The Trust Deficit

Look around right now. The trust is low and the fear is high, and you can feel it everywhere from the headlines to your own hallway. In this episode of Leadership After 5, Kim takes the trust deficit we're all sensing in the wider environment and brings it home to where it quietly does the most damage: inside our organizations.

How do you actually know your team trusts you? And if that trust is already slipping, can you rebuild it on purpose? Kim walks through a four-step path for doing exactly that, from stepping back and naming the real elephant, to gathering the right table, to getting an honest diagnosis, to building a plan and telling people the truth about it the whole way through. Skip that last part, and the rest was just performance.

This one is about the cost of low trust, the obligation that comes with leading, and the one question worth asking before the week gets away from you: what does your trust meter actually read right now?

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:42

Hi, and welcome to Leadership After Five. I'm so, so happy you're here. So, today's topic is going to be on the trust deficit. And I've been sitting with this topic for some time, and I finally was able to put some language or words to paper essentially on what I want to say about this. So look around right now. Pay attention to how the air feels. Folks, we are living through a season where trust is in short supply. Turn on the news, open your feed, sit in any room where people are talking about where things are headed, and you can feel it. People don't believe what they're told. They assume there's a story behind the story, and they brace before they even listen. Whatever side of anything you stand on, I think most of us can agree on one thing. The trust is low and fear is high. I'm not here to talk politics. I'll leave that to the people who do it for a living, and that's not me. But I've been sitting with this feeling, that low national hum of I'm not sure I can trust this. And it pulled me straight back to the thing I think most about. Because what's happening out there in the big loud environment is the same thing that happens inside organizations every single day. Just quieter. The headlines are maybe smaller, but the cost, the cost is the same. So that's what we're going to talk about today: trust. How you know you have it, what happens when you lose it, and whether you can ever build it back. Here's the question that started all of this for me. As a leader, how do you actually know your team trusts you? Not how do you hope, not how do you assume, but really how do you know definitively that they trust your judgment, that they trust your vision, that they trust you as a human being who has been placed in the role of authority over them. Just sit with that for a second. Because it's harder than it sounds. Most of us go through our week assuming the trust is there because nobody has told us it isn't. But silence is not the same as trust. Silence is sometimes the loudest sign that the trust is already gone. And boy, I can think of a lot of examples where this is true. And that led me to the bigger question. If an organization is sitting in a trust deficit, can it actually rebuild? And if it can, what does that even look like? Like, where do you even start? All right, well, let me lay out the stakes because they're simple. When trust is high, fear is low. And when fear is low, almost everything you want as a leader shows up on its own. You get productivity, you get collaboration, you get consistency, you get people who are actually having a good experience while they do the work. Now flip it. When trust is low, fear goes up. And every one of those good things I just named starts to disappear. The collaboration dries up, the consistency gets shaky, the good experience turns into a thing people endure. So the real question is structural. When an organization loses the trust of its greatest asset, which is its people, how do you rebuild that on purpose? And how do you know if what you're doing is actually moving the needle or if it just feels like you're doing something? I may not have all the answers, but I do have four steps, and I want to walk you through all four because the order matters. And the last one is the one most leaders skip. Step one is to pause and step back. I don't care if you lead a team of three, a team of 30, or an entire organization. When there is a trust deficit, the very first thing you owe the situation is your full attention. So step back and assess. Look at what's happening around you. Look at what's happening to you and to your team. And really look at what people are raising, not the polished version they give you in a meeting, the thing underneath it. When you step back and assess honestly, you start to see the elephant in the room. Sometimes it's one elephant. Sometimes it's a whole herd. But you cannot fix what you refuse to name, and you cannot name it from inside the noise. You have to get still first. Step two is to gather the kitchen table. Once you see the elephant, you bring people together to talk about three things: the why, the how, and the what. Why are we here? How did we get here? And that one is really a timeline, a look back at the moments that brought you to this point. And the last is what have we already done, if anything, to change it. Here's the part people get wrong. The right people at the table are not always your leadership team. They're not always the squeaky wheel, the loudest voice who ends up in the room, right? The right table is an array of people who actually represent your organization. The quiet ones, the nearer ones, the ones who see the place from a different floor than you do. If the only people at your kitchen table are the people who already agree with you, you didn't gather a table. You gathered a mirror. Step three is to enlist the help of an expert who can come in, triage, and diagnose what's really going on. And I want to be careful about the order here because this comes after you listen, not instead of it. You want to be the first line of resolution for your people. You want to be the face of listening. You want them to know that you heard them directly from your own ears before anyone else got involved. Then you bring in the expert and bringing in someone else, just so you know, is not weakness. It's one of the most honest things a leader can do. It's you saying out loud, hey, I am not the expert at this, but I know who to call. So you make the call, you share the data, you let them triage, and you let them come back with a real diagnosis of what's happening. That's not you offloading the problem. That's you respecting the problem enough to get it diagnosed properly. Step four is the solution, the plan you actually put in place to move the