Low trust doesn’t just damage relationships. It creates friction, slows execution, and pulls senior leaders into decisions and problems their teams could often handle themselves. Here’s what the hidden tax of low trust looks like in a growing company — and what to watch for in yours.

When managers can’t work through disagreement, friction has a way of rolling uphill. Drawing on Priya Parker’s ideas about apology, group identity, and “meter checks,” Russ Powell explores how management teams can handle difficult conversations more effectively—and why distinguishing disagreement from emotionally charged conflict matters.

When a team lacks the capacity to think through hard problems together, stable times can hide it. Volatile ones can't. Poor decisions compound. Team cohesion fractures under pressure. Founders become the bottleneck — not because they want to be, but because no one else has been developed to carry the weight.