Monitoring The Trust Fuel Gauge
In the Trust Economy, even a sound strategy can crash and burn when the tank runs dry.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about why it might be time to retire one of our favorite business metaphors: “Flying the plane while building it.”
Apparently, I can't leave well enough alone.
Today, I'd like to introduce another airplane metaphor: The Trust Fuel Gauge.
We talk a lot about the emerging “Trust Economy.” Usually, we're talking about trust as something businesses need to earn from customers: trust in a brand or product, trust that a company will protect our data, deliver what it promises and behave responsibly (and not let its AI kill us all).
But there's another trust economy operating INSIDE our organizations, and I would argue it has just as much power to determine whether a business succeeds.
Trust is jet fuel for the modern economy.
Inside an organization, trust fuels the behaviors that turn strategy into performance. When trust levels are high, organizations spend less energy overcoming friction and more energy moving forward. People feel empowered to make decisions and safe taking reasonable risks; they collaborate more freely, raise problems before they become crises and give leaders the benefit of the doubt when all the answers aren't yet available.
They're also more willing to follow an organization through uncertainty because experience has taught them that its leaders will tell them what they can, acknowledge what they can't, and do what they say they will do.
That's an extraordinarily valuable organizational asset. The problem is that trust takes a very long time to accumulate and remarkably little time to burn through.
Trust is a reserve
Jet fuel ultimately comes from raw materials created by natural processes over geological time. We can extract those materials and refine them into something enormously powerful, but we can't manufacture another million years' worth on Tuesday because we suddenly need more.
Organizational trust isn't so different.
It accumulates through repeated experience over time, but time alone isn't enough. Trust gets “refined” through the countless interactions in which people compare what an organization says with what it actually does.
Does leadership keep its commitments? Are employees told difficult news directly, or do they learn it through the rumor mill...or from a headline on CNN? Can a manager say, “I don't know yet, but I'll find out,” and actually come back with an answer? When the company says people are its greatest asset, do its decisions suggest leadership actually believes it?
Over time, those experiences accumulate into reserves of trust.
Or they don't.
The dangerous part is that there's no illuminated gauge on the CEO's dashboard saying TRUST RESERVE: 23%.
Employee engagement and listening data may be the closest thing we have. Yet a disappointing reading too often leads immediately to tactical efforts designed to “improve engagement,” another recognition program, another employee event, another initiative intended to change how employees respond.
Sometimes the gauge may be telling us something different.
Maybe it's telling leaders to examine their own behaviors. Where are we creating friction? Have our actions contradicted our words? Are we making withdrawals from the trust reserve without realizing it? Before trying to goose the reading on the gauge, perhaps we should be asking whether leadership needs to start refining more fuel.
Because those withdrawals can be surprisingly easy to miss: an unexplained decision, a promise quietly abandoned, a little corporate spin or leadership behavior that contradicts the values on the wall. None may seem catastrophic on its own, but employees notice and remember. The tank doesn't magically refill.
Eventually, every organization encounters a Moment that Matters™...exactly when it needs those trust reserves most.
A Moment that Matters™ puts trust to the test
An acquisition, restructuring, layoff, new CEO, major technology implementation or new strategy can disrupt people's understanding of the organization and their place within it.
Employees aren't only wondering what the change means for the business. They're trying to understand what it means for them, their jobs, their bosses, their teams and the work they do every day. They may be wondering whether they'll be able to succeed in the new environment, whether the work they've already done still matters, or even whether this is still a place where they want to work.
At the same time, these are the very people being asked to do the work required to produce outcomes they cannot yet see. They're expected to integrate the acquisition, make the restructuring work, adopt the new technology or change how they work to deliver a new strategy, while taking it largely on faith that the promised result will ultimately make the organization, and hopefully their own working lives, better.
More fundamentally, they're being asked to believe that leadership knows where the organization is going, even when leaders can't yet answer every question about how they'll get there.
These emotionally charged, labor-intensive moments can burn through a lot of trust.
Sometimes leaders are genuinely surprised when employees aren't willing to extend that trust automatically. But trust isn't an entitlement that comes with the corner office; it's an asset leadership has been accumulating, or depleting, for years.
