Most leadership teams say they want better results: faster execution, higher productivity, more innovation, stronger engagement.
But there’s a hard truth many organizations still resist:
You can’t sustainably deliver great results in a low-trust culture.
You might hit a target once. You might push people hard and squeeze out a big quarter. But if your people don’t trust their leaders and each other, the cost of every result goes up—more oversight, more friction, more rework, more burnout, and more talent walking out the door.
Trust isn’t a “soft” topic next to “hard” business results. Trust is the environment where results are either multiplied or slowly suffocated.
In this article, we’ll explore:
How trust directly shapes cost, speed, and quality of results.
Why hybrid and remote work have made trust more visible than ever.
The hidden “trust tax” you pay in a low-trust culture.
Practical moves leaders can make this quarter to build a high-trust, high-performance environment.
Think about your organization as a system that turns ideas into results.
Between those two points—idea and outcome—are meetings, approvals, handovers, decisions, and human relationships.
In a high-trust culture, that system runs relatively smoothly:
People share information quickly.
Decisions are made at the right level.
Teams coordinate without endless escalation.
Mistakes are surfaced early rather than hidden.
The same work gets done faster and with less friction.
In a low-trust culture, everything slows down and becomes more expensive:
More layers of sign-off “just to be safe.”
Emails copied to half the organization to cover oneself.
Extra rounds of review because no one trusts the first version.
People waiting for permission instead of using their judgment.
The work may still get done—but it costs more energy, money, and time than it should.
We often call this gap a trust dividend or a trust tax:
Trust dividend: The performance boost you get when people are willing to collaborate, make decisions, and bring their best ideas forward because the environment feels safe and fair.
Trust tax: The drag on performance caused by fear, suspicion, and politics. The work still happens—but slowly, with frustration, and often at a lower standard.
You’re paying one of these, whether you measure it or not.
Nowhere is the link between trust and results more visible than in how organizations handle flexible and remote work.
Many employees experienced something like this:
“We delivered strong results while working from home. But now I’m being told I must come back to the office, not because the work truly requires it, but because I’m apparently not trusted.”
At the same time, many leaders faced their own worries:
“If I can’t see people, how do I know they’re working? How do I protect the culture? How do I make sure collaboration doesn’t disappear?”
The tension is real. But here’s the key thing: hybrid work didn’t create trust issues—it revealed them.
In a high-trust environment, flexible work becomes a conversation about:
“What outcomes do we need?”
“How do we stay connected and aligned?”
“What guardrails help us deliver great results and protect wellbeing?”
In a low-trust environment, the same debate quickly turns into:
Monitoring tools and surveillance.
Mandatory office days without a clear why.
Whispered assumptions about who is “really” working.
People might still comply. They might show up. But when they feel controlled rather than trusted, most will do the minimum. They’ll do the job description—and stop there.
You lose exactly what you say you want: discretionary effort, creativity, and genuine ownership.
High-performing people have options. They want:
Meaningful work.
Leaders they respect.
Reasonable freedom in how they deliver outcomes.
A culture that is demanding but fair.
In a low-trust environment, they experience the opposite:
Decisions that feel arbitrary.
A sense that they’re constantly being checked up on.
Leaders who talk about empowerment but behave in a controlling way.
Politics and favoritism that matter more than contribution.
So they quietly start looking around.
Today, people can anonymously review your organization, your culture, and your leadership online. A few honest reviews from disengaged high performers can speak louder to the market than any employer branding campaign.
When your best people leave, the impact isn’t limited to their individual output:
You lose deep institutional knowledge.
You lose trusted relationships with customers and partners.
You send a clear signal to the remaining team about what is—and isn’t—tolerated here.
You potentially damage your reputation with future talent.
On the other hand, retaining strong performers in a high-trust culture has a compounding effect:
Teams move faster because they’ve worked together for years.
People can anticipate each other’s thinking and communicate with fewer words.
New hires are onboarded into a stable, credible environment rather than a revolving door.
Trust doesn’t just help you keep people; it helps you keep the right people long enough to build something extraordinary.
Trust is built at the intersection of character and competence:
Character: people trust your motives. They believe you’re honest, fair, and willing to do the right thing even when it’s hard.
Competence: people trust your ability. You consistently deliver what you promise, at the quality and speed you said you would.
Results alone are not enough to build deep trust:
If you deliver impressive numbers by cutting corners or burning people out, trust will erode.
If you are kind, well-intentioned, and supportive but rarely deliver what you promised, trust will also erode.
What builds real, durable trust is the combination:
“This leader cares about our people and they deliver. When they make a commitment, it happens—and it happens the right way.”
That’s why the clarity of expectations is so important. Vague goals are a trust killer.
People need to know:
What outcome looks like “done and good.”
What timelines and constraints they’re working with.
How success will be measured.
Where they have freedom to choose their own approach.
