Your company’s growth strategy is only as robust as the people executing it. Yet, too often leaders can architect big plans and bold moves while overlooking a critical factor, whether their employees are truly engaged and empowered to deliver them. According to Gallup's State of the Global Workplace report 2024, organisations with highly engaged employees show 23% higher profitability. Unfortunately, only 25% of Australian employees report being engaged at work.
This article is part of our series, Where Are Your Growth Blind Spots?, where we explore the often-overlooked barriers that hinder growth. Drawing from Vibrance’s Growth Orienteering strategic approach, we aim to help leaders uncover hidden obstacles and unlock their organisation’s full growth potential.
In this article, we focus on the employee blind spot, an obstacle to growth that arises when organisations fail to build trust, engagement, and empowerment among their workforce, jeopardising their ability to execute growth initiatives and leaving untapped potential on the table.
The Cost of Disengagement: Understanding the Employee Blind Spot
Employees are an organisation’s most valuable asset, yet many organisations struggle to engage and empower them effectively. The employee blind spot emerges when leaders overlook the importance of building trust, autonomy, and meaningful collaboration, resulting in a workforce that feels disengaged and undervalued.
The employee blind spot often manifests as:
A lack of trust between leaders and teams, creating a culture of micromanagement and stifling innovation.
Minimal collaboration, where silos and rigid hierarchies prevent teams from working effectively together.
Neglecting talent development, failing to equip employees with the skills and opportunities needed to contribute to growth.
The consequences are significant. Disengaged employees are less productive, less innovative, and more likely to leave, all of which undermine the organisation’s ability to implement successful growth strategies. In contrast, organisations that prioritise trust, empowerment, and collaboration build cultures where employees thrive, driving growth from within.
Trust: the Unlock to an Organisation’s Growth Potential
Overcoming the employee blind spot starts with a fundamental shift from a control-based operating model to a trust-based model. In a control-based environment, processes are designed to manage and monitor employees at every step, often creating unnecessary complexity and inefficiency.
In contrast, a trust-based operating model begins with the assumption that employees are inherently capable and motivated to do the right thing. This approach embeds trust into the organisation’s processes and systems, focusing on outcomes rather than micromanaging employees. By removing unnecessary layers of control, organisations empower employees to take ownership of their roles, collaborate more effectively, and contribute to meaningful goals
Five Proven Approaches to Foster a Trust-Based Organisation
Shifting towards a trust-based operating model isn’t easy. It requires leadership commitment along with new frameworks, tools, and methodologies. Leaders must take the first step by modelling trust, demonstrating vulnerability, and fostering an environment where employees feel empowered to take ownership of their work. It’s a big shift and one that organisations of all sizes have tried with different levels of success. Here are five approaches organisations have used to foster trust:
Servant Leadership: Empowering Over Controlling
Servant leadership focuses on empowering employees rather than controlling them. Leaders act as enablers, removing obstacles and giving teams autonomy to make decisions. By shifting from command-and-control to a coaching mindset, organisations create environments where employees feel valued and trusted.
Example: Best Buy, under the leadership of Hubert Joly, successfully rebuilt trust within the organisation during a period of significant decline. Joly implemented a people-first approach, focusing on employee empowerment, purpose-driven leadership, and decentralised decision-making. By restoring trust, valuing frontline employees, and giving store teams greater autonomy, Best Buy not only improved employee engagement but also turned around its financial performance, proving that trust-driven leadership can drive both cultural and business success.
Psychological Safety: Creating Space for Open Dialogue
Google’s research on high-performing teams found that psychological safety - the ability to take risks without fear of punishment - is the number one driver of success. Since the publication of that research, many organisations foster psychological safety to create environments where employees trust that their voices will be heard and valued.
Example: Novartis, the Swiss pharmaceutical company, has actively invested in psychological safety training for leaders to encourage open dialogue and innovation.
Radical Transparency: Eliminating Information Asymmetry
Radical transparency involves openly sharing company decisions, financial data, and performance metrics with employees. This openness eliminates uncertainty, builds trust in leadership, and fosters a sense of shared ownership.
