A Response to HBR’s ‘Most Employees Don’t Trust Their Leaders’
A CEO recently shared a concern that should be on every board member’s agenda:
“We’ve run engagement surveys. We’ve launched culture initiatives. We’ve communicated our values endlessly. Yet our best people are leaving for competitors who have something we don’t: a culture where they can actually solve meaningful problems.”
The recent HBR article by Ned Feuer and Maggie Mastrogiovanni from Gartner correctly identifies that trust is “an invaluable commodity that’s critical for organizational success” and that without it, companies are “less prepared to weather” the storms of rapid policy changes, economic uncertainty, and disruption.
However, the article—and much of the leadership discourse—overlooks a key point: the trust crisis is not mainly a communications or engagement issue. It is a credibility problem rooted in the gap between stated values and actual leadership actions.
The most damaging gap occurs when leaders demand innovation while undermining the very conditions required for it to succeed.
The Innovation-Trust Connection No One’s Making
With two decades of experience advising Fortune 500 companies and governments on innovation strategy, leadership, and culture, I have observed a pattern that explains the trust crisis more thoroughly than any employee survey:
Organisations that cannot build genuine innovation capability cannot build genuine trust. The two are inseparable.
Why? Because innovation capability—the systematic ability to identify, develop, and deliver solutions that create meaningful value—requires the same fundamental conditions as trust: psychological safety, leadership vulnerability, consistent behavior, and the willingness to invest resources in uncertain outcomes.
When leaders declare innovation a strategic priority but penalise failed experiments, trust erodes. If they promote psychological safety yet maintain governance that discourages risk-taking, credibility diminishes. When breakthrough thinking is encouraged but resources for deep problem-solving are withheld, employees recognise the inconsistency.
Research with global organisations shows that while 84% of executives view innovation as critical to growth, only 6% are satisfied with the outcomes. The gap is not due to lack of knowledge, but rather a lack of courage to create the necessary conditions for innovation, even when it is costly, uncomfortable, or politically challenging.
This same lack of courage also underlies the trust crisis.
Why Traditional Trust-Building Approaches Fail
Most organisations address the trust challenge with predictable interventions such as town halls, transparency initiatives, leadership training, and communication campaigns. While these efforts are not inherently flawed, they are insufficient.
The reason is that these approaches treat trust as something built through words, rather than as something earned through consistent behavior, especially when that behavior is complex.
Recent research on workplace trust reveals that, instead of trust, organisations are experiencing widespread anger—anger toward institutions, toward leadership, and over broken promises. This “crisis of grievance” stems from repeated experiences where leaders articulate values but fail to demonstrate them when it matters most.
The pursuit of innovation highlights this dynamic clearly. Innovation requires behaviors that often conflict with both human instincts and traditional management practices:
- Calculated risk-taking in environments where our brains feel potential losses twice as intensely as equivalent gains.
- Learning from failure in organisations where career progression has historically rewarded flawless execution.
- Challenging established processes in hierarchies where questioning the status quo has traditionally been career-limiting.
- Tolerating ambiguity when leadership selection has favored those who provide certainty.
When executives demand these behaviors but maintain systems that penalise them, employees lose trust in leadership’s commitment to innovation and confidence in leadership’s integrity.
The Corporate Executive Board reports that 60% of employees have withheld innovative ideas due to fear of negative consequences. This is not only an innovation issue; it is a trust problem rooted in the disconnect between leadership rhetoric and behavior.
Innovation as the Trust-Building Mechanism
A key insight is that innovation capability does not only require trust; it is also a powerful mechanism for building it.
When organisations develop genuine innovation capability by systematically addressing complex problems through collaborative, customer-focused work, they also establish the trust foundations their organisations need.
This is not theoretical. I have observed this dynamic across industries and across the world. Organisations that embed innovation capability experience transformation that extends beyond their innovation portfolio. They build:
Leadership credibility through demonstrated vulnerability. When leaders model uncertainty, share their own innovation attempts, including failures, and demonstrate that not having all the answers is acceptable, they show employees they’re willing to take the same risks they’re asking others to take.
Psychological safety through system alignment. When performance metrics, resource allocation, and recognition systems actually reward experimentation and learning, employees experience consistency between rhetoric and reality.
Organisational resilience through distributed capability. When multiple teams across the organisation can systematically tackle meaningful problems, employees gain confidence that their organisation can navigate whatever disruption comes next.
Purpose and meaning through genuine impact. When people solve problems that matter—that create measurable value for customers or enable their organisation to serve its purpose more effectively—they experience the deep satisfaction that builds intrinsic motivation and trust.
This transformation does not occur through innovation programs or labs, but through systematic capability building that addresses the psychological, physical, and mental factors necessary for innovation to thrive.
The Four Trust-Building Dimensions of Innovation Capability
In my work with organisations around the world, I’ve identified that building innovation capability—and simultaneously rebuilding trust—requires addressing four interconnected dimensions:
1. Leadership Ownership, Not Sponsorship
Trust begins when leaders take ownership of the innovation agenda rather than simply sponsoring it. This involves making difficult choices, such as allocating resources to experiments with uncertain returns, protecting innovation time despite operational pressures, and visibly recognising learning from failure, even when it conflicts with short-term performance goals.
Research from Wharton shows that trust-building qualities include warmth, integrity, and competence. Leadership ownership demonstrates all three: warmth through genuine connection with the challenges innovation presents, integrity through alignment between words and actions, and competence through the capability to create conditions where innovation flourishes.
