Timen Baart
Timen Baart is the author of Compounding Trust (Rethink Press, 2026) and co-founder of TrustXP, the employee trust measurement platform. He has spent years working with leadership teams at technology and AI companies through periods of rapid growth, strategic pivots, and organizational transformation, work that surfaced the same pattern again and again: the organizations that endure are not the ones that talk most compellingly about trust, but the ones built on the structural conditions that strengthen it. The Compounding Trust Model names those conditions. TrustXP measures them.
My argument is that we have been managing the wrong variable. Engagement is a lagging indicator, the echo of conditions leaders never measured. Trust is the leading one, and I define it narrowly enough to be useful: an individual's confidence that they can achieve their own objectives by working within the organization. It compounds or decays through five structural drivers, competence, fairness, reciprocity, identity and transparency, through the Trust Flywheel that converts trust into performance, with a lag that hides its decay until the damage is done. Each driver is observable. Each is improvable. That is the whole book, and the reason I built the instrument that measures them.
He lives in Ireland. The book is dedicated to his sons, Nathan and Oscar.
