The Hidden Tax of Low Trust

How low trust creates friction, extra senior-leader intervention, and slower execution

team of managers in meeting

You ask your team how the project is going, and everyone says it’s going well. The room nods.

Three weeks later it falls apart—and you realize that half the people in that meeting had already seen the warning signs.

Nobody lied. They just didn’t tell you. The concern was softened; the deadline, hedged; the bad news, left for someone else to deliver. The real conversation happened later, in DMs, in the channel you’re not in.

That gap—between what people know and what they’re willing to say—can be evidence of low trust.

And if you’re a senior leader, there’s a good chance you’re paying for it personally.

You pay when a problem two managers could have resolved together gets escalated to you. When a decision you thought you delegated comes back for approval. When you get pulled into a customer problem because nobody trusted the original commitment. When a thirty-minute meeting takes ninety because people are talking around the issue instead of about it.

Many leaders file trust under culture—a “people thing” or an HR thing.

But trust is also operational.

Someone has to clarify, recheck, referee, approve, chase, sit in the meeting, resolve the disagreement. That someone is usually a senior leader whose attention is already scarce.

That’s the tax.

Invisible in the ledger. Everywhere in your day.

Bundles of Five

Early in my career, I worked for a small, scrappy telecom company that sold long-distance services and pagers—back when pagers were essential business tools, not archaeological artifacts.

I was there to learn the sales floor and then train others, which meant sitting next to the top closer in the call center.

Within days I discovered his trick.

He told customers pagers came only in bundles of five.

It wasn’t true.

If someone needed one, he sold them five. And because he moved more units than anyone, management rewarded him for it.

What took me longer to understand was why the company let it happen.

Someone saw the returns. Someone saw the customers stuck with equipment they would never use. But the organization was hypnotized by the numbers it could see—revenue, units, record-breaking quarters—and blind to the trust draining out of every relationship that salesperson touched.

The reps who played it straight noticed too. They watched a colleague cut corners and get celebrated for it.

The dishonesty didn’t stay in his cubicle. It taught everyone around him what winning required.

The company hit the quarter and moved on. The returns came later. The complaints came later. The cleanup came later.

And the cleanup rarely lands on the person who caused it. It tends to land on someone senior enough to fix it.

When Promises Stop Matching Reality

Years later, I worked at a consulting firm where a sales leader promised timelines that had little relationship to reality.

Projects sold as ten-day jobs took ten weeks.

He wasn’t lying. He was optimistic—dangerously optimistic.

I’ve seen versions of this in enough companies to know it’s rarely about one person.

The problem is not so much the words themselves. It’s whether the words can be counted on to mean anything.

When “we’re close” stops predicting that anything is close, a promise loses the thing that makes it useful: the ability to plan around it.

So people stop planning and start verifying.

They build in buffers. Chase side-channel confirmation. Recheck what they were already told. Everyone becomes their own fact-checker because no one wants to be caught trusting the official version.

And then the friction spreads.

A Sales commitment that Operations doesn’t believe becomes a cross-functional dispute.

A manager who has technically been given authority comes back for reassurance because making the call feels riskier than escalating it.

The senior team becomes the organization’s shock absorber. That’s expensive—not just in morale, but in redundant labor and slower execution.

Trust Debt

Think of it as trust debt—like technical debt.

You can move faster for a while. The shortcuts feel efficient. Then they accumulate, and eventually someone has to pay them down.

Organizations often do that with structure.

More meetings. More approvals. More dashboards. More layers of sign-off. More senior people copied on emails “just so they’re aware.”

Some of that structure is necessary as companies grow.

But some of it is a workaround.

If I don’t quite trust you to make the decision, I add an approval.

If two functions can’t reliably work through disagreements, I join the meeting.

If problems keep arriving late, I ask for another dashboard.

The overhead is real.

The underlying problem stays.

The Paradox of Speed

Growing companies tend to reward speed and certainty, which is exactly why they can underprice honesty.

Telling the truth early can feel slow.

“We’re not going to hit the date.”

“I disagree.”

“I made the wrong call.”

“We’re not aligned on this.”

But the alternative is slower.

When trust is low, problems that one candid conversation could have resolved harden into crises. By the time they surface, they require more people, more meetings, and more senior attention.

The bad news usually arrives eventually. Low trust just guarantees it arrives late, when it’s more difficult and more expensive.

Trust reduces the cost of working together. And that’s where the speed comes from.

The Discipline Behind Trust

The most trusted leader I ever worked for wasn’t particularly charismatic and made no speeches about culture. What I remember was his discipline.

He did two things relentlessly: he kept his word, and when something broke, he said so plainly—not dramatically, just honestly.

He treated adults like adults.

So people trusted him—not blindly, but enough to speak candidly, raise problems early, and make decisions without constantly looking over their shoulders.

That kind of trust becomes more valuable as a company grows, precisely because growth makes it harder to maintain.

People lose proximity. Silos form. Managers inherit bigger jobs faster than they can develop the judgment and skills those jobs require.

What Keeps Coming Back to You?

If you’re a senior leader in a growing company, you can hear low trust long before it shows up in a dashboard.

Notice padded bad news. How much time passes between when someone knew there was a problem and when you heard about it?

Notice promises that require decoding. Can “yes” be taken at face value, or has everyone learned to translate what people say into what they’ll actually do?

Notice defensive CCs and extra approvals. Are they providing necessary coordination—or insurance against somebody else dropping the ball?

And above all, notice what keeps coming back to you.

Which decisions are managers authorized to make but reluctant to own?

Which disagreements between capable people repeatedly require a senior referee?

Which problems have become yours mainly because the people closest to them don’t trust themselves—or each other—to work them through?

Those are not merely interruptions.

They are information.

There’s one more possibility worth considering.

Maybe your managers keep escalating because, over time, you’ve trained them to.

If senior leaders routinely step in, overturn decisions, rescue difficult conversations, or make the final call, managers can learn that bringing the problem upward is safer than working it through themselves.

High-trust organizations aren’t conflict-free. They’re better able to handle disagreement because people understand that difficult conversations are not only survivable, but essential.

And senior leaders in those organizations can gradually do something enormously valuable:

get out of the middle.

Not because the problems magically disappear.

Because more of the people below them become capable of handling those problems together.

The tax doesn’t show up in the ledger.

But it’s one your company can stop paying.

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Are too many decisions, disagreements, and problems still finding their way back to you? I help senior leaders develop management teams that can handle more of what comes their way with less senior-leader intervention. Let’s talk. →