Example: The Swedish company Handelsbanken operates with high levels of transparency and decentralised decision-making, empowering employees to make financial and operational decisions.
Flexible Work & Autonomy-Based Models: Freedom to Give your Best
Remote and hybrid work policies can build trust when implemented with a focus on autonomy rather than excessive monitoring. Companies that allow employees to structure their own work demonstrate confidence in their teams, which in turn fosters commitment and accountability.
Example: Atlassian, the Australian software company, has embraced flexible work policies that prioritise autonomy, leading to high employee satisfaction and productivity.
Self-Management: Distributing Authority
While not a fit for every company, self-management can significantly enhance trust by giving employees direct control over their work.
Case Study: Buurtzorg
Buurtzorg is a Dutch healthcare organisation that has revolutionised the way community nursing is delivered in The Netherlands. Founded in 2006 by Jos de Blok, Buurtzorg challenged the traditional, top-down healthcare model by implementing small, self-managed teams of nurses who provide holistic patient care. Instead of relying on heavy bureaucratic structures, Buurtzorg empowers nurses to operate with full autonomy, prioritising patient well-being over rigid workflows.
This approach has made Buurtzorg a globally recognised leader in self-management and trust-based organisational design, with its own Harvard Business School case study.
In 2016, I had the opportunity to meet Nicole Koster at a conference in Melbourne and exchange with her on what happens when you really trust employees. Her talk on “humanity over bureaucracy” brought Buurtzorg’s remarkable approach to life, showcasing how trust-based design could drive both employee engagement and rapid growth.
The core principle behind Buurtzorg’s success is small, self-managed teams of nurses who operate with full autonomy. This trust-based approach enables nurses to focus on patient outcomes and work according to professional standards, free from the constraints of traditional hierarchical management.
Impact on Growth
By replacing control with trust, founder Jos de Blok fostered a culture of engagement and innovation that turbocharged Buurtzorg's expansion. What is particularly remarkable is how the organisation maintained its trust-based principles while scaling rapidly - growing from a single team to nearly 1,000 teams and 10,000 nurses in just a decade.
While some might question whether Buurtzorg's approach is uniquely suited to Dutch culture or healthcare, its principles have since inspired organisations across sectors and geographies. The key lesson isn't that every organisation should adopt Buurtzorg's exact self-management model, but rather that trust-based approaches can unlock extraordinary growth potential when thoughtfully adapted to specific organisational contexts. Buurtzorg’s growth in 2006-2016 demonstrates that trust isn't just a cultural nicety, it's a strategic advantage that drives sustainable impact.
The Reality Check for Leaders
While these five approaches are proven and powerful, seasoned leaders know that implementing them isn't as simple as flipping a switch. Many organisations face deeply entrenched cultural barriers that make trust-based operating models challenging to adopt. Leadership teams often contend with risk-averse board members who prioritise predictability over innovation, shareholders demanding short-term results that can discourage long-term cultural investments, and middle management who may feel threatened by shifts in power dynamics that the above approaches lead to. Additionally, years of operating under control-based models can create organisational muscle memory that's difficult to unlearn. The journey to a trust-based organisation is rarely linear, and even the most committed leaders may face setbacks along the way. What matters most is creating enough goodwill and momentum that when leaders announce bold growth initiatives, employees are genuinely motivated to follow. This employee buy-in - the willingness to commit discretionary effort toward organisational goals - becomes the difference between growth strategies that exist only on paper and those that transform companies.
Overcoming the Employee Blind Spot
The employee blind spot hides in the gap between strategic ambition and execution capacity. But, when trust becomes your organisation's core principle, employees transform from passive participants into active drivers of growth efforts, driving innovation, collaboration, and momentum that paper strategies alone cannot achieve.
The question isn't whether your employees can deliver your growth plan, it's whether you've created the conditions for them to do so. Have you built the trust and goodwill that enable your people to truly commit to your vision?
Ask yourself: What bold move could your organisation accomplish if every employee was as committed to your growth vision as you are?
About Fred
Executive advisor on strategy and innovation. Co-author of The Invincible Company, a guide to building resilience in organisations through corporate innovation. The book was shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Strategy Award in 2021.
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