August offers an unusual test of leadership. Across many organizations, executives step away, teams operate with less direct supervision, and decisions continue while those normally responsible are elsewhere.
Most of this will never appear on a dashboard. Yet those weeks can reveal something fundamental: how much trust remains when the leader is not in the room?
For decades, organizations have become extraordinarily sophisticated at measuring productivity. We track output, efficiency, profitability, employee performance, and increasingly the returns generated by technology and AI. These measures matter. But another indicator may deserve equal attention.
How much do people trust those who lead them, and how much do leaders trust the people they lead?
The question is especially relevant now. Organizations are navigating technological disruption, geopolitical uncertainty, changing expectations about work, greater stakeholder scrutiny, and rapid adoption of artificial intelligence. Trust matters because it allows relationships to function when certainty is impossible.
Recent evidence suggests that leaders should pay closer attention. The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer, which we have previously highlighted in this newsletter, found that 78% of employees globally trust their own employer, making the employer substantially more trusted than business or government more generally. At the same time, seven in ten respondents are hesitant or unwilling to trust people whose values, backgrounds, information sources, or approaches to societal issues differ from their own. Significantly for leaders, 73% expect CEOs to play a role in bridging those divisions.
Trust also has material consequences. PwC's 2026 Global CEO Survey analysis on trust found that 66% of CEOs had experienced stakeholder trust concerns during the previous year. Among the public companies analyzed, those with the fewest trust concerns delivered total shareholder returns that were, on average, nine percentage points higher than those with the most. This does not prove that trust produces higher returns, but it reinforces that trust is more than reputation or employee sentiment.
This is why I believe we should begin thinking about trust as a leadership metric. Not necessarily as another number to add to the quarterly dashboard, but as a leading indicator of organizational capacity.
Productivity tells us whether people are delivering today. Trust tells us whether they will speak up when something is wrong, exercise judgment without waiting for permission, challenge a leader when necessary, and accept difficult decisions under uncertainty. It also tells us whether leaders will give people enough autonomy to do those things.
A team that performs only when the leader is present may be productive. But it may not be particularly resilient.
That brings us back to August. When leaders step away, they surrender some control and rely on something built long before their departure: the judgment of others and the relationships they have created. One test of responsible leadership may therefore be not how indispensable leaders make themselves, but what continues to work when they are absent.
Perhaps this summer offers a useful moment to reflect on the relationships within our own organizations, wherever we sit within them.
We should continue asking how productive our organizations are. But perhaps another leadership question deserves to be asked just as deliberately.
And so, I return to the question with which I began:
How much do leaders and those they lead trust one another?
Have a Great and Impactful week!
Felipe Martins