Can Your Employees Trust You Through Disruption?

What happens when employees are expected to navigate artificial intelligence, job insecurity, cost pressures, changing regulations, and new expectations for well-being—all at the same time?

Organizations cannot address these forces independently. They are converging, accelerating, and reshaping nearly every decision leaders make.

The question is no longer whether disruption will happen.

The question is whether employees trust their leaders enough to navigate it together.

In this episode of The SHIFT Forward, Dr. Cindy Pace speaks with Julian Lute, Insights and Innovation Strategist at Great Place To Work.

Julian is a trained microbiologist and organizational anthropologist who views an organization as a living organism. Like any organism, a company depends on multiple interconnected systems working together to remain healthy, adapt, and grow.

Together, Cindy and Julian examine the mega shifts affecting work, the changing relationship between people and artificial intelligence, and the role trust plays in organizational health.

They also explore why leadership development cannot remain an individual pursuit, why listening must precede innovation, and why the strongest organizations use technology to multiply human potential rather than eliminate it.

Organizations Are Living Systems

A living organism cannot remain healthy when its critical systems stop working together.

The same is true for an organization.

Leadership, culture, communication, technology, talent, strategy, operations, and employee experience are interconnected. Pressure on one system eventually affects the others.

Right now, many of those systems are under simultaneous pressure.

Organizations are attempting to reconcile competing demands:

• Adopt artificial intelligence while protecting trust

• Reduce costs while supporting employee well-being

• Create global standards while following local regulations

• Increase productivity while avoiding burnout

• Move quickly while making thoughtful decisions

• Transform roles while preserving job security

• Create consistency across increasingly fragmented workplaces

Employees experience these tensions differently depending on where they work, what they do, and who leads them.

One employee may receive transparent information, meaningful development, and opportunities to experiment with AI.

Another employee in the same organization may receive unclear instructions, limited support, and constant reminders that technology could replace their role.

That inconsistency weakens trust.

A healthy organization cannot create a great employee experience for only some people. The experience must become consistently positive across identities, roles, functions, regions, and levels.

Workplace Fragmentation Makes Trust More Important

Employees increasingly want consistency while workplaces become more fragmented.

Their experience may vary according to:

• Business unit

• Geography

• Function

• Work arrangement

• Manager

• Access to information

• Technology

• Career level

• Organizational influence

That fragmentation becomes especially dangerous during disruption.

If employees receive conflicting messages from different leaders, they begin questioning which message is true.

If one team is invited to experiment while another is punished for making mistakes, people become uncertain about what the organization actually values.

If leaders celebrate AI publicly while employees privately experience additional work, fear, and confusion, a credibility gap emerges.

Consistency does not require every employee to have an identical experience.

It requires employees to encounter the same underlying standards of honesty, dignity, fairness, and support throughout the organization.

The Five Dimensions of Workplace Trust

More than 30 years ago, Great Place To Work began studying trust by listening to employees describe what it meant to them.

That research produced the organization’s Trust Model, which identifies five dimensions of a great workplace:

• Credibility

• Respect

• Fairness

• Pride

• Camaraderie

Credibility asks whether leaders do what they say they will do.

Employees examine whether leaders communicate honestly, demonstrate competence, and act with integrity.

Respect asks whether employees believe their contributions matter.

It includes professional support, collaboration, involvement in decisions, and evidence that leaders care about employees as people.

Fairness asks whether people receive equitable treatment and a genuine opportunity to succeed, regardless of who they are or what they look like.

Pride reflects the relationship between employees and their work.

Do people believe their contribution matters? Are they proud of their team, organization, and impact on the world?

Camaraderie reflects relationships among colleagues.

Do people like and care about the individuals with whom they work? Does the organization feel like a supportive community?

Together, these dimensions create the conditions for people to perform, contribute, and grow.

They also provide leaders with a way to examine organizational health from the perspective that matters most: the lived experience of employees.

AI Is Changing What Leadership Credibility Means

Artificial intelligence can provide information almost instantly.

