Trust is Busted. That Should Scare Leaders

Brian Elliott

CEO, Work Forward & Publisher, Flex Index

If you're leading teams through AI adoption, navigating hybrid work, or just steering through the tempest that is 2025, there's a crucial factor that could make or break your success: trust. And right now, it's in free fall.

Trust isn’t just a feel-good buzzword. High-performing organizations show 10-11x higher trust levels between employees and leaders, and the business impact is clear:

• People that feel trusted are more productive and 30% more likely to go above and beyond for customers: employee experience drives customer experience.

• Innovation thrives on willingness to take risks, not watercoolers and whiteboards. Do I feel safe sharing the heretical idea? Will my team be rewarded for trying new approaches, or punished for making mistakes?

• AI adoption rates directly correlate with whether employees trust their leaders about technology's impact.

This isn’t news. Professor Amy Edmondson coined the term psychological safety in 1999, and in 2015, Google’s Project Aristotle reinforced the link between team performance, safety and dependability – the foundations of trust.

Yet trust in business is plummeting faster than we've ever seen. Edelman's Trust Barometer shows an unprecedented decline in employer trust - the first drop in 25 years of tracking. Business leaders, once far more trusted than government officials or media, have fallen to the same low levels.

The warning signs are flashing: only 55% of employees trust their senior leaders according to Qualtrics. This isn't just a PR problem — it's a performance crisis waiting to happen.

Bring out the Buckets

The last few years have been a masterclass in eroding employee trust:

• Midnight layoff emails while posting record profits, dramatically reducing engagement and motivation of those left behind

• Return-to-office mandates delivered in absence of supporting data and ignoring the reality of distributed teams

• Executives mandating use of AI for efficiency leaving almost half of employees afraid to admit they're using it

• Demands to "do more with less" while the CEO-to-worker pay gap has risen to roughly 300X the average worker.

As one CHRO told me last year: "We spent years building trust through transparency. One poorly executed layoff destroyed it."

Trust matters more than ever because we're asking people to adapt to seismic changes in how we work. The difference between companies that have built trust and those that haven't will become stark as we navigate AI adoption, hybrid work, and economic uncertainty.

Three Keys to Rebuilding Trust

Decades of research point to ways to build trust through clear goals, shared success, and ensuring people feel their voice will be heard. Here are three that I think are especially critical in today’s environment for re-buidling trust – from both an employee and employer perspective.

1. Clear Goals, Real Accountability. Stop monitoring attendance and start measuring outcomes. Give teams clear goals and autonomy in how they achieve them. At Synchrony Financial, this combination enabled flexibility and drove performance.

2. Transparency with Guardrails. Break down information silos. Share context behind decisions openly - even difficult ones. Layoffs can be done with compassion and transparency; as Airbnb and Spotify have both demonstrated. Afraid that transparency might lead to employee activism? Establish guardrails so that you can have meaningful conversations internally instead of rock-throwing externally.

3. Show Vulnerability. Saying "I don't know" isn't weakness–it's an invitation for others to contribute. I know from personal experience how hard that can be; leaders are often trained that they need to have all the answers. A simple example: one tech CIO I’ve worked with regularly admits his limits with AI, which encourages his team to experiment and innovate together.

The word “vulnerability” seems anathema to too many public figures at the moment, who instead are ready to lock themselves in the Octagon with their opponents. But what’s tougher for them: taking a swing at someone, or admitting to their own limitations?

The Manager Effect: Where Trust Lives or Dies

We've all heard "people don't leave companies, they leave managers." The reverse is also true: great leaders show up at all levels of the org chart, creating "trust bubbles:" pockets of high performance inside even the most challenging environments.

These are the transparent leaders who drive great outcomes while having fun with their teams, that help people not just know each other but know they can rely on each other. They know how to build connections even in distributed teams.

But here's the warning: These trust-building leaders are also the ones most likely to move on if they don't feel supported. They're magnets for talent and performance, which makes them incredibly valuable - and incredibly mobile. The companies that will thrive through our current chaos are the ones finding and championing these leaders before they skip out to build trust bubbles somewhere else.

Which brings us to the central question: Is your company creating the conditions where trust-building leaders can thrive? Or are you watching them walk out the door to companies that will?

The difference could define your success in navigating AI adoption, hybrid work, and whatever comes next.