There is a number that should be sitting at the top of every leadership agenda in every organisation right now.
It is not an engagement score. It is not a retention rate. It is not a productivity metric.
It is this: trust in immediate managers dropped from 46% to 29% in just two years. A 37% collapse. Confirmed by DDI’s Global Leadership Forecast 2025, the largest and longest-running global leadership study in existence, spanning 10,796 leaders and 2,185 HR professionals across 50 countries and 24 industry sectors.
That is not a gradual erosion. That is not a post-pandemic hangover. That is a structural collapse in the most important relationship in any workplace – the one between an employee and the person directly above them.
And most businesses are still running as though it hasn’t happened.
What the Number Actually Means for the People Doing the Work
Managers are not an abstract layer of organisational structure. They are the human interface between company decisions and individual experience. They are the person who decides whether an employee’s idea gets taken seriously or quietly shelved. Whether a struggling team member gets support or a performance warning. Whether a team feels like a unit or a collection of people doing separate tasks in the same room.
When trust in that person collapses, the consequences are not limited to a difficult working relationship. They ripple through every dimension of how an employee experiences their job.
ADP Research analysed three years of monthly surveys from 2,500 US workers and found that employees who trust their managers are 26 times more likely to report high levels of motivation and commitment compared to those who do not. Not 26% more likely. Twenty-six times.
That gap between a team that trusts its manager and a team that does not is not a culture metric. It is a performance metric. It shows up in the quality of decisions made under pressure, in the speed at which problems get solved, in the willingness of employees to go beyond what is strictly required of them.
When trust drops from 46% to 29%, the organisations losing it are not just dealing with a people problem. They are dealing with a productivity problem, a retention problem, and an innovation problem, all at once, all quietly, all without a single dashboard alerting them to what is happening.
Why Employees Stop Trusting Their Managers
Trust between an employee and a manager does not collapse overnight. It erodes through accumulated experience.
It erodes when a manager says one thing in a one-to-one and behaves differently in a meeting. When a promise about development or progression disappears into a busy quarter and is never mentioned again. When an employee raises a concern and watches it go nowhere. When the feedback they receive is vague, inconsistent, or delivered in a way that makes them feel managed rather than supported.
DDI’s research found that frontline managers are three times more likely to have concerns about the impact of AI on their roles compared to senior leaders. They are caught between strategic directives they do not fully understand and teams asking questions they cannot answer. They are operating under more pressure, with less clarity, and less organisational support than at any point in the last decade.
The result is a layer of management that is itself struggling, and struggling in silence, while being expected to be the primary source of support, direction, and psychological safety for the people beneath them.
71% of leaders report dealing with significant stress levels since stepping into their current leadership role. Half of those stressed leaders are grappling with burnout. And 40% are considering leaving their roles entirely. That is the human cost. The business cost sits directly beneath it.
What a Trust Collapse Costs a Business
The relationship between trust and business performance is not soft. It is measurable, documented, and significant enough to appear in financial returns over time.
Companies on the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For list, organisations consistently rated highly on employee trust, generate cumulative stock market returns 3.5 times higher than the top 1,000 US companies by market cap over a 27-year period. Revenue per employee at those companies averages $883,928, compared to $104,030 across the US public market average. That is an 8.5 times difference in revenue per person.
Trust is not a culture initiative. It is a financial multiplier.
When it collapses at the manager level, the business loses that multiplier from the ground up. People at high-trust companies report 50% higher productivity and 106% more energy at work compared to low-trust environments. When trust in managers drops by 37% across an organisation, neither of those figures holds. What remains is a workforce that is physically present, technically functional, and commercially underperforming in ways that may not appear on a spreadsheet for months.
PwC research found that 42% of executives cite productivity as the biggest risk when employees do not trust their employer. But the finding that should concern leaders most came second on that list: the risk is not just that people leave. It is that they stay and work half-heartedly. The cost of mistrust is paid not only in turnover and recruitment fees but in the daily, invisible tax of employees who are capable of more and no longer willing to give it.
The Employees Most Likely to Leave Are the Ones You Can Least Afford to Lose
DDI’s research identified something particularly damaging inside the trust collapse. Among high-potential individual contributors, the intention to leave increased from 13% in 2020 to 21% in 2024. These are the employees organisations depend on to build their next five years. The ones with the sharpest instincts, the most transferable skills, and the clearest sense of what a well-led environment looks and feels like.
High-potential talent is 3.7 times more likely to leave in the next year if their manager does not regularly invest in their growth and development.
Most managers do not know who those employees are. And even among those who do, the structural conditions of their own role, the pressure, the ambiguity, the absence of support from above, make consistent developmental investment in their team extremely difficult to sustain.