A leader may need time to gather data, consult others, consider context, and formulate a thoughtful response. An AI tool can generate an answer within seconds.

That difference raises an important question:

What happens to a leader’s authority when employees can access information faster than the leader can provide it?

Leaders cannot preserve credibility by competing with AI on speed.

They strengthen credibility by demonstrating something AI cannot: consistent judgment grounded in context, relationships, accountability, and experience.

Employees need leaders whose actions match their words.

If leaders tell employees to use AI, employees should see those leaders using it as well. Leaders should speak openly about:

• Where AI helped

• Where it failed

• Which outputs required verification

• How they checked the sources

• What they misunderstood

• Where human judgment changed the result

• What they are still learning

Employees should see the entire process—not only a polished success story.

A leader cannot demand experimentation while hiding their own learning curve.

It cannot become a “do as I say, not as I do” situation.

Close the AI Say–Do Gap

Credibility increases when leaders close the distance between what they promote and what they practice.

If leaders expect employees to use AI responsibly, they must model responsible use.

That includes acknowledging that AI can produce incorrect or fabricated information. It includes verifying outputs, checking sources, protecting sensitive information, and knowing when the tool is not appropriate.

Leaders should also establish clear expectations about the role AI plays in the work.

Employees need to understand:

• Which tools they can use

• What information they can enter

• Which outputs require human review

• How AI-assisted work will be evaluated

• Whether using AI will affect staffing decisions

• What quality standards remain unchanged

• Who remains accountable for the final result

A leader who cannot explain these expectations creates uncertainty.

A leader who openly demonstrates their own practices turns AI adoption into a shared learning process.

AI Should Amplify Human Experience

Cindy shared the example of a private equity CEO who was excited about using AI to draft communications.

The technology produced material so quickly that the CEO began questioning whether analysts were still necessary.

That conclusion overlooked what experienced analysts contributed.

An analyst who has worked with the organization may remember:

• An error that appeared in a previous report

• A stakeholder’s reaction to an earlier message

• Why a particular word created confusion

• Which data points require additional scrutiny

• How leaders prefer to receive information

• What organizational history shapes the current decision

AI may create a useful first draft.

It cannot automatically reproduce the full context accumulated through years of work, relationships, mistakes, and learning.

The better opportunity is to use AI to amplify the analyst’s role.

AI can accelerate the first stage of the work. The analyst can then apply discernment, challenge assumptions, recognize patterns, correct errors, and improve the final product.

Technology provides speed.

People provide judgment.

Removing the human contribution may create the appearance of efficiency while eliminating the experience required to recognize when the work is wrong.

Efficiency Without Discernment Can Create More Work

Many organizations are rushing to describe their products and processes as AI-enabled.

They invest in technology with the expectation that productivity will automatically increase.

But introducing AI does not eliminate the need for human interpretation.

It can generate more information for employees to evaluate, organize, verify, and correct.

In some cases, employees may spend more time managing AI-generated output than they previously spent completing the work themselves.

The organization purchases efficiency.

The employee experiences additional labor.

This creates an expectation–experience gap.

Leaders describe AI as fast, transformational, and empowering. Employees experience uncertainty, increased workloads, unreliable outputs, or new responsibilities they were not trained to perform.

When leaders fail to examine that gap, trust begins to erode.

AI adoption should not be measured only by how many tools the organization purchased or how many employees use them.

Leaders must ask:

• Is this making the work better?

• Is it making employees more capable?

• Is it reducing or increasing unnecessary work?

• Does it improve the quality of decisions?

• Are employees receiving the development they need?

• What new problems has the technology created?

• Where is human oversight still essential?

Employees Need to See How AI Makes Them More Valuable

Employees do not experience AI as an abstract business trend.

They experience it through questions about their livelihoods:

• Will this technology replace me?

• Will my role still exist?

• Will my experience continue to matter?

• Am I being trained for what comes next?

• Will I be included in the transformation?

• Does the organization consider me an asset or an expense?

The strongest organizations address those questions directly.

