Eight Out of Ten

How much trust exists within your organization?

I asked a senior HR executive how much trust existed inside her organization.

She thought about it for a moment. "Probably an eight out of ten."

That's a strong rating. The kind that says whatever cracks exist are manageable and likely aren’t worth losing sleep over.

Then she started running skip-level conversations. Different people. Different roles. But the same theme kept emerging.

"I'd rather just do it myself than involve him."

"It's easier when he isn't part of it."

When most people hear statements like that, they assume they're looking at a difficult employee. A personality conflict. Something to manage around.

But those weren't complaints. They were workarounds.

Every person independently arrived at the same conclusion: it was easier to work around him than to work with him.

What made this case surprising wasn't the pattern itself. It was who it was happening to. He wasn't the CEO. He wasn't another executive. He wasn't even a mid-level leader with real authority over anyone else's work. But still, the organization had adapted around him.

People stopped asking him for help. They solved problems on their own rather than loop him in. They took on more work, just to avoid him.

No one designed this. But no one interrupted it either. Each workaround made the next one easier to justify, until avoidance wasn't the exception anymore. It was just how the work got done.

The org chart said one thing. Reality said something else.

That's not uncommon. Most organizations don't hit pause to wait for the org chart to catch up. They find whatever creates the least friction.

Those paths of least resistance become the standard operating procedure, by default, no design.

An eight out of ten wasn't wrong. It was just answering a different question than the one that mattered. It measured how people felt about trust. It didn’t capture the workarounds that revealed how the organization actually worked.

The org chart tells you how the business is supposed to work.

The workarounds tell you how it actually does.