How Do You Build Trust with Senior Leaders? Start with Gratitude
Gratitude flows downward in most organizations. The leaders who learn to express it upward are the ones who get promoted.
Ask a leader how often they express gratitude to their team. They will have an answer. Most leaders feel they do this regularly. Some do it genuinely well.
Now ask them how often they express gratitude to their senior leaders. Watch them pause.
That pause is one of the most revealing moments in executive presence coaching. It tells you everything about where leaders draw the line on Warmth and why so many of them plateau just short of the roles they are capable of.
The gratitude gap most leaders do not notice
There is a widely held belief that gratitude flows downward. You thank your team. You recognize your direct reports. You celebrate the people who work for you. That is good leadership, and it matters.
But in high-stakes relationships, with your manager, your senior stakeholders, the executives who decide who gets promoted and who gets resourced, many leaders go quiet. They become more measured. The warmth they bring to their team does not travel upward with them.
This is not a character flaw. It is a natural response to power dynamics. When the stakes are high, we tighten. We focus on what we deliver rather than how we connect.
The problem is that the people who can advocate for your advancement and assign budgets to your initiatives are making decisions about you based on more than your results. They are asking themselves whether they trust you. Whether they want to work closely with you. Whether they feel a sense of loyalty to your success.
In the Warmth style of executive presence, trust is not built through performance alone. It is built through the behaviors that make people feel genuinely valued. Gratitude is one of the most direct ways to do that. And the leaders who practice it in high-stakes relationships, not just with their teams, are the ones who begin to be seen as leadership potential.
What gratitude looks like when a leader gets it right
I want to share a client who has taught me something about this.
Mathan Raj is a Senior Vice President and HR Head at Mahindra Research Valley. He came to us to work on his executive presence, and specifically to develop daily rituals that would support his leadership goals.
A few weeks into our work together, he sent me this:
Dear Rajna, hope you are well. Just wanted to keep you posted that I am finding the daily rituals very helpful and have set up a daily rhythm in my calendar. Celebrating a milestone. Thanks a lot!
He did not have to send that message. He sent it because he wanted me to know.
This is not an isolated moment. Mathan sends private messages expressing gratitude to people on his team. He uses his design skills to create and print personal thank you notes. When he completed our EPI Assessment, he took the time to write a detailed email describing his experience as a participant, not to give feedback, but to make sure we understood what the process felt like from the inside.
Every time he does this, I want to support him more. I take more interest in his success. That is not a coincidence. That is Warmth working exactly as it should , trust that does not just earn a response, but builds the kind of loyalty that keeps people coming back.
Mathan is a 25-year HR veteran. He understands the science of leadership. But what sets him apart is that he practices gratitude consistently, specifically, and in every direction. Upward, downward, and across. That consistency and mindfulness is what makes it leadership presence rather than politeness.
Expressing gratitude is a learnable behavior
Knowing that gratitude matters is not the same as knowing how to express it in a way that lands. A generic thank you is a pleasantry. A specific one is a presence behavior.
We developed a practical resource called Never a Naked Thank You, a cheat sheet with 60 ways to say thank you in a way that actually lands, built around a simple three-part framework: what they did, when it mattered, and how it helped. Download it and put it to use this week.
The research confirms what the best leaders already know
Amy Gallo, contributing editor at Harvard Business Review, found that people who feel genuinely thanked are twice as likely to help again in the future. Gratitude does not just feel good. It changes behavior. It builds the reciprocity and loyalty that high-performing teams and high-trust stakeholder relationships are made of.
This is the business case for Warmth. Not as a soft skill or a personality trait, but as a deliberate executive presence practice that compounds over time. The leaders who express gratitude specifically and consistently - in every direction - are the ones who earn the trust that opens the next door.
Your next move
Think about one person above you in your organization who has supported your work in the past month. A senior leader, a sponsor, a stakeholder who made something easier for you.
Now write them a thank you. Tell them specifically what they did. Tell them when it mattered and why. Tell them how it helped.
That one message, sent this week, is a presence behavior. It is also the beginning of a trust that will outlast any single project or performance cycle.
If you want to know exactly where your Warmth behaviors stand today, the EPI Assessment measures all 27 behaviors across Focus, Warmth, and Power and gives you a personalized report you can act on immediately.
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My dear Mathan, thank you for letting me share your story. You are living proof that the smallest gestures of gratitude leave the biggest mark.
Rajna Shetty is an executive presence coach and creator of the Executive Presence Influence (EPI) Assessment at CoachVikram & Company. She specializes in measuring and developing leadership influence. Reach her at rajna@coachvikram.com
