If you’re leading a company today, you don’t need another reminder that the world is moving fast. You just came off an earnings call, you’re preparing for board meetings, AI is everywhere and nowhere at once, and your people are quietly asking themselves a question you probably will not hear anyone say out loud:
“Do I actually trust my leaders?”
Research from FranklinCovey Institute’s Insight Report, “Where Are All The Great Leaders,” highlights the challenging environment today’s leaders must negotiate and navigate:
- Two-thirds of employees have low confidence in the quality of leadership overall, and only 42 percent view their own leaders as trusted, according to the Institute’s global leadership survey.
- In the same study, seven out of 10 employees said that AI and technology are advancing faster than their company’s culture can adapt.
- And two-thirds of respondents to our 2025 AI General Attitudes Survey said that they trust AI more than they trust their leaders.
That last finding is astounding. These are professionals who would rather rely on algorithms, known for occasional hallucinations, than a presumably lucid human whose very job is to guide them through the twists and turns of the business landscape.
I don’t write this as someone who has it all figured out. I write it as a fellow CEO who is wrestling with the same issues you are: constant change, a crisis of trust and how to deploy AI without destroying the human connective tissue that actually makes the business work.
The best way I know to navigate this moment isn’t by pretending to have the answers. It’s by asking better questions, starting with myself. As a CEO of a company that elevates organizations’ leadership performance, this is both the content and context of my work.
Here are seven questions I’m asking myself. The final question includes a survey result that perhaps provides a concrete answer. Tell me what you think!
1. How do people actually experience me as a leader?
Great leadership is an inside-out craft. Before we analyze strategies, org charts or AI roadmaps, we have to ask:
Do I show up with humility? Do I invite dissent? Do I talk about trust while operating from fear?
In times of disruption, people are already anxious. That’s human nature. If what we see from a leader is defensiveness, spin or polished talking points instead of honesty, we tend to fill the gaps with suspicion. Conversely, when we see a real person—an earnest human—wrestling with tough realities, and still choosing transparency and courage, we tend to trust, and lean in.
When we want more trust in our organizations, the uncomfortable starting point is this: As CEO, I have the biggest bullhorn I am either amplifying or eroding trust every day.
2. Have I seriously tried to see this change through the eyes of the people it will disrupt the most?
Whether it’s AI, or massive consolidation in your market, or any other big shift, most employees don’t experience transformation as exciting. They often experience it as a loss of the time and effort invested in building towards the organization’s prior goals and learning how to play under the rules of the old game. Transformation can feel inconvenient or even destructive.
How can we, as leaders planning response to change, acknowledge how it feels to the team? Consider AI: Have we sat down with our teams and asked:
- How do you feel about AI in your role?
- What keeps you up at night?
- What are you hopeful about?
- What will you need from me to make the most of this?
CEOs are not likely to be replaced by AI (anytime soon, anyway). Still, it’s worth pausing to ask: how would I actually feel if that were an imminent possibility? What if a bot existed that could, with a few prompts, generate a robust and convincing corporate strategy and vision? And what if I had doubts about its output, yet my board was quietly using it in the background to assess whether I could be replaced? How would I want the board to raise that possibility with me? And how would I respond if they were doing so without answering my questions about it?
Putting ourselves in those shoes will make us all better leaders.
I don’t pretend we will be able to remove all the fear, or the risks. But we might be able to remove the feeling that change is happening to people instead of with them.
3. Are we using AI, and every disruption, in service of our purpose?
The companies that will emerge stronger from this era won’t be the ones that chase every AI tool. They’ll be the ones that anchor AI transformation to a unifying purpose.
So I ask: Can I draw a straight line between this disruption and our mission, and explain it in plain language?
Look at Walmart’s public stance on AI: The company said it will transform almost everything they do, not just reduce expenses, but enable the company to better fulfill its mission of helping people save money and live better. They’re explicit: Revenue will grow, headcount won’t and they’ll work to bring their people along.
FranklinCovey’s purpose is to help organizations strengthen the human side of strategy to achieve the results that matter most. AI isn’t our purpose; it’s a new power tool that can help us do that better and faster.
4. Do I recognize the leaders in the white space of my org chart?
As CEOs, we tend to think about leadership in official, hierarchical models: titles, boxes, reporting lines laid out vertically. But as Eli Lilly CEO Dave Ricks has pointed out, most of the real work happens horizontally: in informal networks, cross-functional relationships and the white space between boxes.
So I need to consider how I can intentionally cultivate the informal leaders who make the place actually run.
Those horizontal relationships are where trust lives. They’re also where change fails if we rearrange things without an awareness of the informal fabric of work.
I sometimes need to challenge myself to look around and ask: “Where does leadership actually show up around here, and how do I support it?”
5. Do I default to command-and control when I get scared?
In uncertainty, we all reach for the wheel. When your teenager is learning to drive and you see sudden brake lights ahead, your instinct is to grab control. Leaders are no different.
The problem is that command-and-control may get compliance for a repeatable process, but it doesn’t power trust and innovation.
In stable times, that’s limiting. In disruptive times, it’s deadly. When the old playbook no longer works, you don’t need more compliant rule-followers; you need engaged, creative problem-solvers.
Ask yourself:
- When I’m anxious, do I grab control or loosen my grip?
- Do I use my authority to force my view, or as a platform to invite others in?
People already question leaders’ intent. If my reaction to disruption is to centralize power, and diminish the team’s contribution, I will reinforce their worst fears. If my reaction is to share context, invite input, while still making clear decisions, I can help reinforce trust when it’s most fragile.
6. Do we have directional clarity, even when certainty is impossible?
Any leader who claims to know exactly where AI and other disruptions are taking us is kidding themselves and their board.
We don’t owe people certainty. We do owe our teams clarity and a credible general direction.
Think of your organization as a boat on a choppy lake. If the boat is sitting and rocking in the water, people will hang on for dear life and argue with one another about what to do. When we are rowing together, even if the route may not be perfect, the destination gives meaning to the discomfort. And the forward motion reduces the instability.
Strategically, your job isn’t to eliminate uncertainty; it’s to make enough committed choices that can align capital, talent and attention. You can refine the route as you go, but you can’t drift and wait for the wind to die down.
7. Do I choose, daily, to be a great leader?
Great leadership is not a role or a personality trait. It’s a daily decision.
So the final question is this: In a world of continuous disruption and diminished trust, what can I choose to do today to show up as a great leader?
A recent FranklinCovey study of 4,000 professionals may suggest an answer. The survey found that the highest-rated leaders for team engagement and effectiveness were those who demanded both a lot from their teams and cared about them to a high degree.
The data is quite striking:
Only 13 percent of leaders were rated the highest for both high demand and high care. But that cohort of leaders delivered outsized results, with 43 percent of their direct reports in the top engagement tier (“Creative Excitement”) vs. 15 percent for everyone else. That’s a 3× lift.
The combination of high demand and high care together seems to unlock something pretty special. Some 92 percent of these double-barreled leaders were rated by team members as able to inspire willing cooperation or creative excitement—in contrast to just 73 percent of leaders who are either caring or demanding but not both. Meanwhile, 76 percent of caring and demanding leaders were judged by their own bosses as being exceptional at delivering performance, vs. a mere 12 percent of other leaders.
The right question, then, may be this: How can I, today, show up in a way that expects and enables high performance, while also demonstrating respect and care for my team?
There are no perfect leaders. There are only leaders who keep asking the right questions and are brave enough to act on the answers they hear.