They focus on how AI can help employees perform better, develop new capabilities, and increase the value of their contributions.

According to research Julian shared from Great Place To Work, employees who believe AI is augmenting their roles—and whose leaders provide a clear path for growth and development—are two and a half times more likely to experience their organization as a great workplace.

Another organization may purchase the same technology and offer access to the same features without producing the same result.

The difference is not the tool.

It is the employee experience surrounding the tool.

Technology becomes culture-enriching when people understand how it supports their development and enables them to contribute more meaningfully to the organization’s mission.

Leaders Must Reimagine the Work, Not Merely Refill Jobs

For decades, many organizations began workforce planning with established positions.

They identified a job, determined the required skills, and hired someone who matched the description.

That approach assumes the work itself will remain relatively stable.

AI is challenging that assumption.

Organizations must now ask a more fundamental question:

What is the work that needs to be done?

Some roles will change significantly. Others may disappear. Entirely new responsibilities, teams, products, and divisions may emerge.

Future-ready organizations are beginning to scan several years ahead and consider:

• What work will still require human judgment?

• Which tasks can technology accelerate?

• What new work will AI make possible?

• Which capabilities will become more valuable?

• How should existing roles be redesigned?

• What development will current employees need?

• Where can people move as the organization changes?

Leaders may not know every answer.

They can still invite employees into the process of discovering them.

People closest to the work often see emerging opportunities before senior leaders do. They understand where time is being lost, where customers are frustrated, which processes need to change, and how their roles could evolve.

Curiosity allows leaders to access that knowledge.

“I Don’t Know” Can Build Trust

Expert leaders often build their identities around knowing.

They have spent years developing specialized knowledge. They are invited into important rooms because they can answer difficult questions, interpret complex information, and guide other people.

Admitting uncertainty may feel like surrendering the authority they worked to earn.

But adaptive challenges require a different form of leadership.

AI is reconfiguring work in real time. Organizations have never experienced this precise combination of technologies, economic conditions, employee expectations, and social pressures.

No leader can know everything that will happen next.

Credibility no longer requires pretending otherwise.

A leader can say:

“I do not know the answer yet, but we can figure it out together.”

They can also ask:

• What are you seeing?

• How is this affecting your work?

• Where do you think the opportunity is?

• What concerns you?

• What would you try?

• What are we missing?

• What do you need to learn next?

These questions do not weaken leadership.

They allow the organization to combine executive perspective with the knowledge and experience distributed throughout the workforce.

Future-Ready Leadership Requires Personal Development

Leaders cannot guide other people through transformation without examining their own capacity to change.

Julian argues that therapy and personal development should become part of a leader’s compensation package.

Leaders need support that is not tied exclusively to performance, productivity, or business output.

They need places where they can say:

• I do not know.

• I am uncomfortable.

• I need help.

• My identity is changing.

• The expertise that made me successful may no longer be sufficient.

• I am struggling to release control.

• I do not know who I am if I am not the person with the answer.

This is not simply skill development.

It is ego development.

It asks leaders to move beyond protecting an identity built on expertise and consider their larger responsibility for helping other people move forward.

Organizations routinely expect leaders to support employees.

They should also create conditions in which leaders can receive support themselves.

Leadership Development Is a Team Sport

Leadership has traditionally been treated as an individual responsibility.

A leader receives feedback, attends a program, hires a coach, or creates a personal development plan.

Meanwhile, the leadership team works collectively on financial projections, strategic initiatives, operational targets, and major projects—but rarely on the quality and consistency of its leadership.

That creates silos.

Employees may have an excellent experience under one leader, an average experience under another, and a damaging experience under a third.

The organization appears to have one culture.

Employees experience several.

Leadership development must therefore become a team responsibility.

Leaders need to discuss:

• How employees receive information

• What behavior is rewarded

• How uncertainty is communicated

• How teams are invited into decisions

• What effective leadership looks like

• Where trust is breaking down

• How leaders will hold one another accountable

• What each leader is learning

• Where each leader needs support

Their growth must move together.

