Why trust is undervalued in management

'My executives are all A-players. They just don't trust each other.' That's what a $60M CEO told me over coffee this morning. His revenue was up 40%, but his leadership team was falling apart. Sound familiar? Here's the counterintuitive truth I've learned after working with dozens of scaling companies: High performers often create low trust. Not because they're untrustworthy, but because they're too capable. Think about it. When you stack your leadership team with ambitious, competent executives, each one is used to being 'the person with the answers.' They've built careers on being right. But scaling a business isn't about being right. It's about being aligned. Last month, I watched a Chief Revenue Officer and COO nearly sink a $100M deal. Not because either was wrong - both had valid concerns. But their inability to trust each other's judgment created decision paralysis. The real cost of low trust: - 3x longer decision cycles - Duplicated efforts across departments - Missed market opportunities - Rising stress, falling margins Your smartest executives are often your biggest trust barriers because: - They have the strongest opinions - They're used to being proven right - They've succeeded through individual excellence - They struggle with shared vulnerability Want to build trust between high performers? Start here: ✅ Create shared defeats, not just shared victories. Nothing builds trust like failing together and recovering stronger. ✅ Stop celebrating individual heroes. Start rewarding collaborative wins. ✅ Make decisions visible. Trust grows in transparency and dies in darkness. ✅ Build accountability around team outcomes, not departmental metrics. Remember: You don't have a trust problem. You have an alignment challenge. Your executives don't need trust falls. They need a compelling reason to depend on each other. Curious: Have you ever had a high-performing team that struggled with trust? What turned it around? hashtag#Leadership hashtag#OrganizationalDevelopment hashtag#ExecutiveTeam

One of my client companies recently made a bold shift: They replaced their Engagement KPI with a Trust KPI. And it’s one of the smartest moves I’ve seen. Why? Because trust is not a byproduct of engagement - it’s the precondition. 📚 Research backs this up: A meta-analysis by De Jong et al. (2016) found that team trust is a strong predictor of performance, especially in high-interdependence teams. Yet we treat trust like something we either have or don’t. 👉But trust isn’t a mood but rather a design decision. To start with, we need to understand 3 types of trust: 1. Cognitive 2. Affective 3. Swift Most leaders focus on cognitive or affective trust - built over time. But there’s a third type they don’t know about: Swift Trust. 📍Swift Trust forms quickly in temporary, remote, or fast-moving teams. It doesn’t require deep familiarity, it requires structure. And here’s how leaders can engineer it: ✔️ Start with clearly defined roles and expectations ✔️ Align fast around shared goals and purpose ✔️ Create quick wins that build early credibility ✔️ Model openness and ask for input from day one ✔️ Name the importance of trust explicitly In other words, trust isn’t “earned slowly” in every context. It can be catalyzed intentionally if you know how. That’s what I’m helping this client do: not just educate about trust but build it inside the team with psychological safety and my method, one behavior and ritual at a time. Because when trust becomes a designed feature, not an accidental outcome - performance, inclusion, and engagement follow. P.S.: Which type of trust is most alive in your team right now?

The real cost of poor decisions doesn’t show up in dollars. It shows up in trust. I’ve seen plenty of financial mistakes in my career. Numbers can be fixed. Budgets can be rebalanced. Cash flow can be recovered. But once trust is lost, it’s a much more complex repair. I remember a time when leadership pushed through a decision that looked good on paper but ignored the realities on the ground. The financials told one story, but the frontline staff knew another. When it failed, the numbers were painful. But the bigger damage was invisible: Staff stopped believing in leadership. Partners became cautious. The board grew sceptical of future plans. That’s the ripple effect of poor decisions. The dollars are measurable, but the erosion of trust quietly compounds. As a CFO, I’ve learned that protecting trust is just as crucial as protecting capital. In fact, the two are inseparable. An organisation can survive a bad quarter. It won’t survive if people stop believing in its leadership. That’s why every decision I support is weighed not just on its financial impact, but on its trust impact. Because once trust is broken, no spreadsheet can win it back.

