What’s Really Behind “Trust Issues”
February tends to stir up talk about trust and love in our personal lives. Inside a business, trust shows up differently.
It’s less emotional and more operational, yet more fragile than most leaders realize.
Distrust starts quietly. A report gets “cleaned up” before a meeting. Finance double-checks operations’ totals. Sales brings its own version of the forecast. Leadership spends the first twenty minutes validating inputs instead of making decisions.
No one calls it distrust, but that’s what it is. And it usually traces back to the same system failures: teams reporting numbers they don’t own, ad-hoc processes filling system gaps, and critical decisions resting on tools only a few people understand.
Each one chips away confidence in the numbers. Together, they change how the entire organization behaves.
When Reporting Teams Don’t Own the Numbers
One of the earliest signs of trouble is when the team responsible for reporting the numbers doesn’t control how those numbers are created. They’re accountable for the output but disconnected from the inputs, which forces them to explain and defend, with people absorbing the blame instead of the underlying sources of the problem.
This is a common scenario across manufacturers we run into. In one instance, a reporting team had to present numbers generated from a sprawling Excel workbook they didn’t own and couldn’t fully interpret. Only a couple of people understood the formulas and logic behind it, and updates required manual entry across multiple systems. By the time the numbers reached leadership, they reflected workarounds and dependency rather than a process the reporting team could confidently stand behind.
Once interpretation replaces information, confusion follows. Meetings drift away from decisions and toward validation. And when the numbers feel unstable, people start protecting themselves instead of collaborating.
Without trust in the system, teams start creating their own.
The False Promise of “Just Email It”
That’s where informal processes creep in.
Most of them don’t appear as issues at first. They show up as convenient flexibility. “Just email it.” “We’ll track it offline.” “We’ll reconcile at month end.”
In the moment, it feels efficient. But when trust in the numbers is already shaky, these informal workflows compound the problem. They create multiple versions of the truth and scatter critical data across places no one truly owns or governs.
A manufacturer we worked with ran a consignment program this way. Inventory updates lived in emails and disconnected files. As volume grew, so did disputes. Everyone had documentation, but no one had clarity.
When the process moved to a shared portal with real‑time visibility, the disputes faded. The tension disappeared because the data was finally consistent and accessible.
When People Become the System
When formal systems can’t be trusted or used consistently, people step in with the tools they know to compensate.
Many companies end up relying on these heroes and their fragile spreadsheets — a workbook so complex that only its creator truly understands it. It works until it doesn’t. In one case, an operations manager spent four extra hours each week reconciling paper data after every shift. Errors were common. Confidence in the numbers was low.
When critical decisions hinge on a single file and the tribal knowledge behind it, you don’t have a system. You have a single point of failure.
The more a business grows, the heavier that risk becomes.
Trust From the System, Not the Dialogue
Reliable numbers change how a company operates. Decisions move faster. Alignment is easier. Meetings focus on improving the business instead of defending the data behind it.
If you’re constantly explaining or justifying the numbers, the issue isn’t the people presenting them. It’s the system producing them.
Fix the system, and trust follows, because the numbers finally earn it.