And because trust-building is still too often dismissed as one of those “soft” leadership skills, leaders can be surprised by just how hard it is to fly the plane through stormy weather without sufficient trust in the reserve.
Leaders often don't realize how much trust they've been burning until they really need it.
When trust drops, friction rises
The consequences aren't abstract.
When trust levels fall, organizational friction increases. People start second-guessing decisions and protecting themselves rather than taking reasonable risks. Information vacuums fill with rumors, while managers who aren't sure what they're allowed to say hesitate to say much of anything. Eventually, some high performers start considering their options, and customers may begin hearing different versions of the story depending on whom they talk to.
Change gets harder, too. Technology adoption can slow, integration can stall and new ways of working meet resistance. Leaders find themselves spending more organizational energy persuading people to move forward than they would have needed in a higher-trust environment.
And here's the part that matters most: the strategy itself may be perfectly sound.
The financial model may work. An acquisition may make strategic sense, a restructuring may genuinely be necessary, and the technology may be exactly what the business needs.
But strategies don't execute themselves. People do.
And people decide whether they trust the leaders steering the plane.
Communication can't manufacture trust
This is where I need to make an important distinction, particularly as someone who has spent a career in communications.
Good communication can't manufacture trust when leadership behavior consistently destroys it. No beautifully written CEO message can compensate for actions that repeatedly contradict the words in it. Town hall meetings don't erase years of broken promises, and clever communication strategies can't persuade employees that leaders are being transparent when their own experience tells them otherwise.
And yet, communication remains one of the primary ways people experience leadership.
Think about the evidence employees are collecting along the way. What did you tell us, and when? Did you tell us what you actually knew, including what you didn't know yet? Did you ask for our input and what we thought? Did anything happen as a result? Could our managers help us make sense of what was happening, and could we ask questions without worrying about the consequences?
Perhaps most importantly: Did what ultimately occurred actually resemble what you told us would happen?
Those experiences become evidence. Over time, they either add to the organization's trust reserves or drain them.
That's why communicating through a Moment that Matters™ can't simply mean crafting the announcement. Consequential change unfolds over weeks, months and sometimes years, and people need help continually connecting the dots between the enterprise strategy and what's happening in their business, their function, their team and their own work.
That means listening and responding as well as telling. It means equipping managers to carry the conversation to the team level, acknowledging what's changed and what hasn't, and continuing to communicate as reality inevitably becomes more complicated than the original PowerPoint.
Communication throughout that journey is one of the ways leadership protects, or squanders, one of the organization's most valuable and exhaustible assets.
Who is watching the fuel gauge?
Organizations have people responsible for financial performance, operations, legal risk, technology, human resources and marketing. During a major transformation, there may also be consultants, attorneys, bankers, project managers and outside advisors surrounding the leadership team.
Everyone is watching a gauge.
But who is watching the trust gauge?
Who is paying attention to how much uncertainty the organization is carrying and what employees are being asked to believe? Who's noticing the information vacuums, what managers are hearing, or the places where leadership's actions may be contradicting its words?
And ultimately, what happens to the business plan if the people responsible for carrying it out stop trusting the leaders steering the plane?
Those aren't merely communications questions. They're leadership questions, and in the Trust Economy, they're economic questions.
Leadership has an economic consequence. Human-centered leadership isn't an alternative to rigorous business performance; it's one of the conditions that makes sustained performance possible. And that's true for every business, not merely those whose leaders are inclined toward the “soft stuff.”
The board can approve the destination, the executive team can design a brilliant flight plan, and Finance can calculate precisely what the journey should cost.
But none of them can make the plane fly without fuel.
Trust is jet fuel for the modern economy.
Leaders can build reserves of it. They can conserve it. Or, they can squander it. And during the Moments that Matter™, they're going to need a lot of it.
So perhaps one more gauge belongs on the leadership dashboard.
Because when the trust tank runs dry, even a sound strategy can crash and burn.
What are your thoughts about TRUST BUILDING? Is it time to stop referring to interpersonal leadership strengths as "soft skills"?
Have you ever worked for a leader who dismissed these competencies as irrelevant? How hard was it to achieve the desired business outcomes in that environment? How long did you stay?
