Leadership is undergoing a significant shift. After years of promoting empathy and inclusion, many leaders are responding to the pace of change by choosing control. The flexibility leaders used to show is shrinking, and a “tough boss” mindset is creeping back in, masked as accountability. However, new data from SparkEffect’s Trust in Turbulence research shows that control-based leadership will not restore performance; it will break it.
Our research, in partnership with Dr. Aaron Delgaty, a PHD in Cultural Anthropology, surveyed hundreds of employees across industries, and what we found was that when leaders trade their humanity for hardness, trust collapses for companies. In high-trust organizations, 97 percent of employees say their company performs well financially. In low-trust environments, that number falls to 46 percent — a 51-point drop. Retention follows a similar pattern: it increases from 52 percent to 93 percent as trust rises, and reputation nearly doubles, from 49 percent to 97 percent. Trust, in short, is not a soft metric; you can measure it, and it’s structural.
Where Trust Actually Lives
Managers sit at this very interesting intersection of being the drivers of both culture and performance. They translate the organization’s strategy into daily experiences and make it real for their teams. SparkEffect’s research found that employees consistently report higher trust in their direct managers than in senior leadership. However, that trust is also more fragile. During disruptions such as leadership turnover, layoffs, or personal crises, it falls by 4.1 points on average—the steepest drop across all trust domains.
The implication for learning and development is that trust is built on a local level, with managers day in and day out. It lives within the one-on-one check-ins, feedback conversations, and change announcements where confidence, fairness, and care are either reinforced or fractured. This we might already have known, but what we can now measure is how deep the break in trust is when disruption happens, if your managers can’t meet the moment.
Seventy-one percent of employees told us they’ve faced at least one major disruption – personal and/or professional in the past two years, with many facing multiple at once. Managers wanting a sense of control revert to being a “tough boss”, an emotional response to the pace of the disruption. This is killing trust within your organization, and we can prove it.
Managers need support in understanding that they can’t control the events, but they can control their response. And that’s where influence becomes the critical skill.
The Trust Dividend™
The data reveals a pattern every L&D leader needs to understand. When disruption is handled poorly, trust plummets, creating a 28 percent trust deficit that ripples through performance and retention. We see this show up in the data as control-driven responses from managers—tightening communication, skipping context, or pushing change without dialogue—which only drives silence and skepticism.
However, when disruption is handled well, trust doesn’t just hold — it grows! The difference lies in how managers use their influence. Influence-driven responses that are anchored in clarity, fairness, and care invite engagement and ownership. Employees remember not just what happened but how it was handled. This ability to build trust during a disruption is what we call the Trust Dividend™, and when it’s done well, organizations see a measurable 12 percent increase in trust above baseline.
When leaders practice influence under pressure, they turn a moment of disruption into a moment of trust building. That shift compounds over time, fueling stronger alignment, faster adoption, and better business outcomes.
Building Elastic Trust™
The good and bad news is that trust is not static; it stretches or shatters under pressure. We call this trust elasticity™, an organization’s ability to retain confidence and alignment through change, such as company reorganizations or systems and technology rollouts. The difference between high- and low-elasticity organizations is dramatic.
When disruptions are handled well, organizations score an average of 11.23 on our trust elasticity index, indicating that trust expands beyond the baseline. When handled poorly, elasticity collapses to 5.61, leaving trust brittle and performance compromised. High-elasticity companies retain 73 percent of key employees, maintain 74 percent of their industry reputation, and 69 percent report clear strategies for future disruptions. Low-elasticity organizations lose talent, credibility, and confidence.
Elasticity isn’t about endurance. It’s about transformation. When managers are trained to lead through influence, they help organizations bend without breaking. They make trust renewable.
Redefining Manager Development
For learning and development leaders, these insights demand a shift in emphasis. The desire for control has moved the trend in manager training toward efficiency, time management, delegation, and process discipline. But the research shows that the real leverage point is influence: the ability to create clarity amid uncertainty and demonstrate fairness and care under pressure.
Influence is teachable. It starts with developing trust literacy, understanding the signals that build or erode trust, and practicing those behaviors in low-stakes settings before the crisis comes.
In SparkEffect’s work, we observe that managers who prioritize clarity in conversations and feedback are better prepared to handle disruption more quickly and to retain higher team engagement afterward. The new measure of leadership effectiveness isn’t how tightly a manager controls outcomes. It’s how confidently their team moves with them when outcomes are uncertain.
The Bottom Line
In 2025, trust has become the true competitive advantage. It determines not just how people feel but also an organization’s revenue, retention, and reputation. When managers are taught to lead with influence rather than control, they become the multipliers of that advantage.
The question for L&D leaders isn’t whether to teach trust—it’s how quickly they can make it the foundation of every manager’s skill set. Because the next disruption is already on its way, and the leaders who know how to influence through trust will be the ones whose teams follow them through it.
