Why Trust Is the Thing Your Organisational Agility is Missing

Employee willingness to support organisational change has fallen from 74% to 32% in under a decade. Organisations have responded with better frameworks, restructured teams, and more sophisticated change programmes. What most haven’t done is look honestly at the trust deficit sitting underneath all of it, or seriously address how much that’s costing them.

High trust has measurable consequences. According to Great Places to Work, high-trust organisations generate around 8.5x more revenue per employee than the market average. That’s not surprising when you consider the fact that trust is also shown to translate into 260% higher motivation, 41% lower absenteeism, and 50% lower turnover. When trust is present, people move faster, share information more freely, and take the kind of considered risks that produce better decisions and better outcomes.

What makes this more than a morale argument is what happens in its absence. Remove trust and no structural redesign recovers it. The problems that trust was quietly solving — slow decisions, withheld information, risk aversion, disengagement — surface elsewhere, often in places that are harder to diagnose.

Each of the five challenges that most commonly stall agility has trust at its root. Which means each one also has trust as its most direct solution.

1. Change Resistance is Usually a Trust Deficit in Disguise

FranklinCovey’s researchfound that 87% of leaders view disruption as something to survive. Only 13% treat it as a strategic opportunity, and the teams working under them are consistently the most willing to embrace change and take risks.

People don’t resist change because they’re averse to it. They resist when they don’t believe in the direction, don’t feel included in the decision, or don’t trust they’ll be treated fairly through the process. In fact, PwC found that 44% of employees still don’t understand why changes are happening. When people are asked to move fast without clarity or confidence in their leaders, holding back is the rational response.

Worth trying:

• Reframe disruption as possibility. Ask your team: “What does this make possible that wasn’t possible before?” It’s a more honest opening to a change conversation than a list of what’s different and why it’s good.
• Communicate change in layers, not announcements. Brief senior leaders first, give them time to internalise the reasoning, then equip them to take it to their own teams. The message holds better when people aren’t hearing it for the first time alongside everyone else.
• Go first on uncertainty. Leaders who are willing to say what they don’t know, and acknowledge that change is hard, create more room for their teams to engage honestly with it.

Take next steps with our practical guide: The Energy of Change: 5 Leadership Behaviour to Drive Collective Action in a Fluid Landscape

2. Silos Persist Where Trust Between Functions is Low

Rigid departmental boundaries and approval chains not only slow decision-making, they can also produce the kind of territorial behaviour that makes cross-functional work feel adversarial. The structural causes are real, but they don’t fully explain why the same problems persist after restructures and cross-functional mandates. People collaborate across boundaries when they trust the people on the other side. When they don’t, the conversation defaults to credit and resource allocation rather than shared problem-solving.

Organisations that break this pattern tend to have built genuine familiarity between functions before they needed it. This happens when leaders make time to understand how other parts of the organisation actually work, what pressures they’re under, and what they need. That understanding changes the quality of every formal conversation that follows.

Worth trying:

• Make cross-functional relationships a deliberate investment. Most leaders make time for their own team and their own stakeholders. Fewer make time to understand the pressures and priorities of peers in other functions. Those informal conversations determine how quickly formal collaboration moves when it needs to.
• Replace approval layers with shared accountability. Identify one cross-functional priority, make progress visible to all parties, and introduce joint check-ins. When teams share a clearly defined goal and can see how it’s moving, the approval mechanisms that exist because of uncertainty tend to become unnecessary.

3. Psychological Safety is Trust Made Specific

“The antidote to fear is trust.” – Stephen M.R Covey

Agile approaches depend on people being willing to surface problems, challenge assumptions, and say when something isn’t working. That only happens if speaking up doesn’t cost them something. When it does — or when people believe it might — organisations get external agreement and private disagreement. When decisions get made on the basis of what people said rather than what they thought, issues start to arise.

Psychological safety isn’t something leaders can declare. It’s determined by what actually happens when someone raises a problem or pushes back on a decision. Leaders who respond well in those moments, consistently, build it. Leaders who don’t, lose it.

