Return-to-office edicts, AI anxiety, and sliding morale share a root cause leaders prefer not to name: people no longer assume good faith. Seven in ten adults globally say they hesitate to trust those who hold different values, facts, or problem-solving approaches, a sharp signal that everyday collaboration will be harder before it gets easier (Edelman, 2026). At the same time, only 32 percent believe the next generation will be better off, a pessimism that feeds risk aversion at work (Edelman, 2026). Employers sit at the fulcrum. They are the institution best placed to act as a broker of trust and can scale that role through conflict-resolution training and structured interactions across differences (Edelman, 2026).
The engagement picture is equally blunt. Only 20 percent of employees worldwide report being engaged at work, a slump that Gallup estimates costs about 10 trillion dollars in lost productivity, or 9 percent of global GDP (Gallup, 2025). Manager engagement is falling too, down from 27 to 22 percent between 2024 and 2025, which starves teams of energy and consistency (Gallup, 2025). Yet in best-practice organizations, 79 percent of managers are engaged. That gap suggests design, not destiny. Trust is not a perk to sprinkle over the same structure. It is a policy choice that must be built into how decisions get made, how disagreement is handled, and how performance is learned from.
What trust by default actually means
Trust, operationalized, looks like granting authority before proof and holding people to account through transparent work, not proximity. The best-developed management research on radical decentralization frames this clearly. Self-managing organizations decentralize authority in formal, systematic ways across the whole firm. Their defining feature is the elimination of the traditional manager–subordinate relationship, replaced by explicit roles and peer-based governance (Lee and Edmondson, 2017). This is not a manifesto. It is a synthesis of how less-hierarchical systems are designed to work and where they struggle.
That synthesis also draws a line leaders should heed. Classic managerial hierarchy works well for reliable execution of known tasks in stable environments. It becomes a brake when problems are complex, cross functional, and fast changing. Hierarchy tends toward rigidity and reinforces status differences that suppress the very learning people need to grow (Lee and Edmondson, 2017). In a climate where employees are wary of others’ beliefs and motives, doubling down on gatekeeping only deepens silence and slows coordination. Trust by default, in contrast, specifies decision rights in advance, distributes them widely, and normalizes peer challenge without waiting for a boss to bless every move.
Safety is the operating system of trust
A trust-by-default design fails if people fear that speaking up will backfire. That is why psychological safety is not a slogan but an operating requirement. Amy Edmondson’s foundational field study defined team psychological safety as a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking and found that such safety was associated with learning behavior, which in turn mediated the link to performance (Edmondson, 1999). The study was cross-sectional and conducted in one company, so it does not prove causality across all settings, but it provides a durable mechanism: when people can surface errors and ask for help, teams learn faster and perform better.
Safety, however, must be built, not inferred. The trust deficit identified by Edelman is specifically about working with people who think differently. Employers, positioned as trust brokers, can invest in conflict-resolution training and intentionally mix colleagues with divergent views in structured settings, so that disagreement becomes a skill, not a rupture (Edelman, 2026). Pair that with routines that make candor normal. Examples include issue logs reviewed weekly, blameless incident debriefs run by rotating facilitators, and explicit norms that anyone can question a decision if they state the risk, the evidence, and a constructive alternative. None of this requires a manifesto. It does require managers to act more like hosts and editors than approvers.
Guardrails that make trust measurable
Trust by default is not laissez-faire. It is a system with visible constraints and crisp feedback loops. Three guardrails help.
-
Decision rights are published. Map who decides, who must be consulted, and who needs to be informed. In a self-managing logic, those rights live with roles, not titles, so they travel when roles rotate or scale (Lee and Edmondson, 2017).
-
Information is open by default. Meeting notes, decision records, and performance dashboards are shared unless there is a clear legal or privacy reason not to. When people can see the work, accountability flows laterally as well as vertically.
-
Disagreement is processed, not performed. Use a lightweight escalation path that starts with peer resolution, then moves to a cross-functional forum with a time limit. Train people in how to argue well. Edelman points to conflict-resolution training and cross-values interaction as scalable employer moves, precisely the kind of infrastructure that keeps debate from becoming dysfunction (Edelman, 2026).
Measurement closes the loop. If engagement is stuck at 20 percent globally, and best-practice firms have nearly four in five managers engaged, leaders have evidence that structure shapes energy (Gallup, 2025). Track leading indicators that tie to learning and trust: participation in debriefs, the rate of documented decision reversals, the time from issue identification to resolution, and the distribution of decisions across roles. Publish these. When people see that speaking up changes outcomes, they speak up more.
The practical start
Begin with a 90-day pilot in one value stream. Clarify decision rights, flip documentation and information to open by default, and schedule two conflict fluency sessions that mix people who rarely work together. Add a weekly learning review that asks three questions: what did we try, what did we learn, what will we change. Set one nonnegotiable. Any person can pause a decision if they write down a specific risk and a proposed mitigation, and the team must respond within 48 hours. This is trust made visible.
None of this denies that some work benefits from clear chains of command. Lee and Edmondson’s synthesis is explicit that hierarchy suits stable, repeatable tasks, while more fluid, interdependent work needs a different backbone (Lee and Edmondson, 2017). The choice is contextual, not ideological. What the evidence does make plain is the cost of avoiding the choice. A world where most people expect worse for their children and hesitate to trust those unlike them will not reward reflexive control. Employers have both the permission and the need to act as brokers of trust. Make trust the default policy, then build the structures that let people earn it every day.
Sources
- Edelman (2026). Edelman Trust Barometer 2026. Finds 70% globally have an insular mindset and identifies employers as the best positioned trust brokers who can scale trust via conflict-resolution training and cross-values interaction. https://www.edelman.com/trust/2026/trust-barometer
- Lee and Edmondson (2017). Self-managing organizations: Exploring the limits of less-hierarchical organizing. Defines self-managing organizations and synthesizes evidence on when hierarchy helps and when it hinders complex problem solving. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191308517300059
- Edmondson (1999). Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams. Introduces team psychological safety and shows, in a cross-sectional study of 51 teams in one firm, that safety is associated with learning behaviors that mediate performance. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.2307/2666999
- Gallup (2025). State of the Global Workplace 2025. Reports global employee engagement at 20%, a cost of about $10 trillion or 9% of global GDP, and a drop in manager engagement alongside a best-practice benchmark of 79%. https://www.gallup.com/workplace/659610/state-global-workplace.aspx