The trust your team has in you is not what you think it is.

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Hey Spark Family,

I want to share something that landed differently for me when I read the newest workplace research.

Fifty-six percent of employees have left a job primarily because of a bad manager.

Not the work. Not the pay. Not the company itself. The person leading them.

That number, from Monster's 2026 Workplace Relationships Report, stops me every time. Because it names what I have been watching in leadership teams for a long time: trust is not nice to have. It is the most consequential thing a leader builds or erodes.

And most leaders do not know they are losing it until someone is already walking out the door.

The Research Is Clear

Monster's 2026 Workplace Relationships Report surveyed more than 1,000 U.S. employees and found that 56% have left a job primarily due to poor management. On the flip side, 55% have stayed longer because of a great manager. Managers shape retention more powerfully than almost any other organizational factor.

This is not new in isolation. It is new in urgency. And when you look at the trajectory, the urgency becomes clear.

DDI's Global Leadership Forecast 2025 tracked this exact pattern over time. Trust in immediate managers dropped from 46% in 2022 to 29% in 2024. A 17-point decline in two years. Not a dip. A collapse. The study, spanning more than 10,000 leaders across 50 countries and 24 industry sectors, also found that high-potential talent is 3.7 times more likely to leave in the next year if their manager does not regularly provide opportunities for growth and development.

Perhaps most striking: for the first time, employees now trust distant senior executives more than the managers they work with directly. The middle layer of leadership, the people closest to the work, has lost more credibility than the people furthest from it.

That inversion matters. It tells you something fundamental about what is happening in the day-to-day relationship between leaders and the people they lead.

What I'm Seeing In The Field

Most leaders I work with believe their teams trust them. And most of the time, the relationship feels okay to them. What they are missing is that okay and trusted are not the same thing.

Trust does not erode through big betrayals. It erodes through small, repeated moments that accumulate quietly over time.

I see the leader who says one thing in a one-on-one and something slightly different in the leadership meeting. She does not think of this as inconsistency. She thinks of it as reading the room. But the person in that one-on-one has started to wonder which version is real.

I see the leader who makes a decision that affects his team without bringing them into the conversation first. He moved fast because the situation required it. That part was probably right. But he never came back and explained what happened or why. The team filled in the gap themselves, and what they filled it with was not generous.

I see the leader who gives feedback that is technically accurate but delivered in a way that closes the person down rather than opens them up. She told the truth. But the person on the other end of that conversation does not feel seen. They feel managed. And over time, they stop bringing her the things that matter most.

None of those moments feel significant in isolation. Accumulated, they are exactly what a 17-point drop in trust looks like from the inside. And they are the reason people leave without a conversation.

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What We Teach Leaders Inside Spark Brilliance

When I bring this data into a leadership conversation, the first thing I ask is: what do you think trust actually costs you to build, and what does it cost your team when it is missing?

Most leaders underestimate both numbers.

Trust is built in small, consistent moments, not gestures. It is built when a leader does what she said she would do, even in the meeting where it would have been easier not to. It is built when a leader names what is hard instead of smoothing over it. It is built when a leader follows up on a conversation she could have let drop, because she said she cared and the follow-up is how people know she meant it.

Three things consistently move the needle with the leaders I work with.

First, they close the loop. When something changes, when a decision shifts, when context evolves, they tell their people directly rather than waiting for it to come up. People who are kept in the picture stop filling gaps with fear.

Second, they separate caring from agreeing. A leader can hold a hard position and still make the person across from her feel heard. Those are not opposites. The leaders who struggle with trust often believe they are, so they either soften the position or skip the empathy. Both erode trust faster than the hard conversation itself would have.

Third, they make their intentions visible. Most trust is lost not because of what leaders do, but because people cannot see why they did it. Naming the reasoning, even briefly, changes what people do with what they observe.

⭐ Leadership Challenge

Before your week gets moving, sit honestly with these.

Think about a decision you made in the last month that affected your team. Did they hear your reasoning, or did they have to piece it together on their own?

➡ Is there someone on your team who has gotten quieter, less forthcoming, or more careful around you, and have you asked yourself why?

➡ When did you last follow up on something you said you would come back to, and did you?

And the one worth sitting with longest:

➡ If your team rated their trust in you today, would the number match what you believe it would be?

➡ The gap between how leaders see themselves and how they are actually experienced is where trust lives or dies. The leaders who close that gap are not the ones who never make mistakes. They are the ones who stay in the conversation long enough to know what their people actually need.

With gratitude,
​Jackie

P.S. – If this is landing for you, hit reply and tell me what trust looks like on your team right now. I read every response. ✨

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