Breaking the #Bond of #Trust Between #Leaders and the #Workforce, 2040’s Ideas and Innovations Newsletter, Issue 97.

Issue 97, March 2, 2023

One of the unexpected outcomes of the pandemic was the development of a new level of trust between leaders and their corporate level workforce. With entire skilled workers at organizations forced out of the office and working remotely, the workforce and management had to implicitly trust one another to meet deadlines, goals, and quarterly expectations. During this time a shift to measuring performance by outcomes, not time or face-to-face contact emerged. This change shed the layers of an industrial age mentality for a predominantly white-collar workforce.

For a command-and-control leader, this was a moment of crisis infused with insecurity, suspicion, and defensiveness based on a lack of clarity or established baseline in how to lead this new model. The acceleration of non-stop, on-screen meetings was an attempt to keep co…