Boundaries Build Trust: A Leader’s Guide To Respect And Repair

Trust rarely fails with a crash; it thins out through tiny cuts. We unpack how unclear or ignored boundaries chip away at relationships and show practical ways to rebuild trust with clarity, courage, and compassion. Using Brene Brown’s BRAVING as a guide, we broaden trust beyond reliability to include accountability, the vault, integrity, nonjudgment, and generosity—starting with boundaries as the first move.

We walk through ten common boundary violations leaders often miss: intrusions on privacy, work-life overreach, role oversteps, dismissed emotions, wasted time, autonomy squeezes, tech misuse, neglected health needs, broken confidentiality, and cultural disrespect. You’ll hear why most of these slips are unintentional—and why intent doesn’t erase impact. Then we translate awareness into action with simple scripts to name a violation, explain the effect, and ask for a new agreement without blaming motives.

For teams, we offer clear norms that lower friction: quiet hours, meeting purpose and limits, response-time windows, decision rights, and explicit rules for confidential topics. We share how to model integrity by owning mistakes quickly, how to practice nonjudgment and generosity during feedback, and how to protect autonomy by focusing on outcomes over micromanagement. The result is a culture where people feel safe to speak up, bring energy to the work that matters, and protect the values that keep them well.

If this conversation helps you rethink boundaries and trust, subscribe, share it with a colleague who needs it today, and leave a quick review so others can find the show. Tell us: which boundary will you clarify this week?

#TrustBuilding #WorkplaceBoundaries #LeadershipSkills #EmotionalIntelligence #BRAVING #BreneBrownInspired #PsychologicalSafety #HealthyTeams #TeamCulture #AccountabilityAtWork #IntegrityInLeadership #Nonjudgment #GenerousAssumptions #WorkplaceRespect #CommunicationSkills #LeadershipDevelopment #BoundarySetting #RepairingTrust #WorkplaceWellbeing

Ambitious leaders know that real leadership goes far beyond titles—it’s about developing the clarity and mindset to guide others with confidence. In this podcast, you’ll explore what today’s leaders truly need, from navigating everyday problem solving to handling tough moments of workplace conflict with steadiness and respect. Episodes dive into setting healthy workplace boundaries, strengthening workplace collaboration, and building the emotional intelligence and emotional agility that make leadership sustainable. Whether you’re managing a growing team or refining your voice as a decision-maker, you’ll find insights that help you cultivate a resilient growth mindset and elevate your impact.

Chapters

• 0:00 Trust Erodes In Small Ways
• 0:09 Why Boundaries Matter For Trust
• 1:05 BRAVING: A Fuller View Of Trust
• 3:16 Integrity, Nonjudgment, Generosity
• 4:20 Boundaries Defined, Not Walls
• 4:41 Ten Common Boundary Violations
• 9:42 Time, Autonomy, And Tech Misuse

