Change is the only true constant in today’s wild world. Whether your organization is navigating restructuring, shifting to hybrid work models, adopting new technologies, or responding to market volatility, uncertainty can quickly derail momentum. When workplace norms shift overnight, employees often feel unsettled, disconnected, or hesitant to engage.
So, how do leaders keep their teams grounded, focused, and resilient during times of turmoil?
The answer lies in trust.
When workplace culture is anchored in trust, team members feel safe to share ideas, ask questions, and take calculated risks, especially when the future feels uncertain. Trust isn’t an abstract concept. Trust is a strategic asset that fuels retention, engagement, and innovation. Using decades of real-life facilitation experience, here are three essential steps to build, maintain, and restore trust when everything around you is changing.
1. Know Your Trust Barometer (High to Low)
You cannot repair or strengthen trust if you do not know where it currently stands. Trust operates on a dynamic continuum. The trust barometer ranges from high to low across different teams, relationships, and organizational levels.
During periods of rapid change, leaders must actively gauge their team’s position on this barometer rather than assuming everyone feels secure.
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High Trust: Characterized by open dialogue, psychological safety, mutual accountability, and vulnerability. In a high-trust environment, team members freely admit mistakes, challenge ideas constructively, and support one another during transitions.
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Medium Trust: Marked by polite compliance and cautious participation. Employees do the work required, but they hold back their best ideas or refrain from speaking up about potential risks because they aren’t sure how leadership will react.
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Low Trust: Defined by skepticism, disengagement, rumor-milling, and fear. When trust erodes to low levels, employees fill information gaps with negative assumptions, leading to burnout and high turnover.
To evaluate your team’s trust barometer, step back and observe the signals. Are people actively speaking up during team meetings, or is there absolute silence following major announcements? Are feedback loops bidirectional, or is communication purely top-down?
Actionable Pivot: Measure trust consistently through pulse check-ins, anonymous Q&A sessions, and one-on-one conversations. Acknowledge where trust has dipped, communicate transparently about what you know (and what you don’t), and outline clear timelines for future updates.
2. Embrace Shared Experiences
When organizations undergo major shifts, individual team members tend to retreat into silos. Distance, whether physical, emotional, or structural, erodes empathy and fuels division. To combat this, leaders must intentionally foster and embrace shared experiences that bring people together.
Shared experiences humanize colleagues and build community. When employees learn together, navigate challenges side by side, and share their unique perspectives, they realize they aren’t facing uncertainty alone. This shared sense of belonging is the bedrock of an inclusive workplace culture.
Embracing shared experiences involves:
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Continuous Micro-Learning and Dialogue: Instead of reliance on one-off training seminars, establish regular spaces for discussion. Facilitate small-group conversations around real-world topics like psychological safety, inclusive language, or managing change.
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Vulnerable Storytelling: Encouraging team members—especially leaders—to share personal stories of overcoming setbacks or navigating ambiguity. When leaders model vulnerability, it signals to others that it is safe to be authentic.
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Collaborative Problem-Solving: Bringing diverse cross-functional teams together to solve emerging challenges caused by organizational change. Giving people agency over how the team adapts builds collective ownership and trust.
Actionable Pivot: Host regular Allyship in Action or learning circles where team members can discuss shared challenges and personal growth without judgment. When people feel seen and heard, trust deepens naturally.
3. Deepen Strong Ally Relationships
Trust is ultimately built through relationships, and during times of disruption, active allyship becomes critical. An ally is someone who uses their privilege, influence, or platform to advocate for others—particularly those who may feel marginalized or overlooked during periods of transition.
Passive agreement is no longer enough. To maintain a healthy workplace culture, leaders and team members must deepen their ally relationships by moving from intent to impactful action.
Here is how you can deepen ally relationships to fortify trust:
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Amplify Voices: In times of change, quieter or historically underrepresented voices are often lost in the noise. Make a point to explicitly invite input, credit others for their contributions, and advocate for marginalized team members in decision-making meetings.
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Offer Sponsorship and Mentorship: Actively open doors for colleagues by connecting them to key projects, sponsors, and executive visibility as new opportunities arise from organizational shifts.
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Practice Active Listening: Building strong allyships requires listening without immediate defense or intent to fix. Validate team members’ concerns regarding change before jumping into solution mode.
Research consistently shows that organizations prioritizing active allyship see higher employee retention and stronger collaboration. When team members know that their peers and leaders have their backs, trust acts as a shock absorber against external disruptions.
Actionable Pivot: Identify one person in your workplace who may be navigating uncertainty with less support or visibility. Reach out, listen to their experience, and ask: “How can I best support or advocate for you right now?”
Building Trust as an Ongoing Discipline
Building trust across your workplace culture is not a one-off initiative. Trust is an ongoing leadership discipline. When change creates uncertainty, you don’t need to have all the answers. By evaluating your trust barometer, creating space for shared human experiences, and intentionally deepening ally relationships, you create a culture capable of navigating any disruption with confidence and resilience.
Your Next Pivot Point
Are you ready to stop checking boxes and start changing systems? The future is inclusive, and you don’t want to be left behind as a future leader. That is why I offer free allyship training for you and/or your organization by subscribing to our weekly, no-spam newsletter. You can catch new thought leadership in my Allyship in Action podcast interviews, too.