Trust is the new core competency of leadership, but most executives are still approaching it with outdated tools. If your teams don't trust your leadership, no mission statement, values deck or culture initiative will ever land.

Trust may be hard to quantify, but the benefits of getting it right are undeniable. A 2023 MIT Sloan study found that employees in high-trust organizations were 260% more motivated to work, 50% less likely to look for a new job and reported 41% lower burnout. Yet Gallup's data still shows that just 21% of employees strongly agree they trust their company's leadership.

Why is there a disconnect between what we know we need and the reality of where we are with trust in leadership? It could be because many leaders assume trust is the natural byproduct of clarity or competence. In the real world, trust is harder to earn and easier to lose because expectations have evolved. Today's teams aren't just watching what you decide, but how you decide it. They expect visibility into priorities, honesty about constraints and consistency between what's said and what's done.

It's time to stop treating trust as a soft skill. Today's top-performing leaders are engineering it with intent. Let's explore how to do that.

Related: Strong Leaders Use These 4 Strategies to Build Trust in Their Workplace

Before we get into what factors facilitate trust between employees and their leaders, let's define what leadership qualities and organizational policies break trust, with data from PwC's 2024 Trust in U.S. Business........

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