By Kim Bohr, President & COO, SparkEffect
Once this project is done…’ ‘After we hit our Q4 targets…’ ‘When we get through this restructuring…’
Sound familiar?
Seven out of ten employees have faced significant workplace upheaval in the past two years; AI system changes, leadership transitions, restructuring, personal crises that ripple through teams. We treat these disruptions as battles to survive, damage to minimize, storms to weather. But what if we’re thinking about this all wrong?
Here’s what should stop every HR and business leader in their tracks: Organizations that handle disruption well don’t just survive; they emerge with highertrust than companies that never faced disruption at all.
This counterintuitive finding lies at the heart of SparkEffect’s 2025 Trust Research, developed with Aaron Delgaty, PhD. After surveying employees across industries from technology to healthcare, from startups to enterprises, we discovered something that challenges everything I thought I knew about crisis management based on hundreds of executive coaching engagements.
Trust isn’t preserved through skillful leadership during turbulence. It can actually growbeyond baseline levels. We call this the “trust dividend™”, and it’s available to any organization willing to do the work.
The 51-Point Gap Nobody's Measuring
Consider two companies in your industry. Similar products. Comparable talent. Equivalent market positions. Yet one dramatically outperforms the other.
The difference? Trust.
Organizations with high trust report 97% confidence in their financial performance. Low-trust organizations? Just 46%. That 51-point gap cascades through everything from retention rates, which drop from 93% to 52%, to strategic clarity plummets from 93% to 40%, industry reputation falls from 97% to 49%.
These aren’t soft metrics anymore. As we’ve seen time and again, businesses are just a collection of people doing things together. When those people trust their organization, they engage differently with change, adapt faster to new technologies, weather storms together. More critically, they stay through the turbulence rather than updating their resumes at the first sign of trouble.
What continues to fascinate me is how trust operates like oxygen, you don’t notice it until it’s gone. Yet unlike oxygen, trust can be systematically built, measured, and managed. It’s not about having all the answers, it’s about having the courage to find them.
Your Managers Hold the Keys (And They're More Fragile Than You Think)
Here’s the thing about trust: it lives closest to where work happens.
Employees trust their direct managers more than organizational leadership, no surprise there. These are the people who translate company direction into daily work, who advocate for team needs, who answer the questions that really matter. They’re the local leaders who make the abstract concrete.
But our data reveals a vulnerability that keeps me up at night: When organizations stumble, manager trust takes the steepest hit, dropping 4.1 points during disruption while organizational trust barely shifts. Your frontline leaders become shock absorbers for organizational turbulence, often without the tools or support to handle that pressure.
Think about what this means for mid-sized enterprises. Your competitive advantage often lies in those closer manager relationships, the mentality “we’re all in this together” culture that larger competitors can’t replicate. Yet that same advantage becomes your greatest vulnerability when disruption hits. Your strength is simultaneously your risk.
The local leader’s advantage that defines your culture needs deliberate protection and reinforcement, especially when change accelerates. This isn’t about adding another training program. It’s about recognizing that trust flows through people, not policies.
From Damage Control to Trust Building
Most leaders’ approach disruption with a damage control mindset. Minimize losses. Maintain stability. Return to normal operations. I’ve been there, we’ve all been there. But our research suggests this defensive posture misses the real opportunity.
When organizations handle disruption with clarity, fairness, and genuine care, something remarkable happens. Trust scores don’t just recover; they exceed those of employees who never experienced disruption. These organizations are:
- Twice as likely to retain key talent
- Six times more likely to have clear strategies for future challenges
- Significantly more confident in their competitive position
The difference comes down to specific leadership behaviors, inputs that produce outputs. Open communication during change. Fair treatment that considers employee impact. Real opportunities for people to voice concerns and be heard. Visible alignment between changes and organizational goals.
When these elements combine, disruption becomes a trust-building opportunity rather than a trust-eroding threat. It’s about getting it right versus being right.
