Why Trust is Breaking Down in the Workplace – and What to Do About It

Do you really trust the people you work with?

Not in theory, but in practice.

When someone says, “I’ll get that to you tomorrow,” do you really believe them? Or do you ping them later in the day, just to be sure?

Now flip the question: Do the people you work with trust YOU?

Are they confident you’ll do what you said you’d do, without being chased? That you’ll follow through, even when no one’s watching?

You would probably like to answer “yes” to all these questions. But even when the intent is good, and the effort is real, it’s not always that simple. We don’t see each other’s work like we used to. And when things go quiet, we start to assume the worst.

Some of the organizations I’ve worked with understand that they have a trust problem. But most don’t. And yet, I see the signs of low and degrading trust every day. It could be check-ins that feel more like check-ups, processes that seem built to catch people out, teams second-guessing each other, or just leaders unsure if their people are really delivering.

Trust has actually been breaking down inside organizations for years. Today I’m going to look at the five main trust killers in organizations – and what can be done to reverse the trend of trust erosion.

Trust Killer 1: Job Insecurity

Trust in our institutions has never been lower. We often think about this in terms of how much people trust the government, the press, or the police. But most people also trust the companies they work for much less.

The reason for this is pretty simple – a foundational principle of work is now gone. A generation ago, there was a clear (if unspoken) deal: do your job well, and your job will be there tomorrow. It wasn’t perfect, but it created stability. If you showed up and performed, the system would support you.

That’s not how things work anymore. Now, even high performers get laid off in restructures. Loyalty doesn’t result in security.

Not only that, but most organizations don’t even acknowledge this reality. Announcements about layoffs happen at the last minute and often come as a surprise even to the managers tasked with delivering the bad news. No wonder employees often start from a position of distrust when it comes to ANY news from their employers.

Now, with the rise of AI, people are watching tools take on tasks they used to own—sometimes faster, sometimes better. Even if they’re excited about what AI can do, they can see the possibility of more work being done with a smaller team. It’s only natural that they would ask, “Am I safe?”

So for many people, perhaps most, work is now an inherently unsafe environment. And with that, trust is lowered.

Trust Killer 2: The Visibility Collapse

Back in the day, people knew if you were working. They saw your screen. They heard your conversations. And they noticed you staying late. The cues were ambient — and trust built itself, quietly.

Today, that’s mostly gone.

Work is now highly distributed. Today, many of us are siloed in our own digital environments, spending more time interacting with Generative AI than we do with other humans. Many times we barely know the humans we do interact with, so what reason do we have to truly trust them?

This means that in most cases, you don’t see what other people are doing in the moment. You just wait for the outcome.

And when the outcome is delayed or unclear, you start wondering. It’s not because you are inherently cynical — but because you’re missing the context that helped you trust naturally.

So trust is lowered further.

Trust Killer 3: Intrusiveness

This is where things get really challenging. Everyone in this system can feel the lowering of trust, and for leaders this usually translates to a lack of trust that work is getting done with excellence.

Making sure work happens is one of the primary responsibilities of a leader, so unsurprisingly they will want to start checking. Leaders will start to throw themselves more directly into projects, ask for more status reports, call more meetings, or bring remote workers back into the office. They might even invest in the “activity tracking” software that snoops on employees to see if they are working when they say they are.

Can this address the visibility issue? On the edges, yes. But it comes at a major cost. It sends employees a clear message; they are absolutely NOT trusted, and creates an even deeper wedge between employees and their managers.

Trust is now getting dangerously low.

Trust Killer 4: The Reliability Gap

In this new world of work, and particularly in low-trust environments, you can’t always count on people to follow through.

That’s not because everyone is now suddenly less reliable — it’s because we are often overwhelmed. Many people today are no longer doing a single, focused job. They’re juggling multiple roles across multiple projects with inputs from multiple stakeholders. The expectations are ambiguous, and the pace is relentless.

If you work in that kind of environment day-to-day, it’s easy to make commitments in the moment, only to forget about them when other things come up and grab your attention. And all anyone else sees is you dropping the ball, that you cannot be counted on.

The irony is that all busy people do this at some point, even with the best intentions. But it doesn’t stop the reliability gap being one of the fastest ways trust breaks down entirely in teams.

Trust Killer 5: Ambient Cynicism

What threatens to be the final nail in the trust coffin is the cynicism that surrounds us about work.

In the old world of work, which usually happened with a small group of largely trusted colleagues, companies could build their own resilient culture with minimal interference from the outside world.

But today, not only is work merging with the rest of our lives – it’s pourous. All kinds of influences affect our work every day. from the people we work with who are outside of our teams and organizations, to the stuff we see online. We are a mouse click away from all kinds of external noise about the nature of work, on everything from LinkedIn to TikTok.

Some of these influences can be very helpful – giving us new perspective and knowledge. But they can also be destructive. Surrounding you right now are stories of quiet quitting, disengagement, and people secretly holding down 2 or 3 “full-time” jobs while only working a few hours a week. These aren’t fringe anecdotes anymore – they’re in your feed and can have a habit of cropping up just when you are at your most tired and cynical.

This fifth trust killer might seem minor compared to the others I’ve mentioned, but our research suggests just the opposite. It can cause employees to openly wonder if they are the only ones still trying. Often, once that seed is planted, even small lapses in others start to look like proof that no one cares. Left to fester, it can turn high-trust, high-performing teams into a low-trust collection of blame-shifters.

An environment where trust is at an all time low.

