Your team is keeping score. Not on productivity metrics or quarterly goals, though they notice those too. They’re tracking something more fundamental: whether you do what you say you’ll do. Whether your words match your actions. Whether it’s safe to tell you the truth.
You can see it in the small behaviors that shift when trust erodes. The documentation starts innocuously enough, one email summarizing a conversation. Then another. Then, meeting notes were sent “just to confirm we’re aligned.” Before long, every interaction needs a paper trail because nobody trusts that words will be remembered … or honored.
Trust shows up in the smallest moments. It’s in the meeting where nobody challenges the bad idea. It’s in the Slack channel or Google chat that goes silent when leadership joins. It’s in the colleague who suddenly starts documenting every single conversation.
Trust isn’t just a nice-to-have for high-performing teams. It’s the oxygen that allows everything else to breathe, and when it’s missing, even the simplest interactions become exhausting.
The Signs Are Always There (If You Know Where to Look)
Walk into a meeting (in person or online) where trust is low, and you’ll feel it before anyone even speaks. Cameras stay off. Eye contact is averted. People agree too quickly, then nothing gets done. The real conversation happens after the meeting ends, in private messages and side conversations.
I call it “strategic silence” – that moment when someone has an opinion but chooses to keep it to themselves because speaking up feels risky. Maybe they’ve been shut down before. Maybe they’ve watched someone else take the fall for challenging authority. Either way, the message is clear: It’s safer to stay quiet.
Here’s what really fascinates me about this: when people stop voicing their concerns openly, they don’t stop having them. They just redirect them. The meeting after the meeting becomes where the real work happens, or more accurately, where the real work gets undermined.
This isn’t just a feeling I’m having. Slack’s Future of Work research shows that more than one in four desk workers believe their employer doesn’t trust them, and those employees report 2.3 times higher stress, 4.2 times lower sense of belonging, and are over twice as likely to look for a new job. Strategic silence carries a real cost.
The Psychology Behind the Breakdown
After working with teams across industries, from fintech to healthcare to commercial banking, I’ve seen the same trust destroyers show up again and again. Some are obvious: lying, breaking promises, taking credit for others’ work. But some are more insidious:
Inconsistency – Enforcing rules selectively or playing favorites sends a clear message: The game is rigged, and some people have an unfair advantage.
Information hoarding – When someone treats knowledge like currency to be traded rather than shared, everyone else feels deliberately excluded from what matters.
Blame-shifting – Refusing to own mistakes doesn’t just damage your credibility. It tells the entire team that vulnerability is dangerous here.
Passive tolerance – Letting tension simmer without addressing it doesn’t make conflict disappear. It makes it metastasize.
What I’ve discovered is that most people who engage in these behaviors aren’t trying to destroy trust. They’re reacting to their own unmet psychological needs for safety, control, fairness, and/or belonging.
Someone micromanages because they’re terrified of being held accountable for someone else’s mistake. Someone withdraws from collaboration because past transparency was punished. Someone becomes territorial with information because they’ve seen others get credit for their ideas. Understanding the why behind the behavior is essential for addressing the what.
The impact is significant. A multi-country study from Workplace Intelligence found that 68% of employees say feeling distrusted directly reduces their daily effort at work. More than half (58%) reported that a lack of trust affects their career choices, and nearly one in four had actually left a company because they didn’t feel trusted. What looks like a “culture issue” turns out to be real turnover.
What Psychological Safety Actually Means
Harvard’s Amy Edmondson identified four progressive stages of psychological safety, and I see teams get stuck at different levels all the time:
Inclusion Safety – “I feel accepted for who I am.”
Learner Safety – “I can ask questions and make mistakes.”
Contributor Safety – “I can share my ideas without fear.”
Challenger Safety – “I can question how we do things.”
Most organizations think they’re doing fine because they’ve achieved inclusion safety. People feel welcome to show up. But they stall out at learner safety, the moment someone asks a “stupid question” or admits they don’t understand something, and the response is eye-rolling or exasperation rather than support.
If your team can’t safely say “I don’t know” or “I messed up,” you don’t have psychological safety. You have politeness. And politeness crumbles the moment pressure increases.
The organizations that reach challenger safety, where people can push back on sacred cows and propose radical changes without fear, are the ones that innovate, adapt, and retain their best talent. Because their best talent doesn’t have to choose between speaking up and feeling secure.
The data backs this up. Research summarized by The Digital Project Manager on psychological safety and innovation shows that high-safety teams can produce up to 10 times as many patents as low-safety teams. These teams are also about 25% more likely to collaborate effectively and see measurable reductions in project errors. Yet a review in the Journal of Accountancy found that only about a quarter of leaders are perceived as fostering genuine psychological safety on their teams.
There’s a gap between what leaders think they’re creating and what teams actually experience.
The Trust Gap Leaders Don’t See
Leaders often think trust is better than it actually is. Forbes reports that in one global study, 86% of executives said they highly trust employees, but only 60% of workers felt trusted by their employer. That’s a 26-point perception gap.
According to Gallup, only about 21% of U.S. employees strongly agree that they trust their organization’s leadership, a decline from pre-2019 levels. Your team is watching, evaluating, and drawing conclusions from what you do, not from what you say you value.
The Edelman Trust Barometer found that about 79% of employees say they trust their own employer, but that trust is highly contingent on daily experiences with their direct manager and senior leadership. Trust isn’t built in town halls or company-wide emails. Instead, trust is built, or broken, in the small, everyday interactions.
When Trust Breaks: The Repair Roadmap
The hard truth nobody wants to hear is that rebuilding trust takes exponentially longer than destroying it. One careless comment in a tense moment can undo months of relationship-building. And the repair process? It demands vulnerability at the exact moment when being vulnerable feels most dangerous.
