By Gregory Hastings, RIVR Solutions Ltd
Here is a number that should stop every executive team in its tracks: less than half of employees — 48% — trust their senior leaders. That is the headline finding from Gartner’s 2024 Organization Structure and Leadership Trust Survey, cited in a recent Harvard Business Review article, Most Employees Don’t Trust Their Leaders. Here’s What to Do About It, by Ned Feuer and Maggie Mastrogiovanni. I’d encourage every leader to read the full piece.
I read it and immediately recognized the shop floors and boardrooms we work in at RIVR Solutions every week. Trust is not a soft metric we get to after the “real” work of process improvement is done — it is the precondition for the real work. Employees do not surface problems, admit mistakes, or challenge a flawed process to a leader they do not trust. They comply, they go quiet, or they route around the leader entirely. Every Kaizen event, every Gemba walk, every process map we build with a client depends on people telling the truth about what is actually happening on the floor — and that only happens where trust already exists. This article synthesizes what Feuer and Mastrogiovanni found, and connects it to the Culture of Continuous Improvement framework we’ve built RIVR’s entire practice around, which was built to produce exactly the trust and psychological safety their research says is missing.
Part 1: A Synopsis of the HBR Research
The Trust Gap Is Real, and It’s Costing Companies Engagement
Feuer and Mastrogiovanni, drawing on Gartner’s survey of 3,529 employees, found a 25-point gap in engagement between employees who trust their senior leaders and those who don’t — 83 out of 100 for those who trust leadership, versus just 58 for those who don’t. Trust is not incidental to performance. It is one of the clearest levers leaders have over how much their people actually give at work.
The pressure on that trust is not easing. Rapid policy shifts, ongoing economic uncertainty, and near-constant restructuring put leaders in a position where they must make hard calls while somehow keeping people engaged through the disruption. The authors note that employees are significantly less likely to trust senior leaders if, in the past 18 months, those leaders let people go through workforce reductions or restructured in ways that touched their roles or teams. Difficult decisions themselves erode trust — but the article’s central insight is that how those decisions are made and communicated matters just as much, if not more.
Three Behaviors That Break Trust
The research isolates three specific leader behaviors that predictably damage trust:
- Withholding information — employees are 20% less likely to trust leaders they believe are concealing important information or not telling the whole story.
- Scapegoating — employees are 30% less likely to trust leaders who shift blame for their decisions onto others or onto factors outside their control.
- Retracting decisions — employees are 20% less likely to trust leaders who reverse course or backtrack without explanation.
Notice what these three have in common: none of them are about the quality of the underlying decision. They are about honesty, ownership, and consistency in how the decision is handled. Trust is built or destroyed in the manner of leadership, not just the substance of it.
Four Actions That Build Trust
Feuer and Mastrogiovanni prescribe four concrete actions for leaders navigating this environment:
- Identify and address employee trust deficits. Employees are substantially more likely to trust leaders who they perceive as valuing their feedback. The authors recommend building trust assessments directly into existing engagement surveys and focus groups — measuring trust explicitly rather than assuming it exists — and then communicating findings transparently and acting on them.
- Embrace decision-making transparency. Employees are 4.3 times more likely to trust leaders who take the time to explain why a decision was made. Following a restructuring, for example, leaders should explain the external pressures and goals behind the decision, the criteria used, and what alternatives were considered — and keep communicating throughout implementation, even when people don’t like the outcome.
- Facilitate open dialogue with employees. Employees are 6.5 times more likely to trust leaders who express authentic, genuine concern for the issues employees care about most — which the 2025 Gartner State of Employee Experience Survey identifies as compensation and benefits, work flexibility, and skills development. Town halls, “Ask Me Anything” sessions, and informal listening sessions are how leaders demonstrate that concern is real, not rhetorical.
- Invest and participate in skills-development programs. Trust-building is a skill, not just an intention. The authors recommend leadership courses, mentorship and coaching programs, and workshops built around emotional intelligence, active listening, transparent communication, and ethical decision-making — raising leaders’ awareness of the very behaviors that break trust so they can more intentionally avoid them.
The authors’ conclusion is unambiguous: leaders play an instrumental role in building organizational trust, and that role is only getting harder as disruption becomes the norm rather than the exception.
Part 2: How RIVR’s Culture of Continuous Improvement Closes the Trust Gap
What struck me most reading this research is that every trust-breaking behavior it identifies — withholding information, scapegoating, retracting decisions without explanation — is exactly what a Culture of Continuous Improvement is built to eliminate. RIVR’s leadership development work is built around a circular model with four pillars, each addressing a different piece of how trust actually gets built at work: Leadership: Deploying Strategy, Process Driven: Solving Problems, Employee Empowerment: Developing People, and Visual Workplace: Igniting Innovation. Underneath all four sits a leadership practice we teach explicitly in every engagement: leading with curiosity, and without blame.
Here is how that framework directly answers the trust deficits Feuer and Mastrogiovanni describe.
Leadership: Deploying Strategy — Replacing Withheld Information with Shared Direction
The first trust-breaking behavior in the HBR research is withholding information. In most organizations we walk into, this isn’t malicious — it’s structural. Strategy lives in the leadership team’s heads and gets cascaded selectively, if at all, so employees fill the vacuum with suspicion.