How to Reignite Trust

Yes, I know this newsletter has been a bit of a downer so far, but don’t worry—the story gets better – much better. While trust is more challenging to maintain than ever, it is absolutely possible to build trust in work environments if you are strategic about it.

Getting strategic means you don’t just tell people to trust each other (when has that worked in any walk of life?). Instead, you create the conditions for trust to thrive. And a great place to start is not with trust at all; it’s with skills – specifically durable skills.

The Skill and Trust Cycle

It turns out there is a strong relationship between durable skills and trust, and we’ve known it for ages. Steven M.R. Covey talks about this in his book Speed of Trust – The One Thing That Changes Everything and it’s even there in perhaps the OG of self-help books – How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie.

The bottom line here is that trust shows up when people feel confident in two things:

1. That others are able to do what needs to be done
2. That they will actually do it, even when no one’s looking

Both of these translate to skills—the first is specific to the task at hand, and the second is a whole group of durable skills—tracking what needs to be done, managing your time to do it, prioritizing to make sure it happens, holding yourself accountable for what you commit, adapting when what needs to be done changes, and communicating effectively about what is happening.

And this is when things start to get really interesting. As individuals build these capabilities, team members start to develop more confidence in each other, and work becomes more visible. In other words, the individual capabilities start to translate into team capabilities.

This isn’t a simple trick – what you are doing is turning a vicious cycle driven by instability and insecurity into a virtuous one driven by capability and confidence. When you create a world where people feel they are learning and growing alongside each other, they will want to continue to do so, starting to focus on the art of the possible that comes from great collaborative work. That’s what humans do when trust is present.

So, it turns out that:

The fastest way to build trust is NOT to “focus on trust”
It’s to build the skills that make trust possible.

At BillionMinds, we call this the Skill-Trust Cycle – building individual skills that translate to team trust, which in turn causes the skills to be further honed as a team.

Practical Steps to Restore Trust

Whatever your position in an organization, you can play a role in making it a higher-trust environment. And when you do, it will make your work more effective, and even more enjoyable. Here are steps you can take in your organization.

As A Leader

• Focus on transparency. Of course, sometimes there are legitimate reasons to withhold information in the short term, but every time you do it, you erode trust.
• Model Follow-Through. Kyle McDowell’s important leadership book Begin With WE details a critical leadership behavior: “WE say what we are going to do, then WE do it.” This is the heart of follow-through, so it’s vital to demonstrate the behavior and own up to when you fall short.
• Hire for trustworthiness, not just talent – Ask better questions. Look for evidence of reliability and team-centered behavior.
• Reward high-trust behavior – Don’t just celebrate outcomes — celebrate work being done in the right way with team members showing trust in each other.
• Invest in capability – Make sure people have the skills, especially durable skills, to operate reliably in the environment they’re in.

If you’re an individual:

• Assume trust, until you can’t – most people are trying — even if it’s not always obvious.
• Work daily on key durable skills – specifically time management, prioritization, communication, conflict resolution, and expectation setting. These will help ensure that you meet the commitments you make.
• Make your work visible – this is not to brag, but to reduce uncertainty for others.
• Simplify where you can – the more complexity you carry, the more likely something will slip.

The Elephant (or, More Accurately, the Person) in the Room

I run masterclasses on trust, and in almost every one, the same point comes up. I’ll paraphrase it like this…

“You talk about trust as though it’s something I can improve. But what if the person I’m working with just cannot be trusted?”

This question resonates with me deeply, because it’s a challenge I once faced myself earlier in my career.

It started simply, when a new hire on our team, who I’ll call Graham, attached himself to my project, doing almost no work on it, and then taking outsized credit when it went well. Not only that, but I later discovered he was actively discrediting MY work – effectively treating team collaboration as a zero-sum game.

The thing was, this technique worked well for Graham. Within three months, he’d worked his way into leadership, and that’s where the trouble really began – a series of misdirections and outright lies that were designed to protect him personally, but lies which very nearly caused me to quit my company.

Eventually, Graham’s behaviors were discovered, and when they were, I realized I was far from alone. Inside our company were many other people whose lives had been ruined by Graham, and several HAD left the company because of it. I’d felt alone, but it turned out that was far from the case. His terrible influence had been felt far and wide.

It turns out there are way too many Grahams around, which is why the topic comes up so often in my masterclasses. If you’ve had a long career, you’ve probably worked with someone who you knew could not be trusted, and maybe even someone who outright bullied you. As Sean Lemson argues in his book “One Drop of Poison” – this type of behavior has an outsized impact on team and organizational performance, and of course lands employees with significant mental health challenges.

But here’s the thing, the exact durable skills I’ve discussed as part of the skill and trust cycle help individuals and leaders to identify this type of poison, address it and flush it out of their organization. Companies that emphasize durable skills are less welcoming places for untrustworthy people. And leaders with well-honed durable skills stop tolerating untrustworthy behavior. If a member of their team repeatedly breaks trust and shows no intent to change, they act. They understand that the cultural cost of accepting this behavior is too high.

The Return of Trust

In an increasingly cynical society where trust in almost all organizations has eroded, it can be tempting to think that it’s impossible to work in a high-trust environment.

But I can assure you that is not true. You can rebuild trust. By creating an environment where the humans in your organization feel comfortable trusting each other.

And when you do, the results can be amazing.

Next Week

I return to a theme we’ve examined a few times over the years and give you our latest findings – the optimal balance between individual and team behaviors.

See you then!