The good news is that it’s possible. I’ve watched teams come back from devastating breaches: betrayals, public embarrassments, and systematic exclusion. The difference between teams that repair and teams that fracture comes down to whether leaders are willing to do the uncomfortable work.
Here’s what I’ve seen that works:
- Acknowledge the breach directly
Don’t minimize it. Don’t explain it away. Just name it: “I said I’d have this to you by Friday, and I didn’t. That broke my commitment to you.” - Listen without defending
When someone tells you how your action affected them, resist the urge to explain your intent. They’re not telling you what you meant to do. They’re telling you what they experienced. - Own it authentically
No qualifiers. No “I’m sorry if you felt…” or “I’m sorry, but…” Just: “I messed up, and I’m sorry for the impact that had on you.” - Make clear commitments
Vague promises like “I’ll do better” don’t rebuild trust. Specific commitments do: “Moving forward, I’ll send you an update by end-of-day every Thursday, and if something changes, I’ll let you know immediately.” - Follow through consistently
This is where most trust repair fails. The first few times are easy. The twentieth time? That’s when people start to believe it’s real.
The Four Pillars People Are Evaluating
Let’s get practical. When your team assesses whether to trust you, and yes, they’re constantly assessing, they’re not thinking in abstract terms. They’re measuring four specific dimensions:
Benevolence – Do I believe they have good intentions toward me, or are they just looking out for themselves?
Integrity – Do their actions consistently match their words, or is there a pattern of saying one thing and doing another?
Competence – Can they actually deliver on what they promise, or am I going to be left holding the bag?
Predictability – Will they show up the same way tomorrow as they did today, or do I have to brace for whatever version of them shows up at the door?
When even one of these pillars is shaky, the whole structure becomes unstable. And once that instability begins, it feeds on itself in predictable ways. Micromanagement breeds resentment. Resentment breeds information withholding. Information withholding breeds more micromanagement. It’s a spiral that’s hard to escape without deliberate intervention.
A peer-reviewed study published in Frontiers in Psychology (2022) on managerial trustworthy behavior found a direct link between perceived trustworthiness and employee engagement. When employees perceive their manager as more benevolent, consistent, and fair, their energy, dedication, and work engagement increase meaningfully. The study also found that “perceived insider status” (feeling like a valued insider rather than an outsider) acts as a pathway through which trust boosts engagement.
Employees who feel trusted are significantly more likely to report going “above and beyond” and putting in extra discretionary effort compared with those who don’t feel trusted. The four pillars aren’t abstract ideals. They’re the framework your team uses to decide how much of themselves to bring to work.
The Practice of Trust
What I love about teaching this work, especially when I integrate improv principles into leadership development, is that trust is a practice, not a destination. Some days you’ll navigate it beautifully. Some days you’ll stumble. The question isn’t whether you’ll make mistakes. The question is: What will you do in the moments after?
In improv comedy, we have a principle called “Yes, and…” that encourages accepting what your scene partner offers and building on it rather than blocking or negating. Trust works the same way. Someone extends vulnerability, such as “I don’t understand this, can you help?” You have a choice in that moment. You can shut it down with judgment: “You should know this by now.” Or you can build on it: “Great question, let’s walk through it together.”
Every interaction is either a deposit into the trust account or a withdrawal. Typically, I coach leaders by sharing with them: Your team is keeping score, whether you realize it or not. They notice every time you say one thing and do another. They notice every time you ask for feedback, but punish honesty. They notice every time you demand accountability from them, but excuse it in yourself or your favorites.
The good news? Small, consistent actions compound over time. One honest conversation doesn’t rebuild years of broken trust. But ten honest conversations start to shift the pattern. Twenty creates a new norm. Fifty becomes your reputation.
Start With One Conversation
If you’re reading this and thinking, “Well, trust in my team is already gone,” I understand. The gap between where you are and where you want to be can feel insurmountable. Guess what? You don’t have to fix everything at once.
Start with one behavior, just one, and commit to changing it. Maybe it’s finally having that repair conversation you’ve been avoiding for three months. Maybe it’s following through on something you said you’d do but let slip. Maybe it’s asking a direct report, “What do you need from me to feel more supported here?” and then actually doing something with their answer instead of getting defensive.
Trust doesn’t require perfection. It requires consistency, humility, and the courage to be vulnerable first. As leaders, as colleagues, as human beings trying to do meaningful work together, that’s what we owe each other.
Because at the end of the day, people don’t leave companies because of the work. They leave cultures where they don’t feel safe, valued, or trusted. And that’s something every single one of us has the power to change, one interaction at a time.
What’s one small way you could rebuild trust with a colleague this week? I’d love to hear what you’re working on. Reach out at gina@ginatrimarco.com
References
Edelman. (2024). 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer: Special Report – Trust at Work.
Forbes (Kelly, J.). (2024, March 11). The Trust Gap Between Employers and Workers.
Gallup. (2025, March 26). Why Trust in Leaders Is Faltering and How to Gain It Back.
Journal of Accountancy. (2024, February 29). Psychological safety: Creating a workplace where all thrive.
Liu, D., Bakari, H., Niaz, M., Zhang, Q., & Shah, I. A. (2022). Impact of Managerial Trustworthy Behavior on Employee Engagement: Mediating Role of Perceived Insider Status. Frontiers in Psychology, 13. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.942697
PwC. (2024). Trust in U.S. Business Survey.
Slack. (2021). Future of Work Research: Trust as a Driver of Productivity.
The Digital Project Manager. (2025, June 1). How Psychological Safety Impacts Project Performance.
Workplace Intelligence. (2020). Trust in the Workplace Study.