The Leadership pillar of our framework is about deploying strategy — making sure the “what” and the “how,” the macro goals and the daily tasks that ladder up to them, are visible and understood at every level, not just decided at the top and assumed to trickle down. This is the same logic behind the HBR article’s second recommended action, decision-making transparency, applied continuously rather than only after a big decision: employees are 4.3 times more likely to trust leaders who take the time to explain why. A strategy that’s genuinely deployed — not just announced — makes that “why” legible every day.
Process Driven: Solving Problems — Removing Scapegoating at the Root, by Leading with Curiosity
Scapegoating produced the single largest trust penalty in the Gartner data — a 30% drop in trust. This is the behavior our Process Driven pillar is most explicitly designed to prevent, and it’s where we teach leaders to be curious instead of accusatory when something goes wrong. In our Root Cause Analysis training, the discipline is to ask “why” repeatedly until you reach a cause you can actually fix — and the explicit facilitation rule is to stick to facts, not blame. In conflict resolution, the instruction is the same: minimize blame, move to coaching. And in our Gemba Walk methodology — going to the real place where the work happens — we coach leaders to approach the floor “with respect and interest,” to observe and ask questions rather than jump to solving problems on the spot, and to seek to understand rather than to be understood.
This curiosity-first approach is more than a nicer way to run a meeting — it’s the mechanism that produces psychological safety in practice. Our leadership development work is direct about the trade-off leaders are always making, deposit or withdrawal, on what we call the Leadership Bank Account: blaming upstream and jumping to solutions are withdrawals; asking before telling, admitting mistakes, and coaching in private are deposits. When a defect or a missed deadline is treated as evidence that the process needs attention — not that a person needs blame — employees stop hiding problems and start surfacing them early, while they’re still small and cheap to fix. That is the direct, practical payoff of trust: a workforce that tells you the truth about what’s actually happening, because they’ve learned it’s safe to.
Employee Empowerment: Developing People — Ending the “Retracting Decisions” Trust Penalty
The third trust-breaking behavior — retracting decisions or backtracking without explanation — usually isn’t leaders changing their minds arbitrarily. It’s leaders who go weeks or months without addressing an issue or developing the people closest to it, so that when they finally do act, it looks inconsistent and disconnected from what people were told before.
The Employee Empowerment pillar is about developing people continuously: regular coaching and feedback, addressing performance concerns early rather than letting them accumulate, and giving employees real ownership over solutions. Our facilitation principle here is “no surprises” — supervisors have an obligation to raise concerns as soon as they see them — paired with a constructive, no-blaming approach where leader and employee share responsibility for improvement. This is the operational form of the HBR article’s first prescribed action: identifying and addressing trust deficits on an ongoing basis, not waiting for the annual survey. Handled this way, course corrections happen in small, explainable increments rather than as sudden reversals that erode credibility.
Visual Workplace: Igniting Innovation — Making Dialogue and Recognition Structural
The fourth pillar, Visual Workplace, makes the work itself visible — status, priorities, waste, and improvement ideas displayed where everyone can see and act on them. This is where our Gemba Walk practice earns its keep: the objective isn’t inspection, it’s dialogue — managers going to where value is created, asking questions like “What would you change about this if you could?”, and generating improvement ideas directly from the people doing the work. That is close to a structural version of the HBR article’s third recommendation, facilitating open dialogue: employees are 6.5 times more likely to trust leaders who show authentic concern for what matters to them, and a visual workplace turns that dialogue into a daily habit rather than an occasional town hall.
Building the Skill, Not Just the Intention
Feuer and Mastrogiovanni’s fourth recommendation — investing in skills-development programs for leaders — is where our leadership development work lives. We teach leaders explicitly that leadership is built “below the waterline,” in daily choices about patience, curiosity, accountability, and humility, not just in the visible decisions and results everyone can see. Coaching leaders to ask rather than tell, to lead with curiosity instead of blame, and to engage employees directly in problem-solving are trainable skills, not fixed personality traits. Without deliberately building these behaviors into how leaders operate day to day, even the best process improvements become an interesting exercise that doesn’t stick — because the trust required to sustain them was never built.
Bringing It Together
The HBR research makes a case that should reframe how leaders think about trust: it is not a byproduct of good decisions, it is a direct result of how decisions are made, explained, and followed through on — transparently, consistently, and without blame. That is precisely what a genuine Culture of Continuous Improvement produces as a side effect of doing the work well. Strategy deployed with clarity replaces withheld information. Leaders who lead with curiosity instead of blame remove the single biggest trust penalty in the data. Continuous investment in developing people replaces the appearance of arbitrary reversals with a track record of consistency. And a visual workplace turns dialogue and recognition into daily habits instead of occasional gestures.
Organizations don’t get a trusting, engaged workforce by announcing a values statement. They get it by building the operating rhythm — deployed strategy, curiosity-driven problem solving, empowered people, and a workplace that makes the work visible — that makes trust the natural output of how the place runs. That is the transformation we help leaders build at RIVR Solutions: Change. Lead. Grow.
If the trust gap in this research sounds like your organization, I’d welcome a conversation about what building that culture actually looks like in practice.
About the author: Gregory Hastings is Chief Transformation Officer at RIVR Solutions Ltd, an Alberta-based consultancy specializing in Lean manufacturing, leadership development, and building organizational cultures of continuous improvement.
Source: Ned Feuer and Maggie Mastrogiovanni. Most Employees Don’t Trust Their Leaders. Here’s What to Do About It. Harvard Business Review, December 2, 2025.