Worth trying:

• Thank people for surfacing problems, not just solving them. Most leaders thank people for fixing things. Fewer explicitly thank people for raising an issue early or saying something difficult. The distinction matters because it tells people what you actually value.
• Make check-ins short and regular. A brief weekly or fortnightly conversation — what worked, what didn’t, what we’d do differently — normalises learning from mistakes rather than hiding them. Teams that do this consistently build the habit of being honest with each other under pressure, which is when it matters.
• When someone challenges you publicly, treat it as useful. How a leader responds the first time someone disagrees with them in a meeting sets the expectation for everyone watching. Handling it well does more for psychological safety than any stated commitment to openness.

4. Bureaucracy is What Low Trust Looks Like at Scale

Every outdated approval, unreviewed sign-off, and redundant check sends the same message: we don’t trust your judgement. People working inside that environment adapt to it. They become more cautious, more focused on documentation, more careful about covering themselves. The work slows down and so does the thinking.

Simplifying the process while the underlying distrust remains tends to produce limited results. The process usually returns in some form, because it’s serving an anxiety that hasn’t been addressed. The more direct path is identifying where the distrust actually sits and having the conversation.

Worth trying:

• Name your trust taxes. Go through your most time-consuming processes and ask: is this here because the risk is real, or because we don’t trust someone’s judgement? The answer determines whether the right response is a process change or a different conversation about expectations and accountability.
• Delegate one decision you’re currently holding. Not nominally — actually hand it over, with the context and authority needed to make it properly. The information you get back about what happens next is usually more useful than the decision itself.

5. Accountability Breaks Down Where Alignment and Trust Are Weak

When alignment is weak, trust can’t compensate for it. And when trust is low, even clear priorities don’t produce honest conversations about whether they’re being met. The two problems compound each other, and the result looks like a motivation issue when it isn’t. We’ve found that in today’s tech-driven world 92% of employees spend hours each week waiting for clarity or resolving misalignment, and 36% hesitate to make decisions without manager approval. That’s what insufficient alignment and insufficient trust produce together.

The standard response is more oversight. The more useful response is sharper clarity — priorities defined specifically enough that people know whether they’re achieving them — combined with an environment where people can raise problems before they become expensive ones. Accountability that actually works requires both conditions. People need something real to be accountable to, and they need to feel safe enough to say when it isn’t working. In low-trust environments, accountability collapses into compliance when someone is watching and blame when something goes wrong.

Worth trying:

• Check whether your stated priorities are actually clear. Ask three people at different levels to describe the team’s top priority in their own words. Where the answers diverge is where the misalignment lives.
• Shift accountability sideways, not just upward. When team members make commitments to each other — not only to their manager — the follow-through is different. It’s harder to deprioritise something when a colleague is counting on it than when only a manager is tracking it. More commitments kept equals stronger team trust and higher collective momentum.

Download our latest FranklinCovey Insight Report to unpack human-centred execution: AI Transformation & the Human Imperative

And Underneath All Five: Leadership Credibility

“Here’s the revealing thing: most of us are more command and control than we’d like to think. In fact, perhaps the single biggest barrier to becoming a Trust & Inspire lead is that we think we already are one.” – Stephen M.R. Covey

The five barriers above share a common root cause. Each one is created, sustained or dismantled by leadership behaviour — specifically whether a leader has the credibility to inspire trust rather than demand compliance.

FranklinCovey’s 2025 Global Leadership Survey found that two in three employees have low confidence in the quality of their leaders, and only 42% view their own leader as trusted. The performance consequences are real, with CIPD Good Work Index 2024 finding that transparent, empathetic leadership directly correlates with higher discretionary effort. That’s the difference between a team that functions and one that thinks carefully about how to do the work well. Yet our report found only 7% of leaders combine high performance expectations with genuine care for the people they lead — the precise combination that produces the resilience that agility requires.

The pressure response for most leaders is to revert to a ‘Command & Control’ style of leadership characterised by more oversight, more centralised decisions, and closer management. It’s a reasonable instinct which usually makes things slower, not faster. ‘Trust & Inspire’ leaders on the other hand respond to uncertainty by being honest about what they know, consistent in how they behave, and willing to extend trust in ways that raise the bar without burning people out.

At FranklinCovey we work with organisations to build the leadership culture and practical conditions where high trust becomes normal. If that’s a conversation worth having, start here.