There will always be plenty to be afraid of, especially when you are doing something new. Trusting others doesn’t mean that they won’t make mistakes. It means that if they do (or if you do), you trust they will act to help solve it. Fear can be created quickly; trust can’t. Leaders must demonstrate their trustworthiness, over time, through their actions - and the best way to do that is by responding well to failure. The Braintrust and various groups within Pixar have gone through difficult times together, solved problems together, and that is how they’ve built up trust in each other. Be patient. Be authentic. And be consistent. The trust will come.

The research shows that effective perspective-taking, attuning yourself with others, hinges on three principles.

1. Increase your power by reducing it…

As the researchers conclude, “power leads individuals to anchor too heavily on their own vantage point, insufficiently adjusting to others’ perspective.”

The results of these studies, part of a larger body of research, point to a single conclusion: an inverse relationship between power and perspective-taking. Power can move you off the proper position on the dial and scramble the signals you receive, distorting clear messages and obscuring more subtle ones…

2. Use your head as much as your heart…

Perspective-taking is a cognitive capacity; it’s mostly about thinking. Empathy is an emotional response; it’s mostly about feeling. Both are crucial…

This second principle of attunement also means recognizing that individuals don’t exist as atomistic units, disconnected from groups, situations, and contexts. And that requires training one’s perspective-taking powers not only on people themselves but also on their relationships and connections to others…

3. Mimic strategically…

People therefore looked to cues in the environment to determine whom they could trust. “One of those cues is the unconscious awareness of whether we are in synch with other people, and a way to do that is to match their behavioral patterns with our own.” Synching our mannerisms and vocal patterns to someone else so that we both understand and can be understood is fundamental to attunement…

The key is to be strategic and human—to be strategic by being human.

Power and status differences then, can frustrate trust building in a setting. And wiseness can counter that frustration. But for that to happen, it’s best that wiseness come first from the top. It’s too much to expect the vulnerable to risk further vulnerability by trusting first. (Though this can happen, as we shall shortly see.) Once leadership offers trust, like the wise feedback-giver in the Cohen experiment, it becomes a path the vulnerable can follow. So, the advice offered here is that in diverse settings— be it an interaction between a doctor and her patient, a lawyer and her client, a teacher as his students, an institution and its constituents, a business and its customers— the more empowered identity should lead with trust.

The results were clear. Power did not suppress the reciprocation of trust. It amplified it. Compared to playing with a partner of equal power, participants reciprocated trust more when their partner had greater power. They also reciprocated distrust more when their partner had greater power. That is, when the partner distrusted them— failed to give them a dollar in the first round of the game— they were less willing to give him a dollar when their turn came. And this effect was stronger when their partner had more power than when he had equal power.

Leaving out trust instigated by the less empowered would miss how behaving out of trust— with faith in other people’s capacity for fairness— can be its own source of power, even when, or especially when, it comes from people lower in the social order.