credit in the room where it counts. Asking for help, which tells the other person you trust them first.
And what tips marbles out? The same small stuff, running the other way. Repeating something told to you in private. Cancelling the catch-up three weeks straight because “something came up”. Taking the credit. Checking your phone while they answer the question you just asked. None of these feel like betrayals in the moment. That’s exactly what makes them dangerous. Nobody flags them. The jar just quietly empties.
One more rule, and it’s the one founders most want to argue with: withdrawals cost more than deposits. A broken confidence doesn’t take out one marble, it takes out a handful. So the maths is unforgiving. You cannot fill a jar quickly, and you can empty one in an afternoon.
03Why grand gestures don’t build trust
The gesture is the founder’s favourite move, because it matches how founders think. Big bet, big result. So when a founder senses a trust problem, they reach for a big fix. An offsite. A bonus. A heartfelt all-hands.
The gesture fails because trust isn’t a transaction, it’s a prediction. Your team isn’t asking “what did you do for me?” They’re asking “what will you do next time?” One dramatic act tells them nothing about next time. Two hundred small acts tell them everything. Paul Zak’s research, published in Harvard Business Review, found that high-trust workplaces run on repeated everyday signals, recognition close to the moment, real autonomy, honest information, not on annual set pieces. The brain scores patterns, not events.
Here’s what it looks like in a real seat. A founder I coach was frustrated that her head of sales had gone guarded. Short answers, no bad news, everything fine until suddenly it wasn’t. She’d given him a pay rise and praised him at the all-hands, and couldn’t understand why neither moved the needle. Then we looked at the jar. She’d rescheduled his one-on-one three weeks running. She’d answered two of his Slack messages with a thumbs up and nothing else. She’d once mentioned, in a leadership meeting, a hiring worry he’d raised with her privately. Three small holes, all draining the same jar, while she poured in one big pay rise and wondered where the water went. The fix was boring. Hold the one-on-one. Answer properly. Apologise for the leak, once, plainly. Two months later he brought her the pipeline problem he’d been sitting on since March.
04Running the protocol with your team
The full step-by-step lives in the library, but the working version fits in four moves.
Name the jars. You hold a separate jar with every person who reports to you. There is no team-wide jar you can fill from the front of the room. Write the names down. For each one, honestly: is that jar filling or draining right now?
Learn what a marble is for each person. Marbles aren’t universal. For one engineer it’s protecting her focus time. For your ops lead it’s looping him in before the decision, not after. If you don’t know what fills someone’s jar, that’s your first one-on-one question.
Watch the small breaches. You already know your big promises matter. The protocol’s job is to surface the small ones: the meeting moved twice, the “I’ll get back to you” that never came back. Pick your leakiest habit and fix that one first.
Audit weekly. Sixty seconds, Friday afternoon. Whose jar did I fill this week? Whose did I drain? One name, one repair action for Monday. That’s the whole practice.
05Why the jar sits under everything else
Every hard thing you want to do as a leader draws on the jar. Direct feedback, real accountability, telling someone their work isn’t at standard: these land or wound depending entirely on how full the jar is when you say them. It’s the same calibration that runs through The Location of Leadership: the conversation only works when both people feel safe enough to stay open, and the jar is what buys that safety before you ever open your mouth.
It compounds past you, too. Once your leadership team knows the picture, they start counting their own marbles with their own people, and trust stops depending on you being in the room. Culture is what people do when you’re not in the room. A team full of full jars is what that looks like in practice.
06Start counting
You don’t need a trust initiative. You need to see the jar on the desk of every working relationship you have, and to notice which way the marbles are moving. Pick one person whose jar you’ve been draining. Put one marble in this week. Then another next week. That’s the protocol. It’s slow, it’s unglamorous, and it’s the only way trust has ever been built.
If you want help finding the leaks in your own jars, Book a Discovery Call.