Employees' trust in leadership is crucial for initiating quality improvement efforts. The leader must emit certain leadership qualities for trust to develop. The leader can provide or elicit expertise to orient the team along the appropriate quality improvement plan. The leader can distribute reward and punishment to train the team into providing the desired results. The leader's position and charisma also coerce the team into following the leader's plan. These qualities alone do not guarantee trust in leadership.

The leader must work to establish and reinforce trust with the team. Leadership skills such as leveraging and encouraging the diversity of the team, communicating with and motivating the team, evaluating team member skills, and identifying opportunities for improvement all help to provide a trusting relationship. The foundation of trust lies in open and accurate communication.

Trust must be given on both sides. The leader must understand the capabilities of the team and request obtainable goals. With an atmosphere of trust, open communication can exist. Laborers can communicate problems to the leader without fear of retribution. The employees must trust the leader to share responsibility if those goals are not met. If trust breaks down between the leader and employees, so too will communication. Unreliable communication creates a “slippery slope” of mistrust between the leader and the team. Potentially, reports given to the leader will contain inaccurate or distorted data, if the team or members of the team fear the result of providing accurate information. Working from this erroneous information the leader may respond to those reports with inaccurate expectations of the team and demand even more unreasonable requests of them. The result will affect other processes in the production line and could possibly prevent the product from meeting quality specifications.