Building performance with trust and empathy

With hiring budgets still constrained in 2026, many organisations are looking inward. Internal mobility has become a sensible, cost-effective alternative to external recruitment - a way to retain knowledge, reward ambition and demonstrate that growth is still possible even in leaner times. Yet, the data tells a different story. Despite the best intentions, internal promotion rates are being undermined by how much managers trust the people who report to them. 

 

Indeed, employees are 23% less likely to be promoted when their managers have low levels of trust in them. Over a two-year period, promotion rates in high-trust environments reached 27%, compared to just 21% in low-trust teams. While this sounds like a logical conclusion, the biggest issue is the fact that managers don’t even realise the extent to which their personal feelings affect employees.

 

 

The invisible hand behind promotion decisions

Managers tend to think of career progression as something that happens through formal processes like performance reviews, succession planning conversations and structured development programmes. In practice, readiness for the next level is demonstrated through the day-to-day work: who gets handed the difficult client, who is trusted to represent the team at a senior meeting, who is given a project with no obvious right answer and space to work through it.

 

Trust is the single biggest driver of delegation decisions, accounting for 27% of choices about who gets what work. Development opportunity follows closely at 25%. Contrary to common assumptions, managers are not primarily delegating to manage their own workload or protect their own position. In fact, self-interest accounts for just 4% of delegation decisions.

 

When trust is lower, managers delegate fewer of the stretch assignments that build capability and visibility. In higher-trust environments, development-focused work is delegated 11% more often. Over time, this creates markedly different career trajectories for employees who may be equally capable but unequally trusted, and neither party is necessarily aware that it is happening.

 

 

Why well-meaning managers still hold people back

The biggest issue is that high-empathy managers sometimes block progression for entirely different reasons. Four in five managers surveyed reported making decisions without being influenced by others’ emotions. Yet, emotional influences on decision-making operate below conscious awareness, which makes them particularly difficult to address through training alone.

 

Highly empathetic managers were found to be less likely to delegate and less likely to build the trusting relationships that make delegation possible. They can absorb extra work themselves to protect team members from stress or avoid placing people in high-stakes situations out of concern for how failure might affect their confidence. However, that can lead to the employee feeling sidelined and the start of doubting their own competence.

 

While the intention is care, the outcome is curtailed growth. Because both manager and employee are working from incomplete information about each other’s experience, the dynamic rarely gets corrected. Managers genuinely believe they are being thoughtful, but employees rarely feel able to say they want more to challenge them.

 

This creates an unending loop of low trust, which tends to build a self-reinforcing problem. Managers who hold work back often feel overloaded, carrying responsibilities that could otherwise be distributed. Meanwhile, employees feel underused and unclear about what progression actually looks like for them. Leaders therefore assume this to be a talent pipeline problem and respond with formal learning programmes.

 

Autonomy and trust are not peripheral to retention. They rank among employees’ top workplace priorities. Teams where managers actively support independent decision-making experience a turnover rate of 14.8%, compared to 24.2% in teams where that support is absent. The difference is whether people feel trusted enough to do the work.

 

 

What organisations can do

Rebuilding trust at the point of delegation requires more than awareness-raising. Managers need practical support in the moments when instinct takes over, before they step in to rescue a situation, take work back or default to doing something themselves rather than explaining it clearly and stepping aside.

 

There are three steps that organisations can follow to help rebuild trust: 

1. They can help managers recognise the cognitive shortcuts that drive their decisions, allowing them to examine whether those shortcuts are serving their teams or limiting them.
2. They can provide structured prompts for reflection at decision points, rather than in retrospect, which can help interrupt automatic patterns before they become embedded habits.
3. And they can equip managers with just-in-time resources such as practical guides, AI-assisted tools and conversation simulators giving them something more reliable than peer advice (which can inadvertently spread the same biases from one manager to the next). 

Trust is built through repeated decisions to step back rather than step in. The act of delegating - and accepting that learning requires imperfect conditions - is what generates trust and encourages  further delegation. Organisations need to help managers understand this cycle and enter it deliberately. Only then can internal mobility truly support the new business structures and help organisations prepare for what’s coming in 2026.

 

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Dr Anna Barnett PhD CPsychol is Head of Research and Insights at Mindtools Kineo

 

Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com and Moon Safari