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Trust is the new core competency of leadership, but most executives are still approaching it with outdated tools. If your teams don’t trust your leadership, no mission statement, values deck or culture initiative will ever land.
Trust may be hard to quantify, but the benefits of getting it right are undeniable. A 2023 MIT Sloan study found that employees in high-trust organizations were 260% more motivated to work, 50% less likely to look for a new job and reported 41% lower burnout. Yet Gallup’s data still shows that just 21% of employees strongly agree they trust their company’s leadership.
Why is there a disconnect between what we know we need and the reality of where we are with trust in leadership? It could be because many leaders assume trust is the natural byproduct of clarity or competence. In the real world, trust is harder to earn and easier to lose because expectations have evolved. Today’s teams aren’t just watching what you decide, but how you decide it. They expect visibility into priorities, honesty about constraints and consistency between what’s said and what’s done.
It’s time to stop treating trust as a soft skill. Today’s top-performing leaders are engineering it with intent. Let’s explore how to do that.
Related: Strong Leaders Use These 4 Strategies to Build Trust in Their Workplace
How to break employee trust
Before we get into what factors facilitate trust between employees and their leaders, let’s define what leadership qualities and organizational policies break trust, with data from PwC’s 2024 Trust in U.S. Business Survey.
Executives believe they’re showing trust — but employees don’t feel it:
Eighty-six percent of executives say they highly trust their employees, but only 60% of employees feel highly trusted.
People act on trust — or the lack of it:
Sixty percent of employees say they’ve recommended a company because they trusted it. But 22% say they’ve left a company specifically due to trust issues. And 61% report that simply feeling distrusted by leadership makes it harder to do their jobs well.
Monitoring kills morale:
While many companies embrace hybrid or remote work, 35% of employees say they’d trust their company less if it tracked online activity. Flexibility and transparency build trust — surveillance erodes it.
Leaders need to understand that when trust in leadership breaks down, people don’t just feel it; they act on it. So, what actionable behaviors and policies build lasting trust?
How to earn employee trust
Shift decision-making from private to visible:
One of the fastest ways leaders lose trust without realizing it is by skipping the middle of the story. They announce a decision, explain what’s going to happen next and assume it will be implemented no problem. But for people inside the company, the part they actually need to hear is what came before the decision: What was considered? What wasn’t? Why did this direction win out?
People want to understand how leadership thinks. When they aren’t given the means to, they will assume decisions are made behind closed doors with no input from the teams who have to execute them.
Most leaders underestimate how much cognitive strain ambiguity creates for their teams. There’s good data behind this. A 2024 systematic review found that transparency in leadership accounted for over half of the observed differences in employee mindfulness, a state closely tied to better decision-making, focus and resilience under pressure.
This doesn’t mean every leadership choice needs a manifesto. But when something affects people’s work in a meaningful way, it’s worth sharing your thought process while it’s still unfolding, and letting people see the variables in play.
Of course, transparency alone isn’t enough — how leaders show up emotionally in uncertain moments also plays a defining role in trust.
Emotional intelligence turns authority into credibility:
The leaders who consistently earn trust aren’t always the most extroverted, charismatic or even the most experienced. More often, they’re the ones who can read the room, manage their own reactions and respond in ways that de-escalate uncertainty instead of amplifying it. This is what emotional intelligence looks like in practice.
Emotional intelligence accounts for 58% of performance across all job types. Among top performers, 90% score high in emotional intelligence. And companies prioritizing emotional intelligence are 22 times more likely to outperform those that do not.
But emotional intelligence isn’t measured by how warm or agreeable a leader appears. It shows up in the high-pressure moments: when a strategy shifts, when a team misses the mark, when tension shows up in a meeting no one planned for. Leaders who build trust in those moments know how to manage emotional friction without dodging it. They communicate directly, but without defensiveness. They stay present when others are reactive, and they’re able to deliver difficult feedback in a way that strengthens relationships, not sours them.
There’s also a consistency factor. Leaders with low emotional intelligence tend to be unpredictable in tone and presence — even if their strategy is sound. This makes teams second-guess intent, which leads to hesitation and doubt. Leaders with higher emotional intelligence create a steady signal. People know what to expect, not just in performance goals, but in how interactions will unfold. That stability builds confidence over time.
The future of leadership belongs to the trustworthy
When people understand how decisions are made, when they can rely on leaders to communicate clearly and respond with composure, they’re more likely to stay engaged even when circumstances are uncertain or outcomes are tough.
Trust is built in layers over time through what people see and experience every day. And in a business environment that’s always changing and responding to change, that kind of trust may be the most stable advantage a leader has.
Start by asking: Where in our current leadership approach are we skipping the middle of the story? Trust begins when leaders begin to show their work.
