A leader once told me she had to review nearly every important decision her team made. Not because her team wasn’t capable. It had simply become how the business operated.
One extra check became another approval. One mistake created another safeguard. Eventually, leadership oversight was built into the process. That’s the part of trust we don’t talk about enough: mistrust often shows up in the workflow before it shows up in the culture.
A good place to look for it is in the processes themselves. My Process Optimization Audit Checklist can help you spot the extra approvals, bottlenecks, and unnecessary steps that may have accumulated over time.
This week, I’m looking at what trust actually costs when it becomes an operational issue.
The Operational Cost Most Leaders Miss
Trust is usually discussed as a leadership or culture issue. We talk about whether employees trust their managers, whether leaders communicate openly, and whether teams feel comfortable speaking up.
Those things matter. But there is another side of trust in the workplace that receives far less attention: trust changes how work moves through an organization.
When trust is low, companies often compensate by adding more control. A mistake leads to another approval. A missed deadline creates another status meeting. A leader who isn’t confident in a team’s decisions starts reviewing them personally. Two departments that don’t trust each other’s work begin checking and rechecking what the other has done.
Individually, these responses can seem reasonable. Over time, however, they accumulate into an operating system built around mistrust.
The business impact is significant. In PwC’s 2024 Trust Survey, 93% of business executives said that building and maintaining trust improves the bottom line. Executives also identified productivity, product and service quality, operational efficiency, and profitability among the biggest risks when employees don’t trust their employer.
The result is slower decisions, more handoffs, duplicated work, leadership bottlenecks, and processes that become increasingly difficult to navigate.
Low Trust Often Looks Like a Process Problem
Imagine a customer request needs approval from three people before anyone can act on it. On paper, this looks like a process design issue.
But why do those approvals exist?
Perhaps an employee made an expensive mistake two years ago, so leadership added another review. Later, another issue occurred, and a second approval was added. Nobody revisited the process after the original problems were resolved.
The approvals remained.
This happens frequently as organizations grow. Processes accumulate controls in response to individual incidents, but those controls are rarely reconsidered. Eventually, no one can explain why every step exists. They simply know that “this is how we do it.”
What looks like bureaucracy may actually be the operational residue of low trust.
That is why improving trust in the workplace requires more than changing how leaders communicate. Leaders also need to examine the systems they have built around their assumptions about people.
Where Low Trust Shows Up in Operations
You can often see an organization’s level of trust by looking at how work gets done.
Too many approvals
Approvals are sometimes necessary, particularly when a decision carries significant financial, legal, safety, or strategic risk. But when routine decisions require multiple layers of sign-off, it is worth asking what those approvals are protecting the company from.
If the answer is essentially, “We don’t trust people to make the right decision,” adding another approval may reduce one type of risk while creating another: slower execution and greater dependence on management.
Constant checking
Managers need visibility into performance. But visibility and supervision are not the same as repeatedly checking whether people have completed routine work correctly.
When managers spend large amounts of time reviewing, correcting, and following up on work their teams should be able to execute independently, the organization pays twice. Employees spend time producing the work, and managers spend additional time verifying it.
The better question is why that verification continues to be necessary.
This is also where perception matters. PwC found that while 86% of executives said they highly trust their employees, only 60% of employees felt highly trusted by company leadership. Even more telling, 61% of employees said a perceived lack of trust from leadership affects their ability to do their jobs well.
In other words, leaders may believe they’re giving people room to operate while the systems surrounding the work are sending a very different message.
Decisions that repeatedly escalate
An organization can tell employees they are empowered while designing a system that teaches them to seek permission.
If people expect their decisions to be reversed, criticized, or taken back after a mistake, asking a manager becomes the rational choice. The organization may describe this as a lack of ownership when employees are actually responding to the conditions around them.
Developing trust in the workplace therefore requires clarity about decision rights, boundaries, and what happens when someone makes a reasonable decision that doesn’t produce the expected result.
Duplicate work between departments
Low trust doesn’t exist only between leaders and employees. It can develop between functions.
Sales creates its own tracking sheet because it doesn’t trust the information coming from Operations. Operations verifies information it receives from Sales because previous requests have been incomplete. Finance maintains another version because it doesn’t trust either team’s numbers.
Soon, several departments are maintaining different versions of the same information.
The obvious response might be to integrate the systems or standardize the reports. That may help, but it won’t completely solve the problem if teams still don’t trust the information they receive from one another.
More Control Can Make the Problem Worse
One of the most common responses to an operational failure is to add control.
Someone makes a mistake, so another person has to review the work. A deadline is missed, so another meeting is scheduled. Information is inaccurate, so another report is created.
Each countermeasure may make sense in isolation.
The problem begins when temporary safeguards become permanent operating practices without anyone asking whether they are still necessary.
Every additional checkpoint introduces another handoff. Every approval creates potential waiting. Every report requires someone to produce, review, and maintain it.
Eventually, the controls designed to make the company more reliable can become a source of friction themselves.
Building trust in the workplace doesn’t mean removing accountability or allowing everyone to do whatever they want. Strong operating systems still need standards, clear ownership, measurable expectations, and mechanisms for identifying problems.
The difference is that those mechanisms should help people perform the work correctly rather than compensate indefinitely for the assumption that they won’t.
How to Build Trust in the Workplace Through Better Systems
If you want to understand where trust is affecting operations, don’t begin with an employee engagement survey. Begin with the work.
Look for places where processes contain unusual amounts of checking, approval, reporting, or escalation. Then ask why each layer exists.
For every approval, ask: What risk is this controlling?
For recurring management reviews, ask: What prevents this work from being completed correctly without this check?
For escalations, ask: What information or authority is missing at the level where the decision should happen?
For duplicate reporting, ask: Why doesn’t one team trust the information already available?
For decisions concentrated at the top, ask: What would need to be true for this decision to happen closer to the work?
The answers may reveal a genuine need for controls. They may also reveal unclear standards, poor training, missing information, ambiguous ownership, conflicting incentives, or outdated responses to problems that no longer exist.
Those are problems you can address.
Simply telling people to “trust each other more” is much harder to act on.
Trust Should Reduce Dependency, Not Accountability
High-trust organizations are not organizations without controls. They are organizations where controls are intentional.
People understand what is expected of them. Ownership is clear. Information is accessible. Leaders know when they need to be involved and, just as importantly, when they don’t.
When a problem occurs, the response isn’t automatically to add another layer of oversight. The organization first asks what allowed the problem to happen and what needs to change in the system.
That distinction matters as a company grows.
If every new employee, customer, department, or problem creates another approval, another report, or another management checkpoint, complexity grows alongside the business.
But when trust is supported by clear standards, good information, capable people, and well-designed processes, more decisions can happen where the work actually occurs.
That is why trust in the workplace isn’t just something leaders should care about because it creates a better culture.
It is part of how you build an organization that can operate, make decisions, and grow without adding unnecessary control at every step.
Want to Work With Us?
If your team relies on too many approvals, escalations, or leadership check-ins to keep work moving, the problem may be in the system.
The Ops Edge Academy™ is a 12-week implementation and certification program where operations leaders learn how to identify what’s creating friction, improve the flow of work, and build processes that don’t depend on constant oversight.
Enrollment is open for January 2027.
