SEATTLE, Wash., July 07, 2026 –
SparkEffect President and CEO Kim Bohr wrote a byline for Training magazine about a shift she’s seeing across organizations. Under pressure from constant change, many leaders are moving away from empathy and flexibility and toward control, often calling it accountability. Kim argues this works against them.
“Control-based leadership will not restore performance; it will break it,” she writes.
The piece draws on SparkEffect’s Trust in Turbulence research, conducted with Aaron Delgaty, PhD. The data shows that trust is not a soft metric. In high-trust organizations, 97% of employees say their company performs well financially, compared with 46% in low-trust environments. Retention rises from 52% to 93% as trust increases.
Disruption is now the norm: 71% of employees reported at least one major personal or professional disruption in the past two years. How leaders respond is what matters. When disruption is handled poorly, it creates a 28% trust deficit. When it’s handled well, trust can rise 12% above baseline. SparkEffect calls this the Trust Dividend™.
Kim points to managers as the biggest point of leverage. Employees typically trust their direct manager more than senior leadership, but that trust is also more fragile. During disruption, it drops an average of 4.1 points, the steepest decline of any trust domain.
Her recommendation for L&D leaders is to stop centering manager training on efficiency and process discipline and to start teaching influence, which rests on clarity, fairness, and care. That starts with trust literacy and with practicing these skills in low-stakes moments, before a crisis tests them.
