The thing that's quietly disappearing at work

Let me ask you something. When did you last have a truly honest conversation at work? Not a professional polished one, not a careful one. An honest one, where someone said what they actually meant and you felt it land in the right spot, but with respect.

For a lot of people, that kind of conversation is getting rarer. And I think we all feel it, even if we haven't named it yet.

Trust is quietly leaving the building.

According to Gallup, only 21% of employees strongly agree that they trust the leadership of their organisation. That means nearly 8 in 10 people are showing up every day, doing their job, and not fully trusting the environment they're doing it in. That's nota small thing. That's a heavy thing to carry.

Here's what I actually see in the work I do.

People. The colleague who says "all good" when clearly it isn't. The meeting where everyone is perfectly professional and nothing real gets said because no one wants to rock the boat. The person who's hitting their numbers, functioning just fine on the outside, and feeling absolutely nothing on the inside. The person in the team who's constantly underperforming or being negative and dragging the team down but nothing is said and on it goes........

Low trust doesn't always look like conflict or drama. Sometimes it just looks like everyone being very polished, careful, and very far away from each other.

In a world that keeps speeding up and getting noisier, people are withdrawing, disconnecting and protecting. They go quiet. And when people go quiet, connection disappears, and when connection disappears, so does trust.

So what actually builds it?

Not policies or another framework. It's simpler than that, and actually harder.

The leaders people trust most are not the ones with all the answers. They are the ones willing to say "I got that wrong" or "I don't know yet." That kind of honesty disarms people and permits them to be human too. It's worth more than any amount of polished communication.

Most trust doesn't break in a single moment either. It quietly erodes through all the conversations that never happened, the feedback softened to nothing, the concern quietly swallowed week after week. One honest, kind conversation goes further than months of being disconnected mentally and emotionally.

And then there are the small moments, which I think matter more than we realise. Trust is built in whether you remember what someone told you last week, whether you follow through on tiny things, whether people feel genuinely seen by you in the ordinary moments, not just the important ones. That's presence. And presence is what trust is made of. Every human wants to be seen, heard and know they matter. Do this and then you have trust and influence!

When you build a connection with your colleagues then team days become so much more meaningful.

The bigger picture.

I think trust is one of the quiet crises of our time, and not just at work. In communities, in relationships, everywhere. We are more digitally connected than any generation before us and lonelier in ways that are genuinely hard to explain. Stats tell me that 1 in 3 people are lonely - that is just so sad.

The answer isn't more tools, more meetings, or more strategy. It is people choosing to show up more honestly, more consistently, more human. That's the ripple that actually changes things.

How are you building trust?

With energy and intention,

Sue

From My Coaching Space - Today's story is so common!

My client was impressive. Anyone who met her could see it. Senior leader, respected in her field, the kind of person who walked into a room and people naturally looked to her. On paper, she had built exactly the life she set out to build.

But when I asked her in one of our early sessions, "Who are you outside of your role?", she went very quiet.

Not the kind of quiet that means someone is thinking. The kind that means they've just bumped into something unexpected.

After a long pause she said, "I don't actually know anymore."

She was being honest, maybe for the first time in a while. Over years of learning, delivering, leading and performing, she had quietly handed over more and more of herself to the job. Her identity had become her title. Her worth had become her output. And somewherein the doing of all of it, the person underneath had faded into the background.

When I asked about her personal life, what she loved, what lit her up, what she looked forward to outside of work, the answers came slowly and with a kind of sadness she hadn't expected to feel. She mentioned people she hadn't called in months. Interests she kept meaning to return to. A version of herself she could vaguely remember but couldn't quite locate anymore.

She wasn't burned out in the traditional sense. She was still functioning, still performing, still showing up. But she was running on empty in places that don't show up in a performance review.

What we worked on together wasn't about her career. It was about her. Helping her remember what she valued beyond the work. Rebuilding a sense of self that wasn't entirely dependent on what she produced or what her title said. Learning to show up in her personal life with the same intention she brought to the meeting room, but softer, more present, more her.

The shift didn't happen in 1 session. But the moment things began to turn was the moment she stopped treating her personal life as the thing she'd get to eventually, and started treating it as something that needed her now.

The Takeaway

Your role is something you do. It is not who you are. And when those two things get confused, which happens gradually and quietly for so many driven, capable people, something important starts to get lost.

The work you bring to your career is only ever as rich as the life you are living outside of it. The relationships you nurture, the things that restore you, the moments that have nothing to do with your job title. These aren't distractions from success. Theyare the foundation of it.

If someone asked you today who you are outside of your work, what would you say? And how does that answer feel?

You Heard It Here First....

I'm running an in-person workshop in Auckland in June!

"Beyond The Title - The Human Side of Leading"

Beyond The Title is a 3.5 hour in-person workshop designed for professionals who are ready to have an honest conversation about who they are beyond what they do.

It is not a productivity session. It is not a goal-setting exercise. It is something rarer and more human than that.

It's a space to slow down, look honestly at where you've got to, reconnect with what actually matters to you, and leave with a clear and personal intention for how you want to show up, in your work and in your life.

Because when you have self-connection, clarity and intention combined with action, you have Presence! And Presence is YOUR Influence!

Your mind is somewhere else almost half the time.

Harvard researchers tracked people in real time and found that we spend around 47% of our day with our minds wandering, not present to what's actually in front of us. Here's the part that felt sad: in those moments of mind-wandering, people consistently reported feeling less happy. Presence isn't just a leadership skill. It turns out it's a happiness one too.

Feeling heard is rarer than you'd think.

Research suggests that around 60% of people at work feel their opinions aren't genuinely heard or valued. More than half. They're in the room, they're contributing, and somewhere underneath it all, they feel invisible. Trust can't grow in that environment. Neither can people.