Building Trust Elasticity: Your Insurance Policy
Think of trust elasticity™ as your organization’s capacity to stretch without breaking. Some companies shatter at the first shock. Others bend, absorb the impact, and snap back stronger. The difference isn’t luck; it’s the accumulated result of how previous disruptions were handled.
Organizations with strong trust elasticity™ maintain talent through turbulence. Their reputation holds strong under public challenges. Most critically, they develop what our research calls “strategic confidence,” employees believe the organization has a plan for whatever comes next.
For HR executives, this means rethinking how you prepare for and respond to disruption. You’re not just crisis planning, you’re building trust infrastructure. Every handled transition, every communication, every moment of demonstrated fairness adds to your elasticity reserve. When the next shock hits, and it will, that reserve determines whether you emerge stronger or struggle to recover.
Making Trust Measurable and Manageable
We’ve developed the Trust Performance Index™ to measure trust across five critical domains:
- Strategic Clarity– Do employees understand direction and purpose?
- Psychological Safety– Can people speak up without fear?
- Relational Continuity & Cultural Belonging– Do employees feel valued and connected?
- Technology & Systems Trust– Is technology implementation thoughtful?
- Fairness & Change Impact Perception– Are changes handled with empathy?
This isn’t about adding another survey. It’s about recognizing that trust operates like other business metrics, it can be measured, tracked, and systematically improved. Just as you monitor revenue, retention, and your reputation, trust becomes a KPI that predicts and influences those outcomes.
For mid-sized organizations, this systematic approach offers particular advantages. You can move faster than larger competitors, implement changes more personally, create tighter feedback loops between leadership actions and employee trust. Your size becomes an asset when you treat trust as a manageable business driver rather than an abstract cultural value.
Four Practical Moves to Start Monday
After hundreds of executive coaching engagements and organizational transformations, I’ve learned that sustainable change requires practical steps, not grand gestures. Here’s where to start:
1. Support Your Direct Leaders
They’re carrying the weight of organizational trust. Give them simple, practical tools: clarity scripts for difficult conversations, fairness checklists for team decisions, care-based communication frameworks. Transform good managers into trust builders.
2. Design Fairness Into Every Decision
Before announcing changes, run them through a simple filter: Is this clear? Is this fair? Does this demonstrate care? These questions might seem basic, but they’re often overlooked in the urgency of crisis response. The cascading effects of perceived unfairness far outweigh the time saved by rushing.
3. Practice Crisis Leadership Before Crisis Hits
Trust behaviors work like muscle memory, they need repetition to become reliable. Role-plays, retrospectives on small disruptions, low-stakes simulations. Build the reflexes your organization needs when real turbulence arrives.
4. Make Trust Visible
Track it across domains. Discuss it in leadership meetings. Tie it to business outcomes. What gets measured gets managed, and what gets managed improves. Create white space on your calendar to think about trust strategically, not just reactively.
The Choice Is Yours
Crisis will find your organization. That’s not pessimism—it’s pattern recognition from decades of organizational work. The only question is whether you’ll use that crisis to build trust that lasts, or watch it erode the foundation you’ve worked so hard to create.
Our researchproves that well-led organizations don’t just weather storms—they use them to build something stronger. For HR and business leaders, this shifts the entire conversation about organizational resilience. You’re not protecting what exists. You’re using inevitable disruption as a catalyst for building deeper trust, stronger relationships, and better business outcomes.
The trust dividend™ is real. It’s measurable. And it’s available to any organization with the courage to transform disruption into competitive advantage.
Remember:businesses are just a collection of people doing things together. When those people trust each other—and trust their organization—that’s where the superpower is unleashed.
Ready to transform your approach to trust?
Kim Bohr is President & COO of SparkEffect, where she leads organizational transformation initiatives for Fortune 500 companies and emerging enterprises. The complete 2025 Trust Research Report offers detailed frameworks and practical tools for building organizational trust.
Download the full report at https://info.sparkeffect.com/trust-study-2025-download or schedule a complimentary trust strategy consultation at success@sparkeffect.com
