Compliance, Engagement, or Trust—Which Are You Building?
- Debbie Braden
- Jul 20
- 2 min read
You probably think your people trust you.
What you're actually measuring is how well they've learned to manage up.
Employees trust their employer more than any other institution — more than the government, more than the media, more than most anything else in their lives according to Edelman, who has tracked global trust for over two decades. (1)
But sitting right next to it. Nearly half of employees—42%— would rather switch departments than report to a boss who votes differently than they do.
It feels like a paradox but both of those are true at the same time. Trust is high. And people are quietly sorting themselves away from anyone who might complicate the picture.
That's not a contradiction. That's what trust looks like when it's being managed instead of earned.
Top-down, command-and-control leadership doesn’t produce loyalty. It produces compliance. Employees learn fast what leadership wants to hear. They learn just as quickly what happens when they don’t. So, they stop.
That idea, opinion, risk that isn’t voiced doesn’t disappear, it moves somewhere where leadership can’t’ see it—the group chat, the workarounds, the screenshot that gets shared outside the company.
Microsoft's most recent internal survey is a clean example. The company's "Thriving" score rose three points this year, and leadership shared it as a win. But employees noticed something else: the question asking whether they felt they were getting a fair deal — pay, reward, the trade they're making for their time — had quietly disappeared from the survey. The number went up. The question that might have brought it back down went away with it. (2)
It's not just Microsoft. A friend forwarded me a screenshot last year from her own company. Leadership had just reported strong engagement scores company-wide. Employees across the company were mocking the scores because they knew the numbers didn’t reflect what people actually felt. Publicly: a win. Privately: a joke. Both were true, and only one of them was ever going to reach a boardroom.
This is why self-report can only tell you so much. A survey measures what people are willing to put their name behind inside a system they don't fully trust. It was never built to catch what people won't say out loud.
I do this work as a neutral third party, and I hear a different version of the truth than the one that shows up in a survey — not because I'm more skilled at asking questions, but because there's nothing to manage when they're talking to me. No judgement or review cycle behind the conversation.
Recently, at the end of a long conversation, a high-level leader told me our conversation had felt like therapy. While he said it casually, but the statement had weight. He meant that it had been a long time since anyone let him say something real without consequence attached to it.
That's the part worth paying attention to. If the person with the most authority in the room doesn't have anywhere to say the truth, don't expect it from anyone else inside the organization.
The numbers aren't lying to you on purpose. They're just answering the only question your system knows how to ask. The real story is still out there. It's just waiting for someone it doesn't have to manage.
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