The Work That Builds Trust

Whatever happened to trust?

One of my favourite thinkers, Rachel Botsman, defines trust as “a confident relationship with the unknown.” She’s spent over fifteen years studying trust, and the insight she keeps returning to is this: the greater the uncertainty, the more trust you need.

In my joyous role steering the AgileAus conference for almost twenty years, I’ve witnessed people and organisations striving to adopt better ways of working. It has been inspiring to hear the many stories of people trusted to own their work, deliver something valuable to customers, and learn from it along the way. Lately, however, I have found myself wondering whether something is slipping – I think we all feel it. And perhaps the thing slipping fastest of all is trust.

The trust problem

I spoke to a friend recently who got in early to work so he could leave early to meet his child’s needs – and then was quietly warned by his manager that this behaviour ‘gives the wrong impression’. Another friend is too scared to speak up in meetings as the goalposts keep moving and she’s afraid to say the wrong thing, with another frustrated by the time she spends waiting for approval on even the smallest decisions.

These are not isolated moments – they’re what Botsman would call a breakdown of trust. She says it can be very confronting for leaders to recognise that their need for control is itself a form of distrust. The micro-managing, the presence-as-performance culture, the processes that reward activity over outcomes – these are all withdrawals of trust that accumulate.

There is a national conversation about productivity and innovation, though sometimes I think we can miss the point that it all happens through people. Too often we use the words ‘talent’, ‘workforce’ and ‘headcount’ – but innovation and productivity actually walks on two legs! And many people are not thriving – so they cannot do their best work.

Of course, there is the load of the world weighing on many, but in the world of work, the impact is clear: mental health compensation claims have grown 161% over the past decade, and crossed the $1 billion threshold five years ahead of projections. Beyond that, there is evidence to suggest people are disengaged and not proud of their work or their workplaces. Culture Amp’s 2025 research, across 3.3 million employees, finds that what’s happening is “quiet cracking”: a slow erosion of pride, energy and motivation that doesn’t show up as someone leaving, but as someone slowly hollowing out. SEEK’s 2025 Workplace Happiness Index found that nearly half the Australian workforce is somewhere between neutral and unhappy, and 1 in 3 regularly dread going to work.

People aren’t quitting – the job market is too precarious for that – they’re cracking. Adam Grant describes quiet cracking as “the new term for silently disengaging from a job that slowly breaks your spirit”. Organisations that mistake retention for engagement are missing the problem – and the opportunity – entirely. Much of this quiet cracking is rooted in the slow erosion of trust. When people feel they aren’t trusted – to make decisions, to manage their work, to speak openly – their engagement, motivation, and pride quietly drain away.

Botsman is right that trust is not just declining; it has been displaced. The old model, where trust flowed top-down and leaders expected to be trusted by virtue of their position, is breaking. Trust has to be earned through behaviour, through transparency, through actually letting people do their jobs. Botsman writes that trust is the conduit through which all new ideas travel. You cannot get good work, let alone innovation, out of people who don’t feel trusted.

The AI layer

Mike Walsh, the insightful Australian futurist and author of the book, The Algorithmic Leader, has been saying for years that “AI should change what we do, not just how we do it.” Organisations that bolt AI onto how they already work without changing their structures, their culture, or how much they trust their people won’t get the uplift they’re hoping for. They’ll get the same organisation, slightly faster perhaps, but with a much bigger technology bill.

I am curious how many organisations struggling with AI are running into the same problems they faced when introducing better ways of working in the past. Perhaps the questions need to shift from not only “How do we use this?” but to “What does this mean for how we work, how we deliver, and what capability actually looks like now?”

This is the Work

The skills that matter most, such as iterative delivery, cross-functional collaboration, continuous learning, and working in genuine uncertainty, are not being replaced by AI. They are the prerequisites for AI actually working.

As Botsman says, trust is earned through behaviour, integrity and actually letting people do their jobs. The organisations that get this right – that build distributed trust rather than clinging to control – are the ones that innovate, adapt, and create real value. They are also not coincidentally the ones making the most of AI.

Building this adaptive organisation is hard, and it’s a journey that never ends. Every decision, every interaction is an opportunity to strengthen trust.

The agile mindset remains the compass. It guides how we collaborate, how we learn, and how we make intelligent tools actually useful. Right now, investing in trust is the work that truly matters – and it’s work worth doing.

P.S. We’ll be doing the work at AgileAus26, Melbourne, 19–20 May 2026.