By Dr. Leandro Herrero
There’s a certain irony to our age: never have we had more tools for communication, transparency, and collaboration, and yet trust — the very fabric that holds it all together — seems to be struggling more and more. The informal organization and its peer-to-peer inhabitants may hold the power to change this.
The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer, a reliable barometer of social mood, offers little comfort: trust is declining across institutions, and grievances — not hope — dominate the public narrative. Government? Distrusted. Media? Polarised. Even businesses, once heralded as stable beacons, are now approached with increasing caution. The report paints a stark picture: we are living through a crisis of institutional trust.
Yet hidden in the data lies a persistent — and quietly powerful — clue: people continue to trust ‘people like themselves’. This has been true for years, and in the 2025 edition it stands out more than ever. While large systems are perceived as distant, abstract, or self-serving, ‘the peer’ remains credible. The colleague, the friend, the informal leader — these are the trust anchors in an otherwise fast-moving landscape.
I have long believed this to be more than a side note. It is, in fact, the organizing principle for trust inside organizations, and a critical foundation for culture, engagement, and change.
The Collapse of the Vertical, the Rise of the Horizontal
In the traditional model, trust was vertical. Leaders were the custodians of vision; communication flooding top-down. Belief in the organization’s intent rested on formal authority. But this model, even when well-intentioned, increasingly feels unfit for the complexity of today’s environment.
Employees do not default to believing the words of the CEO just because they carry a title. Nor do mission statements printed on office walls generate alignment. Instead, employees ask themselves: What do my peers think? Are we aligned? Are we walking the talk together? Some of this questioning may be unconscious.
The shift is seismic. In today’s organizational reality, trust travels sideways. It is social, not positional. Influence is no longer a function of hierarchy, but of ‘proximity’ and perceived authenticity. And as Edelman shows yet again, trust is now local, human, and experiential.
The traditional view was always ‘look up’ and see the what the leaders say and do. As I have written in many places, this has always been a rather naïve, disproportionate attribution to leadership power. Today, it’s not look up but look sideways.
Over 25 years, in working with organizations navigating large-scale cultural shifts, I’ve seen the same pattern emerge time and again: the most lasting change begins not with mandates, but with a critical mass of peer influencers, highly connected, who others respect. When these individuals are supported and connected across informal networks, the desired culture spreads virally, not by enforcement, but by social reinforcement.
In every organization, alongside the official hierarchy, there’s a real network of trust — quieter, often invisible, but far more powerful. Those are the circuits where belief, alignment, and behaviour actually flow. There is no change unless there is behavioural change and behaviours spread and scale by social copying, social imitation, as I wrote about in Homo Imitans (2011) and before in Viral Change™ (2006, 2008).
Trust Is Not a Message. It’s a cultural expression
There is a temptation to treat trust mainly as a communications challenge: clearer messaging, more frequent updates, better town halls. These are at the very least insufficient.
Trust is not what you say. It may be more related to what you permit others to say. It is a product of lived experience — of perceived consistency between words and actions, between stated values and observed priorities.
In my experience, employees do not lose trust when they hear bad news. They lose trust when they suspect spin, see contradictions, or are made to feel peripheral to the conversation.
I am always very keen to stress two simple parameters of trust, knowing the reductionism that is implicit. One is simply behavioural: keep promises. If you do what you said you were going to do, for example, your trust rating goes up, whether others like what you do or not. The second is equally behavioural but with a strong emotional tint: you feel you can fail (small failing, big failing) and you will not be automatically expelled from your formal or informal circle, hierarchical or otherwise.
From Social Contract to Social Fabric
One of the strongest messages in this year’s Edelman report is the collapse of the social contract — the feeling that the system no longer works for “people like me.” This sentiment, although framed societally, has its mirror inside organizations. Employees, too, are asking whether they are included, represented, and respected.
What organizations need is not a new contract but a stronger fabric — a mesh of interpersonal trust, shared accountability, and mutual reinforcement. The leaders who will succeed in this environment are not those who assert more control, but those who cultivate trust at every layer. That includes creating space for peer dialogue and storytelling, valuing informal influence as much as formal authority, and focusing less on “buy-in” and more on distributed ownership.
In other words: treating the internal trust network not as a by-product, but as the actual operating system of the organization.
I constantly use the image of the Petri dish. What you ‘put in’ will grow, good or bad. Culture is the Petri dish of the company. Trust is something you grow by ‘putting in’ a set of behaviours. Trust is always the output. To see it as an input is the default in many conversations but it’s a linguistic trap. A ‘culture of trust’ is the one where XYZ grows, and by seeing them growing, you can say ‘I trust you’. Or the equivalents: I trust the company, I trust leadership, I trust my colleagues etc. The secret of rapid spread and multiplication in that Petri dish? Peer-to-peer engagement.
A Final Thought
We must resist the false binary between individualism and centralised control. There is a third way: the power of the peer group. If “people like me” are still trusted, let’s start there. Build with them. Lead with them. And most of all, listen to them.
Because in the end, trust doesn’t vanish. It relocates, often to the very people and places that are closest to us.
And perhaps that’s where it always belonged.
Dr Leandro Herrero