The result is a predictable and expensive pattern. The employees most likely to find another role, who have the most options and the most confidence in their own market value, are the first to register declining trust and the first to act on it. The employees who stay are not necessarily the ones who trust their manager more. They are often the ones with fewer alternatives.
This is how organisations quietly hollow out from the inside. Not through a sudden talent exodus but through the gradual departure of the people who could see what was coming.
Why Training Alone Cannot Solve This
The standard response to a leadership trust crisis is a development programme. Better management training. Courses on communication. Coaching on feedback delivery. These interventions have real value and should not be dismissed.
But they address the symptom rather than the system.
A manager can attend every leadership development programme available and return to their team on Monday morning with genuinely improved intentions. But if that manager has no real signal about how their team actually feels, they are still operating on assumption. They are still relying on filtered, managed, incomplete information about the emotional reality of the people they lead.
The gap between what a manager assumes about their team’s experience and what team members are actually experiencing is not closed by better interpersonal skills alone. It is closed by honest, real-time data that surfaces how people feel before the trust erosion becomes visible in performance metrics or resignation letters.
DDI found that only 22% of HR teams currently prioritise the development of future-focused leadership skills. That is a significant gap. But skills without signal still leave managers navigating in the dark. They need both.
The Pattern That Keeps Repeating
Here is what makes this particular crisis so persistent.
Managers cannot rebuild trust they do not know they have lost. Employees will not tell them directly because the act of telling them carries its own professional risk. HR does not find out until exit interview data arrives, by which point the most valuable employees have already gone and the ones who remain have adjusted their behaviour to survive in a low-trust environment.
The warning signals exist long before any of this becomes visible. A team that has started to lose faith in its manager does not maintain the same patterns of communication, collaboration, and discretionary effort that it had when trust was intact. The shift is gradual, observable, and measurable, if an organisation has the infrastructure to see it.
Most do not. Not because the data does not exist, but because no system is collecting it honestly, continuously, and at the team level where trust either lives or dies.
The Moment That Changes Everything
The organisations beginning to close this gap are not doing it by running more surveys or delivering more leadership workshops. They are doing it by fundamentally changing the feedback infrastructure that manager-employee relationships run on.
When employees have a genuinely safe, anonymous, daily channel to express how they actually feel about their working environment, the data that flows from it tells a completely different story from the one that reaches leadership through conventional channels. It tells the truth. The ordinary Tuesday version of the truth, before it becomes a performance issue, a sick leave spike, or a resignation.
That data, in the hands of a good manager or a People Operations team that knows how to act on it, changes the entire dynamic. It gives managers the signal they need to intervene before trust erodes to a point of no return. It makes the invisible visible at the moment when something can still be done about it.
Trust does not collapse all at once. It drops one unnoticed moment at a time. The difference between an organisation that catches those moments and one that doesn’t is not the quality of its people or the sincerity of its intentions.
It is whether anyone is listening closely enough, and honestly enough, to hear what is actually being said.
How Moody At Work Rebuilds What the Numbers Are Measuring
The DDI data identifies the problem with precision. Trust in managers has collapsed. The cost is measurable. The pipeline is at risk. But the research cannot tell any individual organisation where in their structure the erosion is happening, how far it has progressed, or which teams are closest to a breaking point.
That is exactly what Moody At Work was built to answer.
The platform gives employees a daily, anonymous, thirty-second channel to share how they genuinely feel about their working environment. No names. No career consequences. No managed responses shaped by what an employee thinks their manager wants to hear. Just honest, continuous data about the human experience inside the organisation, captured at the team level, in real time.
MoodyBot, the platform’s AI layer, analyses those responses and surfaces the patterns that matter. Which teams are trending toward disengagement. Where trust signals are weakening. Where a manager who genuinely wants to do better is losing ground without knowing it. And crucially, it delivers this in the form of actionable insight to the HR leaders and People Operations professionals who have both the mandate and the means to respond.
The trust collapse DDI measured is a global number. But it is made up of individual moments, in individual teams, between individual managers and the people they lead.
Moody At Work makes those moments visible before they become a statistic.
Moody At Work is a patented filed workplace wellbeing platform connecting anonymous daily mood tracking and AI-powered insights to help HR managers, People Operations leaders, and founders understand how their people actually feel — in real time, before it becomes a business problem.
Sources: DDI Global Leadership Forecast 2025 (10,796 leaders, 2,185 HR professionals, 50 countries). ADP Research EMC Index 2024. PwC Trust in US Business Survey 2024. Great Place to Work High-Trust Culture Business Case. Edelman Trust Barometer 2024 and 2025. Gable Workplace Trust Research 2025. Speakwise Workplace Trust Statistics 2026.