What builds trust between doctors and the people they lead

A three-time cancer survivor remembers exactly which doctors she trusted, and it came down to small things: one held her foot before leaving the room. Jess Bunin, an intensivist, and George Mount, a rheumatologist, who together founded a leadership group, break down why trust is the fragile core of both clinical care and leadership, why uncertainty breaks it faster than anything, and why the hardest skill for any physician is learning to say I don't know. ⏱️ Chapters: 0:00 Introduction 0:39 The three things that make people trust you 2:01 Why trust beats every other leadership trait 4:11 The one breach that destroys trust fastest 6:55 The daily I don't know rule for a know-it-all fellow 8:49 Why training erases vulnerability from day one 9:27 What the COVID leaders who kept trust did differently 11:52 A cancer survivor on the doctors she trusted 13:27 The 11 second habit that breaks patient trust 16:01 How to rebuild trust after you have broken it 19:07 Remembering it is the worst day of someone's life 19:20 Take home messages About this episode: Jess Bunin and George Mount, an intensivist and a rheumatologist who co-founded a health care leadership group, make the case that trust is the secret sauce behind every effective team and every good clinical encounter. They build their argument on Frances Frei's model, which holds that trust rests on three pillars: empathy, logic, and authenticity, and that a wobble in any one breaks the whole. They argue the biggest threat to trust today is uncertainty, and that leaders fail when they go silent waiting for solid answers instead of admitting what they do not yet know. Bunin describes coaching a brilliant critical care fellow to say "I don't know" once every day on rounds, simply to model the vulnerability that medical training trains out of physicians from day one. In the episode's most striking turn, Bunin, a three-time cancer survivor, recounts which of her own doctors earned her trust: the ones who brought her imaging to the bedside, asked what she feared, admitted when they did not have answers, and in one case held her foot and asked what she needed. Mount adds that communication in a crisis means leading with the bottom line, not burying it in detail, and that active listening is far harder than physicians assume. They close with practical ways to rebuild trust after it breaks, drawing on a real government shutdown that left junior staff without paychecks, and a reminder that for the patient it is always the worst day of their life, even when it is your ordinary Tuesday. 🤝 Partner with me on the KevinMD platform: With over three million monthly readers and half a million social media followers, I give you direct access to the doctors and patients who matter most. Let's work together to tell your story. ➡️ PARTNER WITH KEVINMD: https://kevinmd.com/influencer ➡️ SUBSCRIBE TO THE PODCAST: https://www.kevinmd.com/podcast ➡️ RECOMMENDED BY KEVINMD: https://www.kevinmd.com/recommended #PhysicianLeadership #TrustInMedicine #HealthCare