The trust recession, ineffective meetings and the root of psychological safety
Only 21% of US employees strongly agree they trust their organization's leadership. That's the Gallup number. And if you thought it couldn't get worse, the Edelman Trust Barometer recently recorded its first global decline in employee trust across the study's 26-year history.
That's the backdrop for this week's Frequency with my co-host Jenni Field.
We-ness is the prerequisite for psychological safety, and it can't fall entirely on leaders.
Bruce Daisley's Eat Sleep Work Repeat podcast hosted Professor Katrien Franzen, whose research on leadership and social identity draws a direct line: without a genuine sense of team belonging, psychological safety can't take hold. The conditions have to exist first.
Franzen identifies four leadership roles: task, motivational, social, and external. The problem is we've collapsed all four into the expectation of one person. I pushed back a little on this, not to let leaders off the hook, but to make a useful distinction. The motivational and social roles tend to travel together in the best leaders I’ve seen. You don't need one person maxing out at 100% on all four dimensions; you need the right people around you covering the ones you don't.
What Jenni adds is worth keeping: these leadership roles don't have to sit with the formal leader. The person who organizes the team social, the person who naturally advocates externally, they're doing leadership work. Let them. For IC teams, the practical ask is straightforward: tell the stories of leaders doing the motivational and social work well. That's not soft-focus culture content. That's the infrastructure for psychological safety.
Listen: We-ness: The Secret Cause of Psychological Safety (Eat Sleep Work Repeat)
Nearly 80% of workers say meetings are swallowing them. The problem isn't meetings. It's the ones nobody questions.
Southwest Airlines CEO Bob Jordan made the rounds recently by blocking his calendar every Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday afternoon. An Atlassian study of 5,000 workers across four continents found 72% of meetings are deemed ineffective. Jenni's position is the right one: meetings are work, but they're not always the best use of it.
The recurring meeting is the real culprit. The one that runs every Monday whether there's anything to say or not. I believe my point about status and belonging is underrated here: people feel important if they're in the room and anxious if they're not. That's a culture problem that meetings are papering over.
The questions worth stealing, from both of us: what's the actual outcome of this meeting? What's my role in it? If nobody can answer those before it's scheduled, that's your answer.
Read: Meetings Are Not Work (Fortune)
Shel Holtz applied a product development model to the trust crisis. It's one of the more useful reframes for IC in a while.
Shel introduced the Kano model, developed by Professor Noriaki Kano in the 1980s for product management, as a framework for thinking about how internal communication actually builds or erodes trust. Given the Gallup and Edelman numbers above, the timing is right.
The model breaks communication into four categories. Must-be expectations (payroll, benefits updates) are table stakes: you don't build trust here, you just avoid a crisis. Performance factors are where trust is actually built or eroded, specifically how well leaders explain the "why" behind decisions. Exciters and delighters are unexpected efforts that prove the organization sees its people as part of the solution. A genuine "here's what we heard, here's what we're doing" loop is the prime example. Indifferent features are the award-winning newsletter that goes out while employees feel stuck in the dark. It doesn't move the needle whether it's there or not.
Shel's post got me thinking about what this would look like as an actual audit tool. So I built one. I'm not a developer, but with Claude Code I put together the Kano Comms Audit — a free tool that lets you map your current communication activity against the model and see where you're over-invested in noise and under-delivering on trust. Worth running before your next planning cycle.
Read: The Trust Recession (Shel Holtz, LinkedIn)
The UK's best workplaces perform four times better than the market. Trust is the common thread.
The Great Place to Work UK 2026 list puts numbers behind what most IC practitioners already know: organizations that build genuine trust generate 6.25 times greater revenue per employee and significantly outperform on retention and productivity. Hilton topped the super-large category. NVIDIA was highlighted for pairing employee autonomy with management trust in ways that show up in real results.
I am skeptical of paid-for lists, which is fair. Plenty of great workplaces aren't on this list because they didn't apply. But the more useful question, which Jenni and I both landed on, is what are these organizations actually doing? For practitioners, Jenni's suggestion is worth acting on: reach out to the head of IC at a company in your sector that made the list. That's a conversation worth having.
The throughline across everything in this episode, as Jenni put it, is trust. Not engagement, not culture. Trust.
Read: Best Places to Work in the UK 2026 (Great Place to Work UK)
Written by Chuck Gose, founder of ICology.