Without that clarity, you get one of two outcomes:
People over-engineer the work because they’re afraid of failing unseen expectations.
Or they under-deliver, then get punished for a standard that was never clearly spelled out.
Neither builds trust—or results.
When trust is low, many leaders fall back on what feels safe: command and control.
More rules. More detailed procedures. More approvals. More reports.
On the surface, this looks like “tight management.” In reality, it is usually a response to fear.
You see it in patterns like:
Leaders who must be in every meeting “to stay in the loop.”
Teams waiting for sign-off on decisions they are perfectly capable of making.
Initiative being interpreted as “going rogue.”
Compliance becoming more important than contribution.
The irony is that command-and-control almost always produces the opposite of what it intends:
Instead of accountability, you get passive obedience.
Instead of smart risk-taking, you get people doing only what they’re told.
Instead of speed, you get bottlenecks.
One CEO captured the alternative powerfully:
The price of freedom is performance.
When people deliver strong results, you can give them more freedom—more flexibility, more choice, more responsibility. And that freedom, in turn, often lifts performance even further.
In a high-trust culture, freedom and performance grow together. Expectations are explicit. Measures are clear. People know what they’re accountable for. And leaders can step back enough to let them do great work.
Trust is also deeply connected to how people use their time.
When there is clarity and trust:
People understand the few goals that matter most.
They have the autonomy to organize their work around those goals.
They can say “no” or “not now” to distractions that don’t serve those priorities.
In that environment, productivity means making meaningful progress on the right things, not simply being busy.
When there is low trust and low clarity:
Everything feels urgent.
Everyone feels accessible at all times.
Work is interrupted constantly by other people’s priorities.
“Hard work” becomes a badge of honor, even if very little of it moves the dial.
Leaders sometimes respond to this by asking for more visibility: more status updates, more dashboards, more check-ins.
Those things are useful—but only if they are built on a foundation of clear goals and mutual trust.
When goals are clear, you don’t need to hover over people to know whether they’re delivering. You can:
Agree on outcomes and milestones.
Review progress at a consistent rhythm.
Adjust priorities together when reality changes.
Give people space to manage their own energy and focus.
This is how trust and productivity reinforce each other. People feel treated like adults. They feel the weight of responsibility—and the freedom that comes with it.
Building a high-trust culture is a long-term journey. But every leadership team can start shifting the environment in tangible ways within a single quarter.
Here are four moves you can make:
For your own team, choose one or two key outcomes for the next 90 days and answer together:
What does success look like in concrete terms?
What is “good enough” and what is “excellent”?
What decisions can team members make without you?
What trade-offs should they prioritize if conflicts arise?
Write it down. Share it. Check understanding. Adjust as needed.
Clarity is one of the most respectful things you can offer people.
Ask your team:
“Where do we lose time, energy, or money because trust is low or unclear?”
You might hear:
“We redo work because expectations change late.”
“We need too many approvals for routine decisions.”
“We hesitate to raise issues because we’re afraid of the reaction.”
“We aren’t sure how success will be judged, so we over-prepare.”
Choose one or two trust taxes and deliberately reduce them:
Shorten an approval chain.
Decide which meetings no longer need your presence.
Set a clear norm for how mistakes will be handled (e.g., “we learn together, not blame”).
Define a clear decision owner for a recurring issue.
Celebrate early wins and make the link visible: “Because we adjusted X, we moved Y faster.”
If your organization has hybrid or remote elements, bring trust into the open:
Co-create hybrid norms with your teams: when it helps to be together, when remote works fine, and why.
Focus discussions on outcomes and connection, not on presenteeism.
Replace surveillance-style monitoring with regular, human check-ins about progress and wellbeing.
When you treat people as trusted adults, most will work hard to prove you right—especially when expectations are clear and support is available.
Trust always starts at the top.
As a leader, ask yourself:
Do I keep my promises, even the small ones?
Do I explain why we’re making certain decisions, not just what will change?
Do I share credit widely and own my mistakes publicly?
Do I invite feedback—even when it’s uncomfortable—and act on it?
People copy what you do far more than what you say.
Every time you choose transparency over spin, ownership over blame, and clarity over vagueness, you send a powerful signal:
“This is how we behave here. This is what it means to be on this team.”
Over time, those small, consistent signals shape the culture—and the results.
If you take nothing else from this article, take this question into your next leadership or HR/L&D meeting:
“Where are we trying to get better results by pushing harder—when what we really have is a trust problem?”
Maybe it’s in your hybrid working policy.
Maybe it’s in a team with high turnover.
Maybe it’s in a critical project that never seems to land on time.
Maybe it’s in the relationship between senior leadership and the frontline.
Wherever it is, start there.
Because in the end, people always choose whether or not to give their best. They decide, often quietly, whether to bring you their ideas, their energy, and their loyalty—or just enough effort to get by.
And that decision rests, more than anything else, on one thing:
Do they trust you?