Building Trust: The Missing Link in Performance Management

Senior leaders know performance management is critical, yet traditional frameworks often fall short. This article explores how focusing on managerial trust and accountability creates cultural consistency and drives results.

Beyond Performance Reviews

Organizations invest heavily in leadership performance strategies–reviews, coaching, development, and feedback mechanisms. While valuable, these formal structures only address part of the equation.

Without holistically embedding accountability into your culture, you risk creating inconsistent team environments. Top managers take ownership over their team’s outcomes, while poor managers excel at deflection, creating a toxic blame culture in their teams as their downlines follow their example.

The Trust Divide

The accountability gap produces two distinct workplace realities:

• High-trust teams: Where psychological safety enables innovation and honest mistake ownership. These teams don’t fail, they fail forward.

• Fear-driven teams: Where blame cascades downward, obscuring root causes and preventing real improvement.

This inconsistency undermines organizational effectiveness and makes systemic performance improvement impossible.

The Value Question

To solve this problem, senior leaders can implement this transformative practice: regularly ask managers, “What value are you bringing to each team member?”

This simple question:

• Redirects focus from work management to people development

• Emphasizes leadership fundamentals necessary for any manager: developing talent, creating clarity, building trust, and powering performance

• Creates manager accountability beyond traditional metrics

Then close the loop–ask your managers’ downlines, “what value did your manager bring to your team?” Compare responses to identify alignment gaps before they become performance issues.

The Trust Advantage

This approach creates holistic accountability outside formal performance structures. It ties manager effectiveness directly to team outcomes and culture, establishing trust as your organization’s competitive advantage.