Building Workplace Trust Starts With Operationalizing Accountability And Transparency

Managers often believe they have to choose between being liked and holding people accountable. Many assume that enforcing performance standards damages the relationship with their team, and that avoiding hard conversations out of empathy keeps the relationship intact. The opposite is true: when leaders withhold feedback to spare feelings, they leave their team guessing about where they stand. The result is the exact ambiguity that erodes trust, with performance stalling, top performers getting frustrated picking up the slack, and disengaged employees becoming the operating norm rather than the exception.

Doretha Polite, Director of People at the Texas Civil Rights Project, has led HR teams in both corporate and nonprofit settings for more than 25 years. Before stepping into her current mission-driven role, she spent two decades at GEICO designing employee engagement and compliance programs for more than 38,000 workers. The combination of corporate-scale operational rigor and high-stakes nonprofit work has shaped how she frames accountability, treating it as a baseline investment in an employee’s success rather than a punishment for falling short.

“Relationships and accountability are not at odds because accountability is one of the ways we demonstrate that we actually care for people. It also demonstrates our commitment to their success,” says Polite. In her view, accountability and support are part of the same relationship rather than competing instincts inside it. She compares workplace feedback to a close friendship, where a friend making a decision that could sabotage their future deserves honesty, not silence. The conversation a manager avoids out of empathy is usually the one that would have done the most good.

Building trust in real time

Putting trust into practice often comes down to replacing ambiguity with alignment, with Polite advocating for predictable behaviors that foster psychological safety at the team level. BambooHR’s State of the Workforce 2026 report, The Rising Cost of Dignity Debt, found that 89% of workers want a combination of transparency, honesty, and visible leadership from the people running their organizations, with transparency ranking as the single most desired leadership quality at 58%. Separating transparency from total disclosure relieves the pressure on managers, freeing them to share what they know, explain the “why” behind decisions, and follow through on commitments. “Trust is built when your employees feel like your words and your actions continuously align,” Polite explains. “Ultimately employees don’t judge leaders by what they say. They judge them by what they do.”

The gap between intent and execution shows up most clearly when managers face the pressure to communicate perfectly during fast-moving change. Modern technology rollouts, workflow updates, and organizational shifts often surface a false dichotomy: share every detail or stay silent until everything is final. Building clear communication practices means adopting modern norms of information sharing that prioritize context over completeness, with leaders communicating early and repeatedly rather than waiting for full certainty. “Leaders often believe they only have two options, share everything or share nothing,” notes Polite. “Transparency isn’t about sharing everything. It’s about sharing what you can, when you can, and explaining why you cannot share more.”

Polite views communication breakdowns as a structural problem rather than individual manager failure, with organizations regularly promoting top individual contributors into people-management roles and assuming their technical skills will translate. The leadership development required to bridge that gap rarely gets the same investment as project management or budget training, leaving managers without frameworks for organizational change. Teaching core leadership instincts like emotional intelligence and change management gives new managers something to draw on beyond what they’ve personally observed. “Most are promoted because they were strong individual contributors or technical experts,” Polite observes. “Because of that, organizations assume these experts don’t need training. They only know what they’ve seen.”

Where passion meets performance

A lack of structural support creates a particular tension in mission-driven environments, where leaders rebuilding relationships strained by avoidance face an additional obstacle: deep employee commitment to the cause can mask performance problems that would otherwise be addressed. The default becomes evaluating intent over output, with passion functioning as a proxy for delivery. “Sometimes leaders hesitate to address performance because the employee is passionate, and the issue becomes masked by the fact that they deeply believe in the mission,” says Polite. “While passion and commitment are valuable, neither replaces performance and the ability to execute.”

Polite’s fix at the Texas Civil Rights Project involved introducing monthly leadership training and formal performance management structures, with accountability framed as protection for the mission itself. The stakes are what set mission-driven work apart from a corporate context, where a missed deadline typically translates to a slipped timeline. “When accountability is absent, the mission suffers. In a civil rights organization, a missed deadline could impact a client, and poor communication could affect a vital community cause,” Polite notes. The structures she built don’t exist to police her team, but ensure the work reaches the people it was designed to serve. “Mission creates purpose and accountability creates impact. And in our line of work, you need both,” she concludes.