Trust: The Hidden Variable in Team Performance

In high-stakes scientific, technical and clinical environments, organizations invest in controls, protocols and measurement to safeguard accuracy, safety and reliability. Those systems matter. Yet, if overlooked, one critical relational factor can quietly erode even the most sophisticated systems: trust.

Trust shapes how information flows, how teams respond under pressure, and whether people feel safe raising concerns before they escalate. It influences decisions and innovation as surely as any technical safeguard. Because it is relational rather than procedural, trust is often left unexamined in many organizations. That hidden variable can quietly undermine performance or amplify it.

Why Trust Matters More Than You Think

Trust is not a “soft” concept; it is a measurable performance driver. Harvard Business Review identifies trust as one of the most consistent predictors of team resilience, communication quality and sustained performance under uncertainty.¹

Recent global research shows the same pattern. Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2025 report found that 21% of employees describe themselves as engaged, down from 23% in 2023.² Engagement is closely tied to trust in leadership, in the organization and among colleagues. When that trust erodes, energy and commitment decline with it.

In a related report, Why Trust in Leaders Is Faltering and How to Gain It Back (2023), Gallup highlighted research showing that when leaders communicate intentions clearly, deliver on promises and treat people with respect, 95% of employees say they trust them. Yet only about one in five employees report experiencing that level of consistency.³

For precision-driven sectors, these findings carry weight. Delays in communication or hesitance to speak up have consequences for safety and reliability. Some failures attributed to technical error may instead stem from relational breakdowns, moments when trust was too weak for people to raise a concern or challenge an assumption.

Why Trust Is Hard to See

Trust is dynamic and largely invisible. It cannot be charted on a dashboard or validated through a protocol. Its absence shows up in familiar ways: guarded communication, slower decisions and limited innovation. It gets worse: with cautious communication, delayed escalation and strained collaboration, small hesitation compounds into measurable risk. In environments where every milliliter, minute and the precision of metrics matter, trust is therefore no longer abstract; it is a quality parameter.

Organizations often respond to low trust by adding control. Yet no amount of compliance, oversight or automation replicates what genuine trust produces naturally: candid dialogue, faster learning and aligned intent. At the same time, unquestioned trust can weaken accountability. Harvard Business Review also cautions that high-trust teams may grow complacent when feedback, verification and standards are not maintained.⁴ Trust is not static. It requires calibration and a deliberate balance between openness and accountability.

What We’ve Observed in Practice

At Canadian Management Centre, we have spent more than six decades helping individuals and organizations strengthen leadership capability and elevate team performance across sectors including health care, life sciences and engineering. One pattern holds true across them all: trust is earned. It emerges from the daily disciplines of effective leadership: fostering collaboration, facilitating open communication and promoting respect in the workplace.⁵ Trust governs how people collaborate, share information and recover from setbacks. In high-reliability environments, the ability to cultivate trust is not only a hallmark of effective leadership, but a powerful lever of operational performance.

What Leaders, Formal or Informal, Can Do

Because trust operates beneath the surface, leaders must act intentionally to make it visible and durable. The following guiding principles outline actionable approaches to strengthening trust in daily interactions and decision-making.

1. Start with Curiosity. Ask open questions and seek to understand before concluding. Curiosity signals respect, reduces defensiveness, and creates a foundation for candor and problem-solving.
2. Empower and Encourage Continuous Improvement. Trust grows when people see their contribution and development matter. Empower small experiments, invite ideas and normalize learning from small missteps to build momentum for improvement.
3. Address Challenges with Kindness and Candor. Give honest feedback with care. Gallup data indicate employees who feel heard and respected are far more likely to trust their leaders and stay engaged.³

These principles reinforce trust as a measurable element of performance, as essential to quality outcomes as technical precision or process control. Ultimately, trust is not a behavioral ideal but a structural component of reliability. It deserves the same intentional design, measurement and maintenance as any technical control, because in the most complex and consequential environments, the science of performance begins with the humanity of trust.

Looking Beneath the Surface

These ideas will also be explored in greater depth during the session “Building Trust-Based Teams” at the upcoming AABB Annual Meeting. Participants will examine what often lurks below the surface in organizational culture; how unseen patterns of trust and mistrust influence collaboration, safety and performance; and what leaders can do to strengthen the foundation on which high-performing teams rely.

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References

1. Harvard Business Review. “How High-Performing Teams Build Trust.” January 2024.
2. Gallup. State of the Global Workplace 2025. Washington, DC: Gallup, 2025.
3. Gallup. “Why Trust in Leaders Is Faltering and How to Gain It Back.” 2023.
4. Harvard Business Review. “When Trust Takes Away from Effective Collaboration.” May 2022.
5. AABB. “Blood Banking and Transfusion Medicine Leadership Certificate Program, Domain 7”.

Jaime McGillivray is a corporate learning strategist at Canadian Management Centre (CMC). She has worked at CMC since 2005, focusing on partnerships with organizations to develop and implement talent development solutions to achieve organizational strategies and goals.