Trust Fractures: What Tipped Me Off That Something Was Wrong

I worked in my previous company for over 13 years, most of which were spent in leadership roles. It was a wonderful company—a true home for me for a long time. My colleagues and I did a lot of life together: marriages, divorces, children being born. It was a small, close-knit company, and I loved it.

During my tenure there, I watched the company go through a lot of evolution as well. When I started, we were a simple web design firm. Soon, we started offering a few marketing services, which turned into fully executed marketing plans. Eventually, we evolved into a strategy-first digital consulting firm.

Business growth and evolution is exciting. Growing pains, however, are absolutely no fun.

In late 2019, the company completed a brand development exercise that expanded and updated our definition of who we were as a company. We created a brand purpose statement that was the result of intense introspection, discussion, and work. The end result was something that we were immensely proud of, and more importantly, believed down to our collective core. This statement was right, it was us, and it was capable of becoming the cornerstone of every single aspect of our company, from the services we performed to the clients we partnered with to the people we hired. 

Shortly thereafter, I was tasked with rewriting our culture code. We had one in place, but it was reflective of a much younger version of the company, and a much less refined version of our brand. Our company had matured, and so had most of us working there. It made sense to bring the culture code into alignment with our evolving brand identity.

The Assignment That Wouldn’t Come Together

The assignment handed to me seemed like a simple one on the surface: take the list of bullet points and rewrite them. No problem, right? However, every time I sat down to do it, what came out sounded more like a laundry list of grievances than a code of values that would unite us all and inspire us to show up as the best version of ourselves. 

I wrestled with this for a while, and by “wrestled with,” I mean I internalized it. I assumed I was the problem. You see, as coworkers, we do a lot of life together, as I mentioned, but it’s easy to forget that “life” includes hard times as well as good ones, and—importantly—it’s not just made up of big events: breakups or divorces, the passing of loved ones, etc. I had gone through several years of being sucker-punched by life, and I was still living through a difficult season day in and day out. Surviving day to day was as much as I could manage.

To cope with this, I mastered this sort of counterfeit thing of ‘reporting’ on my situations without actually sharing any sort of vulnerability. I completely armored up. I loved and cared for my coworkers, but my inability to share meant that I wasn’t creating or maintaining any real connection. So when I sat down to draft an updated culture code, I realized there was a serious disconnect between what I thought our culture should be and what I was personally experiencing.

Integrity Wasn’t The Problem

Every single person at this company had integrity. We had always hired for culture fit, and integrity was absolutely a fundamental condition of employment there. Every single person had great intentions. We all cared about one another. So why was I so bitter and resentful?

Fortunately, at this point I made some good decisions, albeit perhaps accidentally. My internal dissonance led me to reach out to one of the upper managers whom I didn’t know well personally, but with whom I had developed a rhythm in working that led me to believe that our skills and approaches would complement each other well. 

She had also become the most vociferous cheerleader of my work during a season when I absolutely could not see my own value. Even in my very wounded, reticent state, she seemed like the safest person to get vulnerable with. 

Fortunately, I was spot on. 

She and I began meeting off-site to have private conversations about the state of the culture at our company as we saw it. We established quickly that it wasn’t just me—we had major trust issues within the organization. Perhaps as the resident HSP, I was most sensitive to it, but I was picking up on [and reacting to] the fact that we didn’t properly trust one another internally. 

These trust fractures extended far beyond personal relationships. We were having a hard time establishing or maintaining trust with our clients, many of whom had been burned by their previous agencies who had overpromised and underdelivered. Communication errors, production mistakes, missed deadlines, and more characterized our operations. While we each individually believed that we were doing excellent work, when it came to the work of our team as a whole, our intentions didn’t always match our performance. Because so many of our clients came to us with broken trust, it was vitally important for us to be establishing and maintaining trust with these clients. When we failed, it hurt both their bottom line and ours.

Our first couple of discussions turned into me trauma-dumping on her, and I am so deeply grateful for her kind, compassionate support during all that painful armor-peeling. Opening up to her and crying over sushi was a huge step for me, and once those floodgates were open, I just could not get them closed again. Bless her. She simply… held space for me. (She still does.) She kept saying, “I had no idea. I never knew. No wonder…”

Her response gives us a ton of insight, and I want to make a couple of points about it. 

What Happens When Trust Is Missing

I didn’t trust my coworkers enough to really share the hard stuff I’d been dealing with. In my lack of trust, I festered. I felt hard-done-by, isolated, and lonely.

They didn’t trust me enough to be curious about the behavior they were seeing that didn’t sit right with them. In their absence of information, they made up meanings for my behavior, things like I didn’t like them, I was a negative person, and worse. 

Trust Is A Leadership Responsibility

I don’t think anyone expects to be best friends with every single person they work with, and I don’t either. However, humans are biologically hardwired for connection, and life is hard. Modern work culture has quietly stripped people of the right to be human, while still demanding machine-level performance. This dominant narrative that… 

• work is transactional
  
• emotions are private
  
• pain should be compartmentalized
  
• productivity should remain unaffected

… is a broken system contributing to a deadly epidemic of loneliness. While you certainly need accountability in a workplace, there must also be grace for humanity. Especially if you are a business marketing yourself as relational over transactional, that relationship-building starts on the inside, and healthy, well developed trust is the cornerstone. 

If you’re a leader, you need to create it (and honestly, you might need it even more. It’s lonely at the top). You need to model it. Leadership is not just about managing output. It’s about stewarding the conditions under which humans can sustainably produce.

I’m going to pause my story here and continue it in the next post. If any of these dynamics feel familiar to you and you’re wondering not only how you can bring specific trust issues to the surface but how to navigate repairing them when you do, let’s talk. You’re not alone, and you don’t have to figure this out on your own.