The Hidden Tax of Low Trust
Updated: Sep 6
How trust gaps create friction, pull senior leaders into the middle, and slow growing companies down
You ask how the project is going, and everyone says it's going well.
Three weeks later it falls apart, and you find out that several people had already seen the warning signs.
Nobody lied outright. The concern was softened. The deadline was hedged. The hard conversation happened later, in a DM, in a channel you're not in.
If you're the founder or a senior leader, you usually end up paying for that gap.
You pay when two managers who could have resolved a problem together bring it to you instead. When a decision you thought you delegated comes back for approval. When you get pulled into a customer problem because nobody trusts the original commitment. When a thirty-minute meeting takes ninety because people are talking around the issue instead of about it.
Most leaders file trust under culture. But trust is also operational. When it's low, someone has to clarify, recheck, referee, approve, chase, or step in. In a growing company, that someone is often you.
That's the hidden tax. It doesn't show up in the ledger. It shows up on your calendar.
Look at next week. How many things are on it only because two people below you couldn't work something out? Add up those hours. It's a partial bill at best. It leaves out the decisions that arrived too late to change anything and the hours your team spent verifying what they had already been told.
When Promises Stop Predicting Reality
Years ago I worked at a consulting firm where a sales leader routinely promised timelines that bore little relationship to reality. Projects sold as ten-day jobs took ten weeks.
He wasn't lying. He was optimistic, dangerously so.
Over time, people stopped treating his commitments as useful information. They built in buffers. They checked with other people. They sought side-channel confirmation. Everyone became their own fact-checker because nobody wanted to be caught trusting the official version.
That's what low trust does. People don't stop working together. They add protection. Another approval. Another meeting. Another name on the email. Another senior leader brought in just to make sure.
Some of that structure is necessary as a company grows. Some of it is compensation for a trust gap. From the outside, the two look identical, which is a large part of why this stays hidden.
Trust Debt
It behaves like technical debt. A shortcut helps you move faster today. Take enough of them and the accumulated workarounds start slowing everything down.
Organizations do the same thing. If I don't quite trust you to make the decision, I add an approval. If two functions can't work through a disagreement, I join the meeting. If problems keep arriving late, I ask for another dashboard.
Each response is reasonable on its own. Together they build a company that needs more senior attention every quarter just to keep operating.
Your calendar fills with issues that aren't really yours. Your managers have authority on paper, but the hard decisions still migrate upward. You become the company's shock absorber.
You May Be Teaching This
Notice who the "I" is in those three sentences.
Here's the uncomfortable possibility. Your managers may keep escalating because, over time, you've trained them to.
When you step in, rescue the difficult conversation, overturn the call, or make the decision yourself, managers learn something entirely rational: bringing the problem upward is safer than working it through. Every rescue teaches it again.
Then the loop closes on itself. You intervene because you don't yet trust the team to handle it. The team gets less practice handling it because you intervene. Their continued escalation becomes evidence that you were right not to trust them.
The hard part is that you're usually right in the moment. Stepping in genuinely is faster today.
It's slower over a quarter.
The conversations that would have prevented most of this feel slow in the moment too.
"We're not going to hit the date."
"I disagree."
"I think I made the wrong call."
"We haven't actually resolved this."
Avoiding them feels efficient right up until the missed date becomes a crisis, the unresolved disagreement becomes a cross-functional problem, and the questionable commitment reaches a customer. The bad news arrives either way. Low trust just guarantees it arrives late, when it's harder and more expensive to fix.
What Keeps Coming Back to You
Once you're looking for that loop, your calendar is the best place to find it.
Which decisions are your managers authorized to make but reluctant to own? Which disagreements between capable people repeatedly require you as referee? Which problems reach you mainly because the people closest to them haven't been able to work them through together?
Then there are the subtler signals. How long does bad news travel before it gets to you? Can a commitment be taken at face value? Are the extra meetings, approvals, and CCs actually helping coordination, or providing insurance against somebody dropping the ball?
Those interruptions aren't just annoyances. They're information, and usually more about the system than the people working in it.
Getting Out of the Middle
Breaking the loop doesn't mean backing away. It certainly doesn't mean telling people to trust each other more.
It's also worth being clear about the target. High trust doesn't mean fewer disagreements. It means disagreements can surface earlier and more openly. What changes is where and how they get settled.
In a twenty-person company, trust can run largely on proximity. Everyone knows everyone, and the founder can personally vouch for much of what matters. As the company grows toward fifty and beyond, that stops being enough. Functions specialize, managers inherit bigger jobs, and problems have to be solved across boundaries rather than by whoever sits closest to you. Trust has to stop being a set of relationships and start being a way of operating.
The most trusted leader I ever worked for wasn't charismatic and never gave a speech about culture. He kept his word. And when something went wrong, he said so plainly, with no drama and no spin. He treated adults like adults, and it made it easier for everyone around him to raise problems early, disagree openly, and admit mistakes without looking over their shoulders.
None of that was personality. It was practice, and practices can be modeled, expected, and taught. So can the ones you want from your managers: surfacing problems while they're still small, making agreements specific enough to be kept, owning the decisions that are theirs, and repairing mistakes instead of burying them.
As those get more consistent, you can start doing something worth more than any single decision you'd otherwise be making in someone else's place. You can get out of the middle. Not because the problems disappear, but because more of the people below you can solve them together.
The tax never appears in the ledger. But once you know where to look, you can see it all over your week. And it's one your company can stop paying.
A note on the "trust tax": Stephen Covey has written extensively about the idea of a low-trust tax and a corresponding high-trust dividend, most notably in The Speed of Trust. My use of the metaphor here builds on that idea, with a particular focus on how the costs show up in the day-to-day operation of a management team.
I help management teams carry more of the company's weight.
Most of my work is in-house: workshops and coaching for growing startups, usually when a founder's managers are capable but the team isn't yet handling as much as it could. I also run public workshops a few times a year.
If your managers are capable and the hard things still route through you, that gap is usually addressable. Let's talk. →
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