When Clarity Fades: What Happens to Trust in Local Government

Originally published March 25, 2025 · Edited February 24, 2026 · About our editorial process

Trust in institutions is shifting. Not because leaders stopped caring, but because the conditions that once made trust feel automatic have changed underneath everyone.

Gallup research shows that only 22% of employees strongly agree their organization’s leadership has a clear direction for the future. That’s not a reflection of individual leadership failure. It’s a signal that the relationship between clarity and trust requires more intentional effort than it did a decade ago.

For local government leaders, where every decision is a public act of trust, that gap between intention and experience carries consequences the private sector rarely faces.

Why the Clarity Gap Widened

Many effective leaders built trust without thinking of it as trust-building. They communicated consistently, made decisions transparently, and stayed accessible. The trust emerged from their presence and character.

That approach works when conditions are stable. It strains when multiple forces shift simultaneously: workforce expectations change, political dynamics intensify, public scrutiny increases, and the informal channels that once carried clarity, hallway conversations, in-person check-ins, visible daily leadership, get compressed or eliminated.

The result isn’t that leaders became less trustworthy. It’s that the mechanisms trust relied on quietly eroded, and what replaced them often wasn’t enough to carry the same weight.

Michelle Berger, co-developer of VisionSync and founder of Public Leader Life, puts it directly: “In a culture skeptical of everything, clarity isn’t a luxury. It’s the anchor that keeps your team from drifting with the tide.”

What This Looks Like Inside Organizations

When clarity fades, the effects rarely announce themselves. They accumulate quietly. Teams begin interpreting decisions through their own assumptions rather than shared understanding. Departments develop competing narratives about organizational priorities. New employees absorb confusion as culture. The gap between what leadership intends and what the workforce experiences widens, and neither side may notice until something breaks.

This is the signal that Circle of Safety has weakened. When people feel uncertain about the environment, they protect themselves by hedging, staying quiet about problems, and reading leadership decisions through the most cautious possible lens. The information leaders need to course-correct stops flowing because the conditions make surfacing it feel risky. Clarity and safety are not separate concerns. When one erodes, the other follows.

This is particularly acute in local government, where the workforce serves a public that is itself navigating declining institutional trust. Research on political dynamics shows that while Americans trust local government far more than federal, local leaders increasingly feel the spillover effects of national polarization. The environment around the work has shifted, even when the work itself hasn’t changed.

The Difference Between Assumed Trust and Built Trust

Organizations that sustain trust through changed conditions tend to share a pattern: they moved from assumed trust to built trust.

Assumed trust relies on stability, proximity, and consistency of conditions. It works when the environment holds steady. Built trust is intentional. It creates systems, rhythms, and structures that maintain clarity even when conditions shift.

The distinction matters because assumed trust feels effortless until it isn’t. Leaders who relied on informal accessibility find that remote and hybrid arrangements changed the equation. Leaders who relied on organizational momentum find that workforce turnover reset the culture faster than expected. Leaders who relied on shared institutional knowledge find that five generations working side by side don’t share the same baseline assumptions about work.

None of these are failures. They’re changed conditions requiring different approaches.

A Practitioner Lens

City managers and county administrators operate in environments where trust is both essential and fragile. Public meetings, FOIA requests, council dynamics, media scrutiny: every leadership decision is visible in ways the private sector rarely experiences.

This visibility creates both constraint and opportunity. The constraint is obvious: mistakes are public, and trust once broken is hard to rebuild under public observation. The opportunity is less obvious but more important: visible, consistent clarity becomes a competitive advantage for organizations willing to build it deliberately.

One place to start: ask your direct reports what they think the organization’s top three priorities are. Not what’s on the strategic plan, but what they experience as priorities based on where time, attention, and resources actually go. The gap between the official answer and the experienced answer is your clarity gap. It’s also your starting point, and the decision about what to do with that information is a Define What Matters question.

Research on the expectation gap between what employees need and what organizations provide suggests this kind of honest assessment is increasingly urgent, and increasingly rare.

From Clarity to Alignment

This is the work that connects Face the Truth to Define What Matters. Seeing the clarity gap honestly is diagnostic work. Deciding what your organization will protect under pressure, and building the systems to sustain that clarity over time, is the harder and more valuable discipline.

Trust doesn’t erode because leaders stop caring. It erodes when the systems that carried clarity stop working and nothing replaces them. The question isn’t whether your team trusts you. It’s whether the conditions you’ve built make sustained trust possible.

Framework Connection

The diagnostic awareness of where clarity has faded connects to Face the Truth. The work of determining what your organization will protect under pressure is Define What Matters. Building systems that sustain clarity through changed conditions is Make It Real. And the ongoing discipline of detecting drift before it becomes crisis is Reinforce the Change.

Research Foundation

• Political Dynamics – Why Americans trust local government more than federal, and what that means for leaders navigating political spillover
• Workforce Expectations – What the research reveals about the disconnect between what employees need and what organizations provide