Most leaders and managers often get 'building trust' wrong. They think it’s built through team bonding, feel-good speeches, or simply “giving it time” to get to know each other. But trust doesn’t come from feeling good. It comes from clarity. A few years ago, a large CRM company went through mass layoffs. They brought me in to run leadership workshops, and one exec asked me: "𝘞𝘩𝘺 𝘪𝘴𝘯’𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘢 𝘵𝘳𝘶𝘴𝘵-𝘣𝘶𝘪𝘭𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘴𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘰𝘯? 𝘠𝘰𝘶 𝘬𝘯𝘰𝘸, 𝘵𝘳𝘶𝘴𝘵 𝘧𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘴, 𝘵𝘦𝘢𝘮-𝘣𝘶𝘪𝘭𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘦𝘹𝘦𝘳𝘤𝘪𝘴𝘦𝘴?" I told them: "Because you can’t build trust if people don’t even have clarity on where they stand." 𝗜𝗳 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝘁𝗲𝗮𝗺 𝗶𝘀 𝘂𝗻𝘀𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝘄𝗵𝘆 𝗱𝗲𝗰𝗶𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗺𝗮𝗱𝗲, 𝘄𝗵𝗮𝘁’𝘀 𝗮𝗵𝗲𝗮𝗱, 𝗼𝗿 𝘄𝗵𝗮𝘁’𝘀 𝗲𝘅𝗽𝗲𝗰𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗺, 𝗻𝗼 𝗮𝗺𝗼𝘂𝗻𝘁 𝗼𝗳 ‘𝗰𝘂𝗹𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲’ 𝘄𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝗳𝗶𝘅 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁. When people are uncertain, they don’t need reassurance. They need clarity. Clarity on the past → Why something happened. Clarity on the present → The reality we’re in. Clarity on the future → What’s known, what’s uncertain, and what it means for the team. You don’t ask people to trust you. You create an environment where trust is earned through transparency, consistency, and delivering on what you can control. If you’re leading a team, start here: Before asking for trust, ask yourself: Have I made things clear? Would love to hear your take. Drop it in the comments. #Leadership #Trust #Teamwork #Clarity --- I’m Hugo Pereira, co-founder of Ritmoo and fractional growth operator. I’ve led businesses from €1M to €100M+ while building purpose-driven, resilient teams. Follow me for insights on growth, leadership, and teamwork. My book, Teamwork Transformed, launches early 2025.

After decades in leadership, I’ve witnessed the fragility of trust firsthand. Team trust is the invisible thread holding everything together, and it isn’t built in grand gestures. It’s earned - or lost - in those small moments when we think no one’s watching. What really stands out to me as trust-breakers are seemingly small events - things like forgetting to acknowledge contributions or showing favoritism in meetings. But it’s these issues that can have seismic impacts on team dynamics. People notice when leaders don’t give credit where it’s due, and they feel unappreciated as a result - creating a domino effect of lower morale and productivity. Here’s a hard truth I’ve learned in my time leading teams: While trust takes years to build, it can evaporate in seconds. The most damaging part? It’s not always about major ethical breaches. Sometimes it’s those subtle, throwaway moments - forgetting to acknowledge contributions, showing favoritism in meetings - that create hairline fractures in the foundation of your leadership. The trickiest part is that once trust is broken, there’s often no way back. I’ve seen talented leaders forced to leave roles not because of dramatic failures, but because they couldn’t rebuild trust after seemingly minor missteps. Ultimately, what I’ve come to realize is that trustworthiness isn’t just a leadership principle. It’s your most valuable currency. Guard it zealously in every interaction, no matter how small, because once you’ve created that bond of trust, your team can do incredible things. #ethics #organizationalculture #businessintegrity

Most performance problems don’t start with strategy. They start with silence. Not the silence of focus, but the kind that creeps in when trust erodes. When high performers stop challenging decisions. When meetings get quieter, but nothing feels clearer. When things still look good from the outside, but feel off on the inside. In five decades of coaching elite teams in sports and business: I’ve seen this before. The erosion never starts in the numbers. It starts in the culture. And once that begins, results don’t decline gradually. They drop sharply. Sometimes without warning. Take Boeing. Engineers raised serious safety concerns. But leadership, chasing speed and shareholder pressure, didn’t respond. The result wasn’t just $2.5 billion in penalties and two crashes. It was cultural collapse the kind that makes even the most talented teams distrust their own systems. This happens everywhere, in subtler forms: – Teams default to agreement, not alignment – Middle managers avoid hard conversations – Leaders push harder, but clarity stays missing – Talent stays longer than they should, then exits all at once And still, many CEOs think: “We just need better execution.” But what they really need is to repair the conditions that make execution possible. In high-growth companies, trust isn’t a vibe. It’s a system. When it breaks, speed dies. Accountability fragments. And people start protecting themselves instead of the mission. The data is clear: - High-trust orgs return 286% more to shareholders (GPTW) - 76% of people with low psychological safety underperform (Harvard Business Review) - 84% of execs don’t measure trust until it’s too late (PwC) If you’re leading a company where: Execution is inconsistent Tension is rising but unspoken Your best people seem distant, but still delivering …it’s not about effort. It’s about alignment. And that’s what I help fix. I work with CEOs and executive teams to realign trust, accountability, and culture fast. Within 30 days, teams start talking more clearly, owning more confidently, and moving with a rhythm they haven’t felt in quarters. If you’re leading through complexity and feel like things are slower than they should be this is the work. Not theory. Not personality training. Structural cultural clarity. If you’re ready, let’s talk. #ExecutiveCoaching #LeadershipDevelopment #OrganizationalAlignment #HighPerformanceTeams #CultureTransformation

