When fewer than 1 in 4 employees trust leadership, it becomes impossible to engage them in strategy, change, or operational goals. We have passed this inflection point. According to Gallup, only 23% of U.S. employees currently strongly trust their leadership.
Low trust doesn’t just feel bad—it has real costs: higher turnover, poor performance, and deep disengagement. Mistrust undermines leadership excellence. It toxifies cultures, inhibits innovation, and hemorrhages value. So, organizations are doubling down on trust. Many companies have started mandating “trust training courses” and printing trust slogans on T-shirts and uniforms. This emerged during a recent leadership roundtable I led. Many of the leaders acknowledged that these efforts are not showing results. Trust still feels tenuous—like something being promoted but not practiced.
I saw this play out firsthand during a leadership offsite. The company had “trust” on every keynote slide. But when a senior executive voiced dissent in the room, everything went cold. Silence followed. That moment said more about trust than any keynote ever could.
Trust is like good glass—if it is effective, it shouldn’t be noticed and certainly not spoken about. If a couple often need to speak about trust, they have lost it. If they need to remind themselves and each other to build trust, their relationship is on the rocks. The same applies to corporate cultures: if you need to have “trust workshops” or emblazon trust on T-shirts, trust has long been lost—and slogans and workshops won’t bring it back.
So how do you build and reinforce organizational trust?
The most important step is to recognize that trust is an outcome of other qualities, not an input of behavior. When leaders are trusting and trustworthy, trust ensues. Trust cannot be mandated; it grows organically.
- To Trust is to Risk
In our culture of de-risking everything we do, it is hard to be trusting. Being trusting means taking a risk on people. It means understanding that some of these risks will not succeed. Risk mitigation means managing the failures—it does not mean avoiding the risk of loss entirely.
Being trusting means empowering people to make decisions and achieve results in their own ways. Their ways may not be as good as yours, and their results may or may not be as strong as yours would have been. But for their growth and the growth of the company, it is important to trust them and, while supporting them, get off their backs and let go of some managerial control.
- Trustworthy Leaders Reinforce the Narrative with Structure and Action
Many leaders try to build trust by telling people it exists. But trust doesn’t come from messages. It comes from what those messages rest on. And when the structure behind a message is shaky—ambiguous priorities, inconsistent behavior, unspoken power dynamics—people feel it, even if the words are perfect.
Trustworthy leaders remove friction between words and reality. If you say people are empowered, decisions have to reflect that. If you say accountability matters, then excuses can’t go unchecked. Trust breaks when the message outruns the mechanics. It holds when the system reinforces the story.
- When Trust Breaks, Name It and Repair It Together
Like a healed bone fracture, broken trust can become even stronger once it’s repaired. Even in the strongest cultures, trust inevitably strains and sometimes fractures—whether through a rushed decision, a poorly handled conflict, or a broken commitment. In the aftermath, many leaders default to damage control. They smooth things over, shift focus, or quietly hope people will move on.
But when a breach in trust isn’t acknowledged, it doesn’t go away.
It lingers and slowly reshapes how people engage.
We’ve seen what happens when leaders choose a different response. Instead of minimizing the impact or protecting their image, they name the break in trust directly. They own their part, without defensiveness. And then they do something most leaders overlook: they invite others into the repair.
It’s not just an apology. It’s an act of reconnection:
That moment—genuine, vulnerable, and mutual—is where trust deepens.
Because trust isn’t the absence of missteps; it’s the ability to recover from them—together.
If trust is so elusive, how might you identify trust fractures before they cause breakages?
Often, our clients—leaders who sensed something was off but couldn’t locate it—used our Lapin Trust Index to see what’s otherwise invisible: patterns of misalignment, pockets of silence, inconsistent norms. The Trust Index not only identifies trust fractures; it provides the reasons for them and insights into how to repair them.
Trust reveals itself in how we lead when no one is watching.
Not in the statements we make, but in the tensions we’re willing to hold, the mistakes we’re willing to own, and the structures we’re willing to build with care.
When trust is present, people lean in. They speak truth. They take risks.
When it’s missing, no slogan or training will fill the space it leaves behind.
Trust is not the most visible part of leadership.
But it may be the most essential.