Trust gets filed under culture, somewhere near the values posters and the team lunches. That filing error is expensive, because trust is not decoration. It is load-bearing.
Low trust is a tax on everything
When trust is present, work flows: decisions stick, handoffs happen without a paper trail, and people assume good intent when something goes wrong. When it is absent, every one of those becomes friction. Approvals multiply. Emails get cc'd to managers as insurance. Small disagreements climb two levels because no one trusts the level below to settle them.
You see low trust in how the org chart behaves, not in its boxes. Escalation is the tell. An operating model that routes every minor conflict upward is not rigorous; it is starved of the trust that would let decisions resolve where they belong.
Every escalation that should have been handled one level down is a small invoice for missing trust. They add up to most of a leadership team's calendar.
Build it where the work happens
Trust is not built at the away day. It is built in the operating rhythm: in whether decisions made in a meeting actually hold, in whether owners deliver what they promised, in whether bad news can be raised without punishment. Each kept commitment is a deposit. Each quiet reversal is a withdrawal.
This is why I treat trust as an operating metric, not a sentiment. Where are decisions sticking? Where are they being relitigated? Where does everything route through one person because nothing moves without them? Those are infrastructure questions, and they have infrastructure answers.
Repair the trust and the friction disappears on its own. Leave it broken, and no amount of process will carry the load. You feel it the moment it is missing, usually in a meeting that should never have needed to happen.