‘Mixed bag of managerial skill’: Workers losing faith in their bosses

With trust in managers on the decline, identifying the reasons is crucial towards reconciling team cohesion.

HR Leader recently spoke to Karlie Cremin, co-founder and managing director of DLPA, about the recent findings of the 2025 Global Leadership Forecast, which showed that trust in managers has declined from 46 per cent in 2022 to 29 per cent in 2024.

Cremin pointed towards the “mixed bag” of managerial talent available as a key issue exacerbating this mistrust between employees and managers.

“There’s an erosion of connection, or connection is a little bit different in the workplace, particularly when there’s hybrid or remote working,” said Cremin.

“What we’ve seen is managers becoming much more task-focused rather than people-focused. That makes it a little bit harder to build the trust and rapport, particularly when new people are coming into the work environment.”

“The other area is that there’s inconsistent capability or competency amongst managers in the workforce generally. With the challenges that we’ve had over the talent landscape over the last few years, we have quite a mixed bag of managerial skill.”

“So we’re actually seeing people lose trust generally in the role of the manager because they’re not quite sure where an individual manager is going to be sitting in the scheme of things, which I think is a new dynamic.”

Despite the apparent inconsistency of skill and experience at the managerial level, Cremin pointed towards wellbeing issues such as burnout being a key contributor to this fostering of distrust within organisations.

“All managers are under the pump and are really being squeezed, and having that tension between strategic deliverables and operational deliverables. What we’re seeing happen is that they tend to be quite burnt out, or they’re more likely to burn out, and that can lead to some quite inconsistent behaviour,” said Cremin.

“Once we see that come through, that damages any existing trust pretty quickly and makes it quite difficult to build trust with new people coming into the organisation as well.”

When managers are under this immense pressure, they often skip their people-to-people deliverables, instead prioritising business outcomes and operational deliverables, which, of course, can create fallout in numerous sections.

“Most managers have key deliverables around people management, but they’ve fallen by the wayside. When oxygen isn’t given to those kinds of discrete deliverables around really prioritising people, you tend to have a higher level of churn. We see organisations struggle to retain talent, in particular, key talent, in those environments,” Cremin said.

“Obviously, engagement tends to go down in those environments. Then you have the fallout of that, of discretionary effort not being mobilised and things of that nature.”

“You also have poor quality decisions or inconsistent quality of decisions as well, because people are withholding information or ideas, people are not engaging fully in the work group and not kind of working through the feasibility stage of ideas.

“So, the quality of decisions overall tends to go down. I suppose the other thing that I’d put in there is, obviously, around psychological safety, that where the people’s piece is not prioritised by managers and everything’s kind of tactical or strategic only, then psychological safety becomes quite unlikely.”

Ultimately, Cremin pointed towards a top-down approach when addressing these issues, saying that the “buck” starts with the board.

“I think it needs to be prioritised from the board down, that there needs to be a directive around it, there needs to be a framework around it and proper process maps and time-loaded process maps,” she said.

“Most of these managers are not making a conscious decision around this, that there are operational requirements and organisational reality around trying to get the job done as best they can. But ultimately, the buck stops with the board.”