✨Cakes, Eggs, and Trust (040)

Over the holiday season, I ate a lot of cake.

Birthday cake. Christmas cake. The “someone brought dessert just in case” kind of cake. And alongside all of that sugar, I spent time with people I share long-standing, trusting relationships with.

Somewhere between the second slice and the third conversation, I noticed a pattern.

Cakes and trust kept showing up together in my mind.

Not in a profound way. Just in that quiet, end-of-year, reflective way where your body slows down enough for connections to surface.

Then someone made an offhand comment:

And it landed.

Trust is the Egg in the Cake

I’ve spent years thinking about trust in workplaces, teams, and leadership.

And if I’m honest, I used to think of trust like icing on the cake. The “thing” you add once everything else is in place. Once people have proven themselves. Once the work is underway.

But if you bake, or watch someone bakes, you know eggs don’t come at the end.

They go in early.
They bind everything together.
They’re quiet, unglamorous and essential.

You can have all the right ingredients — talent, ambition, experience, strategy, budget, sponsorship — but without trust, things don’t quite hold.

The cake might look fine in the bowl, but it won’t rise in the oven.

The Trust Deficit We Don’t Talk About

In many workplaces, trust isn’t absent, it’s delayed.

And that delay has consequences.

When trust feels conditional, people adapt in small, protective ways:

• they hold back ideas

• they avoid asking questions

• they over-prepare

• they stay busy instead of honest

On the surface, this can look like professionalism.
Underneath, it’s effort.

A lot of it.

Burnout doesn’t always come from too much work.
Sometimes it comes from doing good work in environments where you’re careful about what you say and how you show up.

Trust Isn’t the Treat — It’s the Ingredient

High-trust environments don’t remove accountability.
They remove unnecessary fear.

They make it easier to speak up early.
Safer to admit uncertainty.
More possible to learn together.

When trust is baked in from the start, people stop bracing themselves — and start contributing fully.

That’s where sustainable performance lives.
That’s where people burn bright, not out.

A Gentle Question to Sit With

As you return to work routines and new-year intentions:

And what would shift if it came earlier?

Because when trust is part of the mix from the beginning,
everything else has a better chance of rising.

Until next week,
Mary