needle. Now, hear me on this. Moving the needle is not a quick activity. This is not a one-month fix. There's no validated data I've ever seen that says you can rebuild trust in 30 days. This happens over months, sometimes over years. So you have to look honestly at what you're dealing with and build a concrete plan that matches the size of the real problem. But here is the step inside the step, and it's the one most leaders miss. You have to communicate that plan back to your people the whole way through. Because if you do step one and step two and even step three, and you never get to step four, it was all performative. You held meetings, you brought in an expert, you looked like a leader who cared, and then nothing changed. And worse, nobody heard from you again. That doesn't rebuild trust. That spends what little you had left. People need to see the effort, and they need to hear about the effort in a way that lets them feel that something is genuinely being done. The work is half of it. Telling the truth about the work is the other half. So let me back up and tell you why I care about this so much. Trust is what allows all the unseen work to happen, the undercurrent, the quiet, invisible effort people put in when you're not watching and will never even know about. That only happens naturally when trust is high. You cannot order it off of a menu. You cannot schedule it. You can only earn the conditions for it. Think about why people get up and go to work. Sure, plenty of folks are motivated by the paycheck. They have bills, they have people counting on them. That's real. But the paycheck, the paycheck gets them to the building. It is not what decides their attitude when they walk through the door and log on. What decides that is their trust meter, how high it reads when they sit down at their desk, and how low it reads. Let me give you the clearest picture of high trust, at least I can think of. And here I go with my analogies. If you've been here for a while, have you met me? A young child with a parent who shows up, that child does not wake up worried about whether there will be a food on the table. They don't lie awake wondering if they'll be cared for. Even in hard moments, a child keeps reverting back to this baseline of someone has me. And I want to be clear, I'm not talking about kids who have been through real trauma. I am talking about that natural state, that built-in belief that says, if something happens, somebody will be there. That is exactly what high trust feels like in an organization. When trust is high, people don't spend their energy worrying. They don't speculate, there's no rumor mill, there are no corner conversations, there's no quiet campaign to take the place down. There is just an honest, shared desire to move the mission forward. Now, look at the other side, because this is where it gets expensive. If your organization is struggling or suffering, if it's stalled, if it's just not making any progress, I put money on it tracing it back to trust. And trust shapes the entire pattern of the place, the unwritten rules everybody operates by, even the ones nobody ever said out loud. People want to work somewhere where they feel valued, somewhere where they they believe they can have an impact, somewhere they can bring their full professional, authentic self and not get punished for it. What people cannot survive is the opposite: the tiptoeing, watching their back, being on guard 24-7. That is not just unpleasant, that does real damage to a person's nervous system. And that damage does not stay at the office. It follows them home and bleeds into everything. So let me just say plainly: show me an organization with high turnover, show me one that keeps missing its bottom line. Show me one where people are backbiting and doing all the small, strange, undermining things people do. And I will show you an organization with a trust deficit every single time. So if you're a leader, it absolutely behooves you to measure trust at every single opportunity you get. Every one. And I don't just mean measuring it for your own little team. If you lead 10 people, your job is not only those 10. When you step into a leadership role, you become a delegate of the whole organization. You carry it with you even when you clock out. I don't know, maybe that's the military in me. When I served, I was on call 24-7. Off duty didn't mean off. I had to act accordingly, I had to carry myself accordingly. And I know somebody's thinking, well, that's the military. Okay, fair, fine. Look at law enforcement, look at public servants, look at anyone in a public-facing role. I'd argue it's true for every leader, including every leader in corporate America. That's the job. You don't get a free pass on your judgment because it's after five. Yes, you're still human, right? Of course. You can have fun, you can have a real life, but you don't get to walk away from what you stand for the moment the workday ends. That obligation doesn't clock out because your obligation is to the organization. And here's the part that I really want to learn. Even if you only have 10 people, and even if the trust deficit doesn't seem to live within your 10, you should still be concerned. You should still be advocating for community across the whole place, not uniformity. I'm not asking everyone to be the same, community. Big difference. An environment where everyone can thrive, not just the people who happen to report to you. That is the role of a leader. That's what gets people to believe in the organization and not in their one particular boss. That's what lets people come to work, do good work, and actually feel like they belong. You know, that low hum you feel out there in the wider environment. You know, the one where nobody quite believes anybody, the one where everyone braces before they listen, that same hum can live inside any organization. It usually just whispers instead of shouts. At the core of all of this is trust. When companies fall, when teams fall, when good people quietly check out and take their best work somewhere else, you can almost trace the line back to trust. A pattern of mistrust only ever leads to one place, and that's the slow demise of the whole thing. The good news is that trust is not a mystery. You can see it, you can measure it, and you can rebuild it on purpose if you're willing to pause, gather the right table, get an honest diagnosis, build a real plan, and keep telling people the truth about the work the whole way through. So here's my closing question. What does your trust meter actually read right now? And when was the last time you checked? Hey, I'm glad you spent part of your evening with me. Please go take care of your people. This is Leadership After Five, where leadership gets real. I'll see you again in the next episode. Take care.