You're Already Trustworthy. That's No Longer Enough

ISSUE #020 | THE LEADERSHIP CONTRARIAN

The Post-Trust Era: Why the Leaders Who Already Value Trust Have to Go to the Next Level

One of my entrepreneurial friends, who has been running a successful company for over 30 years, said something to me recently that stopped me cold:

"It's just harder to make a buck these days," he said. "Our company's doing well, but you just have to work so much harder to make a dollar."

The look on his face told the rest of the story - a quiet exhaustion, and something just beneath it that felt like discouragement. He wasn't complaining. He was just being honest about something real.

I knew exactly what he was talking about.

What he was describing isn't just an economic trend or a market cycle. It's something deeper and more pervasive. We are living through what we have known as the Post-Trust Era for several years now, a significant and measurable collapse of trust at every level of society.

Trust between individuals. Trust between employers and employees. Trust between customers and the companies they buy from, or could buy from. Trust in institutions, in government, in the systems we once assumed would hold.

This isn't just an American phenomenon. It's global, and it's accelerating.

The forces driving this aren't hard to identify, even if we haven't connected them all into one picture.

• Social media has fractured the shared reality we once took for granted.
• Political infighting has made institutional trust feel naïve.
• High-profile leadership failures - in business, in government, in the church - have made skepticism feel not just reasonable but wise.
• And now artificial intelligence is adding an entirely new layer of uncertainty.

AI-generated photographs, videos, and content have become sophisticated enough that people are genuinely questioning whether what they're seeing is real. That's not paranoia. That's a rational response to a world where the line between authentic and fabricated is harder to find every single day.

And it is costing us directly, on the bottom line.

Acquiring new customers is harder and more expensive than it used to be. It's not just competition or market noise, though there's plenty of both. It's that your prospective customers have been promised the world by too many companies that didn't deliver.

They tried the diet that was supposed to change everything. They bought the software that was going to solve the problem. They hired the consultant who guaranteed results. And too often, they were let down.

So now, before they say yes to you, they need more time, more proof, more reassurance - and that costs you more money to provide.

It's not only happening outside your walls either. Inside your organization, trust is under pressure too. Finding employees you can genuinely rely on - not just people who are honest and ethical, but people you can trust with complexity, with judgment calls, with the hard situations - is increasingly difficult.

That means slower decisions, less initiative, more management overhead, and margins that quietly erode as a result.

If you lead a nonprofit, you feel this differently but just as acutely. Even donors who believe in your mission are asking harder questions before they give. Trust has to be earned at a level it never did before.

Here's the thing though - if you're the kind of leader who is still reading at this point, you almost certainly already value trust. You've built your reputation on it. Your team knows where you stand. Your best customers came back because they believed in you. Trust isn't a foreign concept to you. It's something you've practiced and protected for years.

But here's the honest and difficult truth:

The trust that got you here isn't sophisticated enough for the world we're in now.

The Post-Trust Era doesn't just demand that leaders be trustworthy, it demands that they become masterful at building trust. Strategically. Intentionally. At a level of depth and complexity that most leaders, even great ones, haven't had to develop before.

This isn't about starting over or questioning your integrity. It's about going graduate-level in one of the most important leadership competencies of our time.

The leaders who win the next decade aren't learning trust from scratch - they're the ones already committed to trust who are willing to master it at a whole new level of depth and strategy.

That's what this article is about.

Section 1: The External Cost - It's Costing More to Get a Customer or a Donor

Let's start with a number that should stop you cold.

According to a 2024 PwC Trust Survey, 90% of executives believe their customers highly trust their company. The actual number of customers who say they do? 30%. That's a 60-point gap between what leaders believe and what's actually true in the marketplace.

And if you're thinking, "That's probably the big guys, not me," you're likely right that you're more trusted than Amazon or a Wall Street bank. But the gap between what you think your trust level is and what it actually is? That's probably alive and well in your company too.

This matters because trust is now a direct line item in your customer acquisition costs, even if it doesn't show up that way on your P&L.

When people feel uncertain, the question they're asking isn't "what's the best option?" It's "who can I trust?" And when they can't answer that clearly, they often don't decide at all, or they stay where they are, not because it's the right choice, but because it's the known one.

People will stick with a familiar problem over an unfamiliar solution they're not sure about.

If you haven't given your prospective customers signals that are clear enough and strong enough to cut through that uncertainty, their inaction isn't indifference. It's a trust gap you haven't yet closed.

Your prospective customers have been burned. They've bought the product that promised to change everything and didn't. They've hired the vendor who guaranteed results and disappeared. They've tried the service that sounded exactly like what they needed and walked away disappointed.

So now, before they say yes to you, even if you're the real deal, they need more time, more proof, more touchpoints, and more reassurance than they ever did before.

That's not a sales problem. That's a trust deficit in the marketplace that you are paying to overcome, whether you know it or not.

For nonprofits, the dynamic is slightly different but equally real. Donors aren't just asking whether they believe in your mission. They're asking whether they believe in you; whether their money will actually be used the way you say it will.

In a Post-Trust Era, even well-run organizations with strong track records are working harder to earn what used to come more naturally.

The marketplace is not going to get less noisy. The broken promises from other companies are not going away. The only variable you control is how deliberately and strategically you build trust with the people you're trying to reach.