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Trust isn't broken by just big betrayals. It's chipped away by the small, unintentional boundary violations that we may overlook every day. In this episode, we're uncovering how unclear or ignored boundaries quietly erode trust and how to rebuild it through intentional, courageous communication. Welcome to the Intentional Leaders Podcast, the show that helps leaders gain clarity, build emotional agility, and create meaningful impact without sacrificing themselves. Let's get started. Welcome to the Intentional Leaders Podcast. Today we're talking about boundaries. Do you know what they are and how important they are? You know what? I never did. I don't think anyone ever talked about this in my life until I was talking with a therapist, and this was decades ago, and she mentioned it. This is such an important topic. And the reason why boundaries are so important is because it leads to trusting, respectful relationships. So if you've ever attended a leadership class with me, you may have heard me talk about Brene Brown, of course, because she's amazing. She has so much good work out there. And one of her books, Braving the Wilderness, there was an acronym in that book about trust. And I loved this acronym because I think trust to a lot of us is predictability, reliability, dependability. But she has a much more nuanced version of trust. And her braving acronym describes it. And I've used it in a lot of my classes. And this gets also to the point that a lot of people think trust needs to be earned rather than just given. I did a whole podcast about that. If you didn't listen to it, check it out. Because I believe in that passionately. I believe that we should trust each other. And then if something happens or occurs that erodes trust, that we are responsible to talk about it. We don't just dismiss the other person as untrustworthy if we haven't talked about the breach of trust and what it was to us. So I just want to briefly describe the braving acronym because boundaries connect to it. But braving represents the B and Braving is boundaries. R is reliability, which I think many of us typically associate. Did you do what you said you're going to do? Reliability, I I said I followed through. The A is accountability. And again, if you've ever taken a class with me, I I think about accountability as answerability. I am answerable to the outcome that I either produced or I didn't. No excuses, no blaming. I didn't do blah blah blah. No. Accountability is I didn't use my time well. So it is being really honest with yourself about what you did or didn't do. So we got boundaries, we got reliability, we account accountability. V in braving is the vault. And the vault is are you trusting with confidential and sensitive information? Do you keep that to yourself? The I is an integ is integrity. And I think about integrity in a couple of ways. One is are you honest with others? Um, but also are you honest with yourself? And if you think about integrity, let's say, for example, you work with someone and they're doing something that is affecting you and you really want to talk about it, you want to give them feedback, but you don't. To me, that could be a potential integrity issue, right? You're thinking something, you're feeling something, you want to talk to someone, but you don't do it, even though you know how important it is. So I think about integrity is yes, honesty, but am I honest with myself? Am I in integrity with myself? And then non-judgment and generosity, those two are super hard because by definition, we tend to be judgmental in how we listen to people, how we um interpret what they say and label it. We have to be conscious and cognizant of not doing that on purpose. And generosity means we're gonna assume good intentions about other people, so we're gonna be generous with our uh with other people's behaviors and our interpretation of them. So back to boundaries, but braving starts with boundaries. And when I teach this to a lot of people and talk about boundaries, not everybody knows what they mean, but boundaries are not keeping other people out. Boundaries are all about protecting ourselves and protecting the things that we hold dear, values. So I'm gonna just ask you to think about, I'm gonna give you a list of boundaries and see have any of them ever been violated for you that someone took advantage of your boundaries. All right, I'm gonna run through a list. Number one, intrusions on your personal space or privacy, where we go into someone's space without permission, um, or going through someone's stuff without permission, um, or even asking really personal questions. So all of those fall into that personal space and privacy. The second one is ignoring work-life boundaries. I probably don't have to explain that one. I bet every one of us have had a situation in which someone wasn't considering the importance of our family life with regard to work requests they were making. Number three, overstepping professional roles. And this might look like uh micromanaging or uh taking credit for someone else's work, if you've ever had that experience. So that falls into category three. Disrespecting emotional boundaries. Now, I do a lot of classes on emotional intelligence, and this really affects people. So if, for example, I have expressed my emotions and someone dismisses them or makes fun of them or calls them dramatic or unimportant and undermines our ability to express our emotions appropriately and effectively and constructively, and just at all, um, that's definitely a boundary violation. Um, also time violations. So this isn't just work-life balance, but this is about overloading people, having unnecessary meetings. I know you've probably never had that. Not respecting time boundaries or last-minute demands, making last-minute demands on people, all of that fine falls into time. Lack of respect for autonomy. Now, I don't know about you, but when I think about autonomy, um, I get really triggered by this because my whole life I have been incredibly independent and I do not want anyone to tell me what to do. You can ask anyone in my family. It's a big trigger for me. Telling me what to do can most assuredly um result in me not doing what you tell me to do because I don't like that um imposition on my autonomy, my freedom to make my own choices. So for you, um, is that something that has affected you either? Um, okay, misusing technology. And this could be someone tracking your use of technology or um following people on social media, kind of stalking or sharing private conversations publicly, all of those technology violations. Next one, disregarding physical or mental health needs. And this could be requests for accommodations, it could be uh overloading someone when they've said they're really burnt out or stressed, or making comments about people's sick or mental health days. The next one is gossiping or violating the vault. So essentially the V in vault is I'm sharing confidential or sensitive information. And you know what? When I was first managing, this was many years ago, a lot of the people I work with were my friends. I probably had a ton of vault violations. I didn't think about it like boy, I'm violating the vault, but I sure did it. And I didn't even think about the the fact that I probably should have been more sensitive and cognizant of what I was sharing with others. All right, and then number 10 is disregarding cultural or self social norms. So comments or jokes that are offensive or not respecting someone's dietary habits or even holidays that they um that they uh honor, or assuming everyone shares the same values, which of course we don't. So there's 10 boundary violations. And I bet if you think about it, you can think, oh my gosh, yeah, other people have violated those boundaries. And maybe you can think, as I have, that I have violated other people's boundaries. And again, probably not intentionally. I don't think we go, we set out the day like, oh, I'm gonna get up today. Today I'm gonna just violate a whole bunch of boundaries. We don't think about it in that way, but those things affect trust. And when we, when they are eroded for us, we are responsible to talk about them. And then when I think back to times in my life where I felt like even those work-life boundaries, I did it to people, but I know it was done to me, or that's how I experienced it, right? Um, but a lot of those things I did not talk about. And that's the important part of a boundary, is when it has been eroded, or you get that emotion or that feeling of something was violated and it's affecting your trust in someone. It is your responsibility to say it. It's your responsibility to name it and to clarify what your boundaries are. And that's just part of your rights as a human being is to say what you think, how you feel, and the effect that someone else's behavior is having on you. You can't change them, but you sure can change you. And it starts with being courageous enough to have a boundaries violation. So just think about this as you go into your next few weeks and you think about honoring other people's boundaries, maybe being more cognizant of what they are, or even if you are a leader or manager, asking people, what are some of those important things? Again, when you think about work life, when you think about emotional boundaries, time boundaries, autonomy, these are some big, big issues that affect employee engagement. And when you think about that, think about the unintended. If you're doing this in an unintentional way, right? You've you violated someone's boundary, you know what's going to happen to them? Um, probably the same thing that has happened to you. You might pull yourself back a little, right? You may, um, it may affect your trust in the relationship with that person, but also your behaviors and how you think about them. And we store all that in our heads, right, for a long time. And none of that helps our stress or well-being. So bring trust to the surface and bring boundaries to the surface. I encourage you to think about this topic for yourself, for the people that you work with, and honoring people's boundaries is a great goal. I have been so much more cognizant of this, not just for me, but for other people as well, and ensuring that I honor the limitations they have. Because again, boundaries are not about keeping other people out. It's about protecting the things that we value most and the things that we care about and our purpose and what we want to accomplish in life. And that, my friends, is being incredibly intentional and compassionate and honoring you. So think about that in the next coming, upcoming weeks. I would love to hear any of your comments or thoughts about boundaries and their impact on you. If you did like this podcast, I would love it if you would subscribe or share with others who may benefit from this message in this podcast episode today.