This is not an executive retreat built around entertainment and surface-level bonding.

It is a direct conversation about how leaders are affecting the organization and what they must change together.

Vulnerability Gives Other People Permission to Grow

Cindy recalled an organization that asked employees to evaluate the effectiveness of their leaders.

The assessment included direct feedback from the people reporting to each leader.

During a company town hall, the CEO publicly shared his own results.

He discussed what he was doing well and where his behavior could prevent him from leading effectively.

That act immediately changed what other leaders believed was possible.

If the CEO could acknowledge areas for improvement, they could do the same.

Leaders began contacting one another for advice:

• How did you discuss your results?

• What questions did your team ask?

• How did you prepare?

• What did you find difficult?

• What are you going to change?

The CEO’s vulnerability transformed an individual assessment into a collective leadership practice.

It demonstrated that feedback was not punishment.

It was a tool for growth.

When leaders make their development visible, they give other people permission to evolve.

That is how culture changes.

Silos Weaken the Organizational Organism

In a living organism, systems must exchange information.

When leaders restrict communication across organizational boundaries, they damage that flow.

Julian described an organization where employees were afraid to ask questions outside their business units.

People could be reprimanded for contacting someone in another area. Information was expected to travel through established leaders and formal channels.

The organization’s workplace results began declining.

Another company encouraged the opposite behavior.

Employees were invited to schedule coffee conversations with colleagues in other areas—especially with people whose work intersected with their own.

One organization restricted the movement of information.

The other created relationships through which knowledge could move.

Silos may give leaders a sense of control, but they limit learning, reduce trust, and prevent employees from understanding the larger organization.

Healthy cultures create responsible pathways for people to ask questions, exchange perspectives, and solve problems together.

Leaders Need Safe Ways to Hear Difficult Feedback

At one organization, Julian helped facilitate a fishbowl exercise involving approximately 50 leaders.

A leader sat in the center and listened while colleagues described what it was like to work with that person’s business unit.

The conversation was not about the leader’s personality.

It was about the experience the leader’s team created for other parts of the organization.

The exercise was deeply uncomfortable.

Leaders resisted it for months. Some became visibly anxious when the conversation finally occurred.

But the organization needed a breakthrough.

Senior leaders often receive increasingly filtered information as they rise. People become more cautious about what they say, and the leader’s formal authority can prevent honest feedback from reaching them.

A carefully designed exercise can interrupt that pattern.

The goal is not humiliation.

It is to create a safe, caring environment in which leaders can see the distance between their current impact and the impact they hope to create.

Feedback may not produce an immediate transformation.

It can provide the first impulse toward change.

When employees see leaders willingly enter the discomfort of honest feedback, they become more willing to experiment, learn, and evolve themselves.

Middle Managers Carry the Weight of Transformation

Julian is especially concerned about middle managers.

They are sometimes described as the organization’s “frozen layer” because information, strategy, and trust can stall there.

Middle managers receive pressure from multiple directions.

They must:

• Understand executive strategy

• Translate it for employees

• Implement organizational change

• Respond to employee concerns

• Maintain performance

• Adopt new technology

• Protect team well-being

• Communicate decisions they may not have influenced

• Manage their own uncertainty

They are catching pressure from both the top and the bottom.

Data may show that executives understand the organization’s direction while comprehension and trust decline sharply at the middle-management level.

That decline affects real people.

If only half of the middle managers understand a transformation, the employees reporting to the other half are left to interpret it themselves.

Organizations cannot build trust at scale without investing in the people responsible for translating strategy into daily experience.

Middle managers need context, development, community, and permission to ask questions before they are expected to answer everyone else’s.

A Great Workplace Must Be Great for All

An organization may appear on a respected workplace list while some employees continue having poor experiences.

That does not necessarily mean the organization’s effort is insincere.

It means culture work is unfinished.

A company cannot consider its culture healthy simply because the average score is high.

Leaders must examine whose experience differs from that average.

They should ask:

• Which groups experience less trust?

• Where does the experience change by manager?

