Whole Leaders, Wild Trust By Dr. Rob McKenna

This Time Trust is Personal

After years of working with leaders across the business, nonprofit, education, and faith-based sectors, I’ve become convinced of this simple truth: the health of our leadership determines the health of everything it touches. And in a world marked by fragmentation, fatigue, and mistrust, leadership development that stays shallow or transactional isn’t enough.

That conviction is what led me to write Whole Leaders, WiLD Trust, which releases this week. Not as a manifesto. Not as a silver bullet. But as an honest offering to leaders who care deeply about their people, their mission, and the weight of responsibility they carry.

What follows is an excerpt from the book’s introduction. I’m sharing it here because it captures the heart of what I’ve studied and experienced regarding leadership, trust, and the kind of formation required to steward both well.

An Excerpt from Whole Leader, WiLd Trust

“You already know that without great leaders, your teams suffer. Without growth in your people, your mission lags. You’ve seen the damage one unprepared, unaware, or immovable leader can cause. You’ve seen how dysfunction and silence can take down momentum and morale.

But you’ve also seen the opposite—a leader with clarity, courage, conviction, and compassion—and how one person like that can shift everything. You already know that without a deep, ongoing investment in people, nothing else really matters.

And if you’re reading this, I suspect you’ve tried. You’ve made an effort. You’ve taken courses, held off-sites, maybe even brought in coaches or read your share of leadership books. You may have tried tools around personality, strengths, or styles, and you’ve probably seen some things help.

But you may also still feel like something’s missing. Like you’re building, but not sustaining. Like you’re growing, but unsure how to scale that growth across your organization or your life.

If you’ve solved all that, if trust is high and alignment is seamless, I applaud you. But if you’re like most leaders I know, including me, then you’re still learning. You still feel the pressure to get it right for your people. You still see the cracks and wonder how to build something stronger.

To every leader reading this, whether emerging or experienced, I have deep respect for you. It takes guts to admit you’re still learning, even when others expect you to have it all figured out. It takes humility to acknowledge where things could be better. And it takes hope to believe we can still build what we’ve always needed most.

But I believe we can.“

Because if we do this together, we won’t just change our leadership. We’ll change our organization’s culture. and our world.

So let’s go. Let’s develop whole leaders and build wild trust—together.“

Why This Is Personal for Me

This work isn’t abstract for me. It’s deeply personal.

I’ve watched faithful, gifted leaders burn out—not because they weren’t obedient to the call on their lives or didn’t care about people, but because they were never given permission, language, or tools to become whole. I’ve seen organizations with noble missions slowly erode under the weight of unaddressed fear, silence, and unresolved conflict. And I’ve seen what happens when leaders confuse spiritual maturity with emotional avoidance, or competence with trustworthiness.

At the same time, I’ve also witnessed something profoundly hopeful.

Leaders Must Choose

I’ve seen leaders choose courage over comfort. Truth over image. Formation over performance. And when that happens—when leaders do the interior work and invite others into it—trust begins to take root. Teams become honest. Cultures become resilient. Missions regain momentum.

This should not surprise us.

Formation precedes fruitfulness. Our character allows us to hear the call on our lives. And trust, real trust, is always relational, always costly, and always built over time. That’s the vision behind Whole Leaders, WiLD Trust. Not a program to run, but a way of leading that integrates faith, psychology, courage, and responsibility. A way of developing leaders who are aware, grounded, teachable, and trustworthy, because the stakes are too high for anything less.

If this resonates with you, I hope you’ll see this not as a book to consume, but as an invitation to reflect, to grow, and to lead with greater wholeness and trust right where God has placed you.

Because the world doesn’t just need more leaders.

It needs whole leaders.

Dr. Rob McKenna is the founder of WiLD Leaders, Inc., The WiLD Foundation, and creator of the WiLD Trust Platform. His most recent book, Whole Leaders, Wild Trust, weaves decades of research with real leadership stories to offer a courageous, practical pathway for building trust and developing whole leaders in today’s fractured world.

Reserve your seat today! Dr. Rob McKenna will be presenting in our FAST TRACK sessions for 2026. Come and join us! (And be sure to buy his new book!)