Q. Why are there so many bad managers? A. Fear-based management (using threats and intimidation to get people to do what you want) is the prevailing leadership model. Most managers are trained to use fear, not trust, to motivate people. They only know power & control. They have only been managed through fear themselves. Their ideas about what leaders do (direct, command, measure, instruct, monitor, course-correct, praise and discipline employees) are all fear-based too. The hardest part of a manager's job is to give the corporation as much as possible of the results they want without killing the good energy on the team or mistreating employees. That's a tough balancing act. Of course many if not most managers are going to err on the side of pleasing the employer that pays them. If they try to lead through trust they may get their hand slapped. They may be told they're too soft or not businesslike enough. I got told that and I'm sure lots of other managers have heard it, too! It's hard or nearly impossible to push back against that pressure. Your only recourse is to get another job - but what if that company manages through fear, too? It takes a concerted and consistent effort over time for an organization to move from fear-based management to trust-based leadership. The good news is that it costs nothing to move from fear to trust and the rewards for doing so are incredible – in terms of customer satisfaction, product or service quality, financial results, teamwork and innovation. People enjoy their work more, collaborate more and are less likely to quit when they are led through trust – unsurprisingly.

Employee trust is at an all-time low. And that’s on every leader. We've swung from toxic hustle culture to "quiet quitting" and "bare minimum Mondays" in a heartbeat. And honestly? I get it. This isn't about laziness. It's about broken trust. For years, employees have watched companies: - Demand "family culture" while laying off thousands - Preach work-life balance while texting at midnight - Talk about transparency while hiding bad news After decades of grinding themselves into dust, employees are drawing hard lines between work and life. They're protecting themselves from getting screwed over. Because employers have shown that they can’t be trusted. That trust won't rebuild itself. As leaders, we need to: 👉 Actually give a shit about our people 👉 Connect roles to their purpose, not corporate BS 👉 Invest in their growth 👉 Give fair compensation tied to results 👉 Create room for two-way feedback without fear The days of expecting blind loyalty are over. And that's a good thing. Great cultures aren't built on buzzwords and free snacks — They're built on mutual trust and respect. Want your employees to care? Show them you care first. ____ 📌 PS. Join our free newsletter & community of 100,000+ https://lnkd.in/gRxdayew

Trust doesn’t come from what you say—it comes from what you do. Leaders often preach collaboration and transparency, but when actions favor output over principles, trust erodes rapidly. Here’s the truth: trust is built—or destroyed—in the small moments of leadership. Inconsistency ends up smelling a whole lot like a lack of integrity, and your reports will absolutely notice if your actions don't align with your words. When a direct report struggles, the easy choice is to avoid the hard conversation. But that moment? It’s your chance to teach, to support, and to build trust. Walking away from an opportunity to have a straightforward conversation robs that individual of a learning experience. A culture that values outcomes over behaviors kills innovation. Teams stop taking risks when mistakes aren’t safe. And there is no reason to favor outcomes (or delivery) at the expense of the behaviors, because they can (and must) exist simultaneously to truly have a high performance team. Leaders must align actions with their words. That’s the foundation of a high-performance, high-trust culture. Leadership without trust isn’t leadership—it’s management. I would love to hear shared stories about the impact that trust--or lack thereof--has had on your team in the past. What’s one action you’ve taken that strengthened trust on your team? What's one action you've seen that damaged trust?

A few months ago, one of my clients brought on a new COO. In his first few days with the company, the new hire used a phrase I had never heard before - "moving at the speed of trust." I was blown away. Though the language was new, its essence was familiar. I was reminded of a concept I learned in Mr. Laurence's HS chemistry class: limiting reagents. Limiting reagents are substances that are completely consumed in a chemical reaction, essentially limiting the amount of product that can be formed. When the limiting reagent is gone, the reaction stops. (stay with me, math and science phobes!) So, for example, imagine trying to replicate the "classic" volcano reaction by mixing baking soda and vinegar. If I only have a teaspoon of baking powder, it doesn't matter if I pour 6 gallons of vinegar on top of it - the reaction will almost immediately stop. In this context, baking soda is my limiting reagent. It's the thing that stops all other things from happening the moment it ceases to exist. This is what trust is on a team - the limiting reagent. The thing that will cause everything else to stop the moment it runs out. Many leaders continue to pour gallons of vinegar on teams that have run out of baking soda and wonder why they aren't getting any more production. It's because the trust has expired... - people don't trust that you'll do what you say - they don't trust that your expectations will be clear - they don't trust that their needs for balance and boundaries will be respected - they don't trust YOU. Never forget what Simon Sinek once said: "A team is not a group of people who work together. A team is a group of people who trust each other." No, trust, no team. And, no team, no triumph. -------- #management #leadership #team ♻️ Repost to share with your network!