• Who lacks access to development?

• Which teams receive information late?

• Where do employees feel unable to speak?

• Who experiences AI as an opportunity?

• Who experiences it primarily as a threat?

• Which parts of the organization are improving?

• Which parts are being left behind?

A great workplace cannot be great only for employees with the right manager, position, geography, identity, or access to leadership.

It must work for everyone.

Trust Moves Differently at Scale

Smaller organizations can often change more quickly.

There are fewer leadership layers. Decisions may be more visible, communication more direct, and the relationship between leadership behavior and employee experience easier to observe.

As organizations grow, leadership reverberates through more layers.

Messages are translated repeatedly. Local practices develop. Employees become further removed from the people making decisions.

That makes consistency more difficult.

It also makes positive change more powerful.

A global organization may employ hundreds of thousands of people. Improving leadership across that system affects employees, families, communities, and economies.

The challenge is greater, but so is the potential impact.

Large organizations need mechanisms that allow trust to travel:

• Consistent leadership expectations

• Strong middle-manager development

• Local listening

• Transparent communication

• Cross-functional relationships

• Shared accountability

• Data that reveals differences in experience

Listening Is the Beginning of Change

Whether an organization employs 50 people or 500,000, the work begins with listening.

Listening is not waiting for an employee to finish so the leader can defend a decision.

It is not collecting feedback to validate a conclusion that has already been reached.

Genuine listening allows another person’s perspective to affect what happens next.

It helps leaders understand:

• What employees care about

• What is causing fear

• Where processes are failing

• How technology affects the work

• Which messages are unclear

• What opportunities employees see

• How people can influence decisions

• What the organization needs to change

Teams cannot work through problems they are unable to discuss.

Organizations cannot transform when information moves in only one direction.

Listening sits at the center of trust because it creates the conditions for better communication, innovation, and decision-making.

Leaders Need Multiple Forms of Data

Employee surveys provide valuable information about workplace culture.

They reveal patterns in how people experienced the organization during a particular period.

But one survey cannot provide the entire picture.

Leaders need to triangulate multiple forms of data.

That includes:

• Employee engagement and trust surveys

• Feedback from direct reports

• Input from cross-functional stakeholders

• One-on-one conversations

• Team discussions

• Real-time observations

• Open-ended employee comments

• Leadership-effectiveness assessments

• External benchmarks

• Competitive intelligence

Retrospective data helps leaders identify patterns.

Just-in-time conversations reveal what employees are experiencing now.

Stakeholder feedback shows how a team affects other parts of the organization.

External information helps leaders understand whether the organization is leading, keeping pace, or falling behind.

The purpose of data is not merely to produce a score.

It is to help leaders understand the culture they are creating and decide what they need to do differently.

The Storms Will Keep Coming

AI is not the only disruption facing organizations.

Economic pressure, new regulations, workforce changes, geopolitical instability, technological acceleration, and evolving employee expectations will continue intersecting.

The storms will keep coming.

A leader cannot promise employees calm water.

They can create enough trust for people to remain in the boat together.

That trust grows when leaders:

• Match their actions to their words

• Use technology openly and responsibly

• Preserve human judgment

• Invest in employee growth

• Admit what they do not know

• Invite people into problem-solving

• Seek difficult feedback

• Develop alongside other leaders

• Support middle managers

• Listen before acting

• Use data to understand different employee experiences

Leadership during disruption is not one person standing at the front and issuing commands.

People throughout the organization may need to assume different roles as conditions change.

Some will navigate. Some will identify hazards. Some will repair the vessel. Some will see opportunities others have missed.

Everyone needs to understand the north star:

What is our purpose? Where are we trying to go? How will we reach it together?

The defining advantage of a great workplace is not the absence of disruption.

It is the presence of trust.

Employees believe their leaders have their best interests in mind. They believe leaders will bring them into the journey and sometimes allow them to lead from the front.

The question is not whether an organization can build trust.

It can.

The question is whether leaders will build enough of it—consistently and for everyone—to move through the storms ahead together.