Many employees don’t trust their managers, and this is what managers need to do to fix it.

Employees are not engaged with their work. According to Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace report, employee engagement has hit its lowest level since 2020, falling for the second consecutive year. This has cost the world economy an estimated $10 trillion in lost productivity. I thought about what this means in practice. It reminded me of Claire, a leader who was proud of her team. She described them as smart and high energy, and she’d worked hard to create this kind of environment. So she eagerly read the results twice when her organization’s annual engagement survey came back. Fully 81% of her team said they trusted the organization, but only 43% said they trusted their direct leader. Unsurprisingly, Claire was disappointed. She had to contemplate that gap for a week before she could bring herself to look at the scores closely and face the truth. She discovered a pattern when she sat down with her team. Her team experienced her as decisive, capable, and clear on direction. However, they also saw her as distant. They didn’t know what she cared about beyond the work. They didn’t know how she made decisions or what she valued when things got hard. They respected her, but they didn’t really know her. Claire was smart enough to recognize that the trust she wanted her team to have in her wasn’t there, and she worried it might be too late to turn it around. The window is still open Trust in governments, media, and large institutions sits at historic lows globally. Yet leaders within organizations are bucking that trend. The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer found that while government leaders recorded a net loss of 16 trust points following major global events, direct leaders moved in the opposite direction, gaining a net 9 points. If you’re a leader, your people are not done with you. In a world that feels increasingly uncertain and untrustworthy, they are still looking to you. In my 30 years of leadership and more than two decades of co