Section 2: The Internal Cost - Distrust Inside Your Company Is Quietly Killing Performance

The external cost is the one founders feel most visibly. The internal cost is the one doing the quieter, deeper damage.

Gallup reported in 2023 that only 21% of U.S. employees strongly agree they trust their organization's leadership.

Read that again. One in five.

Which means if you have 20 employees, statistically, only about four of them deeply trust the direction you're setting and the decisions you're making. The other sixteen are operating with some combination of uncertainty, skepticism, or quiet disengagement, and that shows up every single day in the speed of your organization, the quality of decisions being made, and the initiative people bring - or don't bring - to their work.

Finding people you can genuinely trust with complexity is getting harder. It's not primarily a question of honesty or ethics; most people aren't trying to steal from you or lie to you.

The deeper question is whether you can trust someone with a hard judgment call, a difficult client situation, or a decision that has real consequences. That kind of trustworthiness - the kind that shows up under pressure - is rarer than it used to be, and every founder who has been in business for more than a decade knows it.

But there's another dimension of internal trust that doesn't get talked about enough, and it's the one that lives closest to home: your own.

We’re living and leading in what researchers call a VUCA world - volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous. The signals are noisier than they've ever been. The feedback loops on major decisions are longer.

Ted Koppel - one of the most respected journalists in American history (and if you're not sure who Ted Koppel is, he was a news anchor and reporter for over 60 years, the most honored journalist in ABC News history, winner of 43 Emmy Awards, 12 DuPont Columbia Awards, and 8 Peabody Awards, needless to say, he was kind of a big deal; and if you do know who Ted Koppel is, you already know why this matters) - said in a recent interview that he now sources from roughly 20 different outlets just to try to piece together what's actually happening in the world.

If Ted Koppel is struggling to get a clear read on reality, what does that mean for the rest of us - especially those of us running companies and managing people at the same time?

What this creates for leaders isn't a lack of confidence exactly. You still have your instincts. You still have your experience. You still form opinions and make calls.

But there's a new layer of uncertainty underneath the decision that wasn't there ten or fifteen years ago. You make a strategic move and you genuinely don't know - not just whether it will work, but whether you'll even be able to tell if it's working for another 12 to 18 months. The world shifts again before the last decision has had time to prove itself.

That's not weakness. That's the honest experience of leading well in a complex world.

But it is a new kind of pressure on your inner game, and it's one that most leaders are carrying quietly and alone.

Section 3: The Opportunity - Leaders Who Build Trust as a Skill Will Win the Next Decade

Here's where the story turns.

Gallup's research shows that U.S. confidence in big business currently sits at just 16%. Confidence in small business? 70%. That's a 54-point structural trust premium that you, as a founder or owner of a growing company, already carry into every room you walk into.

Your prospective customers, your potential employees, your community are already more inclined to trust you than they are to trust the Fortune 500. That's not nothing. That's a genuine competitive advantage that most small and mid-size business owners have never consciously leveraged.

But here's the critical question: are you building on that advantage deliberately, or are you just hoping it holds?

Because the leaders who will truly win in a Post-Trust Era aren't the ones who are passively trustworthy. They're the ones who treat trust as a leadership competency; something to be studied, developed, and practiced with the same intentionality they bring to their financials or their sales strategy.

Trust at this level isn't just about keeping your word or having good values, though those are the foundation. It's about:

• Understanding how trust is built and broken in complex organizations.
• Knowing how to rebuild it when it cracks.
• Developing the kind of self-awareness that closes the gap between how trusted you think you are and how trusted you actually are - that 60-point gap that is costing companies real money right now.

This is exactly where great leadership development and executive coaching become not a luxury but a strategic investment.

The leaders who are winning aren't just good people with good intentions. They are people who have committed to growing their inner game with the same rigor they bring to their business strategy.

A great coach doesn't tell you to trust yourself more. They help you see what you can't see - the blind spots in how you're showing up, the gaps between your intent and your impact, and the specific places where trust is leaking inside your organization and out.

The most valuable thing a coach gave me wasn't a framework. It was an honest mirror.

In a world where complexity is accelerating and the cost of distrust is rising, the leaders who invest in becoming masterful at building trust - internally with their teams and externally in the marketplace - will have an advantage that compounds over time. Their people will perform better, stay longer, and bring more of themselves to the work. Their customers will return, refer, and require less convincing. Their organizations will move faster because trust, as Stephen Covey observed, is the hidden multiplier of speed and cost.

Conclusion: The Invitation

We are not going back to a high-trust world by default. The erosion is real, the data is clear, and waiting for the culture to sort itself out is not a strategy.

But you are not starting from zero. You never were.

You've already built something worth trusting. You've already proven, over years of showing up and doing what you said you would do, that you are the kind of leader and the kind of company worth believing in. That foundation is real.

What the Post-Trust Era is asking of you now is to go deeper. To grow from a leader who is naturally trustworthy into one who builds trust intentionally, strategically, and with greater self awareness. To close the gap between how you see yourself and how your employees and customers actually experience you. To develop your inner game with the same seriousness you've always brought to your business.

The leaders who win the next decade aren't learning trust from scratch - they're the ones already committed to trust who are willing to master it at a whole new level of depth and strategy.

That's the invitation. And it starts with being honest about where the gaps are.

If this was helpful to you, email me and let me know. 

Until next time,

Keep learning.

Keep growing.

And God bless,

Michael