2. Middle Management Enablement
The trust crisis is particularly acute at the middle management level. Research shows that 69% of middle managers feel solely responsible for delivering cultural commitments, while only 14% believe senior leaders are modelling those same behaviors.
In innovation-focused organisations, middle managers are the essential link between executive vision and daily operations. Their decisions on resource allocation, risk tolerance, and employee recognition collectively shape organisational culture more than any executive communication.
When organisations provide middle managers with the capabilities, psychological safety, and authority to drive innovation day-to-day, they not only build innovation capability but also restore trust in leadership’s commitment to enabling success.
3. Systematic Problem-Solving Capability
Trust increases when employees see tangible evidence that their organisation can solve meaningful problems. This requires moving beyond superficial innovation activities to develop what I call differentiated innovation capability.
This represents the strategic middle ground between incremental improvements and radical initiatives, where organisations address customer-centered problems that require cross-functional collaboration and are achievable within reasonable timeframes.
When multiple teams can systematically address these challenges, employees see that their organisation is building the capability to shape its future. This observable capability restores trust more effectively than any communication campaign.
4. Systems Alignment with Aspirations
Trust erodes most when formal systems contradict stated values. Performance metrics that penalise risk-taking, resource allocation that favors established operations, and recognition practices that reward conformity all contribute to perceptions of leadership hypocrisy.
Building innovation capability requires redesigning systems to enable, rather than constrain, desired behaviors. When employees see that experimentation is rewarded, resources are allocated to uncertain opportunities, and learning from failure is recognised, they experience the consistency between words and actions necessary to rebuild trust.
Aligning systems requires more than policy changes. Leaders must make explicit trade-offs between short-term efficiency and long-term capability, between control and empowerment, and between optimisation and exploration.
The Courage Question Leaders Must Answer
Ultimately, both the trust crisis and the innovation gap come down to a single uncomfortable question:
What are leaders prepared to sacrifice to create the conditions they say they want?
Are you willing to sacrifice short-term efficiency to build long-term agility?
Can you protect innovation capacity even when everyone seems to be running at maximum utilisation?
Will you allocate resources to experiments that might fail?
Are you prepared to model vulnerability about your own uncertainties and failures?
Most organisations find that their trust crisis, like their innovation challenges, results not from insufficient knowledge or inadequate programs, but from leadership’s reluctance to make necessary sacrifices when costs become tangible.
The HBR article correctly notes that facing headwinds, “a solid foundation of employee trust can give companies an important edge.” But it doesn’t address how to build that foundation when traditional trust-building approaches have failed.
From Theatre to Transformation
The solution is not additional communication about trust or more innovation programs. It is to build systematic capability in both areas through an approach that:
Starts with an honest assessment of where your organisation actually stands—not where you assume you are or aspire to be—in terms of both innovation maturity and trust foundations.
Creates controlled environments where leaders can practice innovation-focused behaviors—vulnerability, calculated risk-taking, learning from failure—before applying them in high-stakes situations.
Equips middle managers as the critical bridge between executive vision and daily reality, providing them with capabilities, psychological safety, and authority to translate innovation aspirations into operational practice.
Redesigns systems so they enable rather than constrain innovation—aligning performance metrics, resource allocation, recognition practices, and governance with stated values.
Builds capability through solving real business problems that matter, creating observable evidence that the organisation can shape its future rather than merely react to it.
This process is neither quick nor easy. It requires confronting difficult truths about the gap between rhetoric and reality, making explicit trade-offs between competing priorities, and maintaining consistency even when it is costly.
For organisations willing to undertake this work, the rewards are significant: cultures where trust and innovation reinforce each other, employees are confident in their organisation’s ability to navigate disruption, and breakthrough thinking becomes standard practice.
The Choice Every Leader Faces
The trust crisis described in the HBR article cannot be resolved through improved communication or additional engagement initiatives. It requires rebuilding the foundation that supports both trust and innovation: leadership behaviors that align with stated values, systems that enable desired outcomes, and the courage to make difficult decisions when necessary. Executive teams face a choice: continue addressing trust and innovation as separate challenges through traditional approaches that have consistently failed, or recognise them as interconnected capabilities that must be built systematically through consistent leadership behavior and system redesign.
Ask yourself these diagnostic questions:
- When was the last time you visibly took a risk that could have damaged your reputation if it failed?
- Do your formal systems—metrics, allocation processes, recognition practices—actually reward the behaviors you say you want?
- Can your organisation systematically solve complex problems worth hundreds of thousands of pounds, or do you rely on heroic individual efforts?
- Are your middle managers equipped to drive innovation on a day-to-day basis, or are they caught between impossible demands?
The answers indicate whether you are building genuine capability or merely creating the appearance of trust.
Employees are already aware of the reality. The question is whether leadership is prepared to acknowledge it and undertake the necessary work for genuine transformation.
The trust crisis and the innovation gap both stem from the same underlying issue: the gap between what leaders claim to value and what they actually enable. By closing this gap through systematic capability building, organisations do more than restore trust; they become capable of shaping the future rather than simply surviving.
This is not merely trust-building; it is transformation grounded in leadership, courage, and operational reality.
Cris Beswick is a strategic advisor and recognised global thought leader in innovation strategy, leadership, and culture. He partners with executive teams worldwide to build innovation-led organisations where trust and capability reinforce each other through systematic transformation based on leadership behaviors and system redesign.