We went in thinking leadership was about the title. We left wondering whether it’s really about whether people would follow you without the title.

Randall S. Peterson told us leadership has less to do with what you intend and more to do with how other people read your intentions. Trust takes years to build, and one self-interested move can undo it.

Randall is a professor at London Business School, where he’s Academic Director of the Leadership Institute. Before that, he taught at Northwestern and Cornell. He trained as a psychologist, and he co-founded a company built on the Big Five personality model.

We’re Suraj and Kritin, two high schoolers who started Ledger Bros because we had way more questions about how business actually works than answers. Trust sits at the center of it all, and Randall was the first person we thought to ask.

A few things we’re still chewing on:

• Why your intentions matter less than how others read them.

• The warning sign that tells you a team is in trouble before it falls apart.

• Why there’s no single “leader personality” to copy, and what to do if yours doesn’t fit the mold.