What's Actually Eroding Trust on Your Team
A practical look at why most trust-building efforts target the wrong layer of the problem
In this moment of massive technology acceleration and even greater shifts in how organizations will structure themselves to meet a new demand, the growing trust perception gap between leaders and employees is becoming harder to ignore.
A few data points:
A recent PwC 2024 Trust Survey found that 86% of executives believe their employees trust the company at high levels. Only 67% of employees say the same. The gap doesn't stop at the edge of the C-suite, either — just 44% of executives say they trust each other, compared with 53% of employees who say they trust their peers. Leaders are consistently more confident about the state of trust than the data supports.
Gartner's April 2025 survey of more than 2,850 employees found that 79% have low trust in organizational change, and traced the mistrust to a specific pattern: senior leaders withholding information, retracting decisions, or looking for someone to blame once things go sideways. Glassdoor's 2026 Worklife Trends report shows the same erosion from the employee side — mentions of "distrust" in workplace reviews are up 26% year over year, and senior leadership ratings have dropped to their lowest point since 2017.
AI is part of what's straining trust right now, but it's one driver among several, not the whole story. Reorganizations, rolling layoffs, and flattening hierarchies are doing their own damage.
On the Team Lab podcast, Joshua Pinchuk points to a quieter version of this: as organizations flatten, less information reaches the first-line managers responsible for preparing their teams for what's coming. Those managers end up explaining decisions they were never briefed on, and the team reads the hesitation as something to distrust.
Most organizations respond to a trust problem the same way: a workshop, an apology tour, a team-building day. These treat trust as something that broke between two or three individuals. Usually, it didn't. Unclear decision rights, a purpose nobody can state the same way twice, expectations that were never actually agreed to out loud — these produce the friction that gets blamed on personalities, when the actual malfunction sits in the system surrounding them.
How We Approach Trust Gaps with Leaders & Teams
To be honest, leaders don’t call us to report that their team has a trust issue. There are presenting symptoms: hesitation to speak up in meetings, micromanagement, assigning blame are a few. Typically, a Distinctive Teams engagement starts with a systemic question: what in this team's operating system is producing the breakdown, not who's responsible for it. An initial diagnostic assessment, interviews and data collection will typically reveal a systemic rather than individual root cause. And this shapes everything that follows.
Discovery comes first: clarifying the team's purpose, mapping who actually holds which decisions, and building a Team Canvas the group can point to instead of arguing about from memory. Part of that work is agreeing on a transformational KPI — a measure the team can only hit together (this is also effective across teams), which makes shared accountability the default in a world of individual reward systems.
Once the system is visible, the harder work starts: deliberately building both psychological safety and relational maturity at the same time. Relational maturity is the higher bar: a team's capacity to hold real support and real challenge simultaneously, rather than trading one for the other. A team that's only "nice" to each other has safety without maturity; conflict gets smoothed over instead of used. Distinctive Teams treats trust and accountability as a polarity to keep managing vs. a tradeoff to settle once and move on from.
What keeps that work from fading after the engagement ends is coherence, which translates to staying clear, connected, and steady under pressure, on purpose, week after week. Matt Tabor, also on the Team Lab podcast, describes vulnerability-based trust as faster and more durable than the predictive kind, and points to simple recurring rituals: a regular personal-and-professional check-in — as what actually sustains it, even though these are often the first thing teams cut when things get busy. Jardena London makes a related point from a different angle: a leader who removed a literal obstacle for her team built more trust in that moment than any conversation about trust could have. Coherence gets built in concrete, repeated moves vs. single declarations at a quarterly all hands meeting.
A team rebuilds trust
Let’s revisit a recent client example: A product leadership team at a leading SaaS company missed a major launch date. What followed was less about the missed date than what came after it: blame moved sideways, conversations that should have happened in the room happened in side channels, and two directors started routing decisions around each other rather than through each other.
An Upgrade Your Team OS engagement started where it always does, with discovery, not jumping directly into repair. It surfaced that the team had never actually agreed on who owned late-stage scope changes. Both directors had been making reasonable calls inside an undefined boundary, and the launch had simply exposed it. The team built a Team Canvas that named decision rights explicitly, set a transformational KPI tied to joint delivery rather than each function's separate metrics, and used facilitated sessions to surface timeline risk and disagreement directly instead of managing it quietly. A 90-day plan with biweekly coherence check-ins kept the new agreements alive past the workshop.
Three months later, escalations to the executive team had dropped, side-channel conversations had mostly moved back into the room, and the team's pulse-survey trust score had visibly recovered. The two directors were the same people with the same instincts, now operating inside a structure that finally matched the work.
Rebuilding trust is work on the system: the undefined decision rights, the unstated agreements, the misaligned or broken structure underpinning team relationships. That work must be done collectively by leaders and their teams.
