Your Value-Creation Plan Failed on a Tuesday at 2 p.m.

Your value-creation plan is a PDF until a shift supervisor, on a Tuesday at 2 p.m., decides to run the new process instead of the old one. Whether she makes that call comes down to whether she believes you. That belief is what buy-in really is, and it runs on trust.

In a company that just changed hands, most of your people don't believe you yet. Only 31 out of every 100 American workers are actually engaged at work, the lowest in a decade, and another 17% are actively disengaged (Gallup, U.S., 2025). Just over half your people are going through the motions. The actively disengaged 17%, nearly one in five, are the ones Gallup describes as "resentful" and "acting out their unhappiness," undermining what their engaged coworkers accomplish. Ignore them and they can quietly stall the very changes your strategy needs.

Many new CEOs assume the trust is already there. Often it isn't, and no one is going to walk in and tell you otherwise. When PwC surveyed 548 executives and more than 2,000 employees in 2024, 86% of the executives said employee trust in leadership was high. Only 67% of the employees agreed. You're grading yourself a B+ in a room that's handing you a C-, and nobody has told you.

That blind spot is why the nod fools you. You stand up, lay out the plan, the room nods, nobody pushes back and you walk out thinking you won them over. You didn't. You got compliance. It looks exactly like buy-in until the numbers start slipping, and by then you're three months in, missing targets and none of the people who nodded can tell you why.

When your best people finally leave, it's often not just about the money. During the Great Resignation, MIT Sloan analyzed large U.S. employers and found a toxic culture was 10.4 times more predictive of attrition than pay was. Pay still matters, but people walk when they stop believing the work matters, or that you meant what you said. Most won't tell you that on the way out. They just leave.

Trust runs both ways. Your people have to feel safe enough to tell you the truth. And you have to be willing to tell them the truth back, especially the part they'd rather not hear. Miss either direction, and you're back to the blank-stared nod.

Start with the first direction: can they tell you the truth? The Ford turnaround story gets told in half the leadership books on the shelf, and it earns the repetition. Alan Mulally took over Ford in 2006, the year it would post a $12.7 billion loss, the worst in the company's 103-year history, in a culture where admitting a problem got you buried.

Mulally ran a review every week and made every executive mark their status red, yellow or green in front of the whole room. For weeks, every line came back green. A company losing billions, and the whole board green. Then Mark Fields, who ran the Americas, put up a red on a car launch. The room went silent, and people figured Fields was done. By most accounts, Mulally applauded; what isn't disputed is what he said next. "Mark, that's great visibility," and he asked who could help. As Brookings recounts it, that was the turn. Three years later, Ford posted a $2.7 billion profit and, unlike GM and Chrysler, avoided both bankruptcy and the TARP bailout. (Ford did take a separate federal loan to retool for fuel efficiency, but it stayed out of Chapter 11.) The plan on paper didn't change that week. What people believed changed.

Now the direction most CEOs dread: telling employees an unpleasant truth. You can't ask people to level with you while you're hiding the ball on the hard stuff. It matters even more in a PE-backed company, where you're usually changing more than the org chart. You're moving cost, incentives, sometimes headcount, on a clock, to hit the number the fund wants at exit. Some of your people may have seen this movie before, so pretending there won't be pain doesn't calm them down. It tells them you'll hide the truth when it's convenient. You can't always share every number; board confidentiality and securities rules are real, but you can be honest about what's changing, why and the timeline you're working against, even when you can't show them the whole deal.

In 2020, Airbnb's Brian Chesky had to lay off a quarter of the company. His memo did it in the open: the real revenue math, weeks of severance scaled to tenure, extended healthcare and a public directory to help laid-off staff find new jobs. He gave people the worst news of their year straight. Your fund may never approve that severance package, but the structure travels: real numbers, no euphemisms, specific help, on the record.

So how do you know if you've got real, two-way trust?

The first sign is who brings you a problem before you go looking for it. Sixty days in, if your reports still only show up with green dashboards and finished answers, that's not alignment. It's a filtered feed. Remember Ford: every line was green while the company bled. In a real turnaround, the red goes up before it comes down, because people finally trust you enough to show you the mess.

Then ask whether the honest conversation still happens when you're not in the room. You can make people show up to a meeting. You can't make them run it straight when you're on a plane. So watch the week you're traveling. Does the numbers-on-the-table review still happen, because your managers actually find it useful? Mulally's review worked because it stopped being his meeting and became the way Ford ran. If it falls apart the minute you leave, all you built was a meeting.

And you owe them the truth first. People won't risk honesty with you until you've shown it to them, especially on the hard calls. Your actions have to match your words. If the people you promote and the people you let go tell a different story than your speeches, they'll believe what you did, never what you said.

Don't try to force this with a stunt in your first all-hands. Start in one-on-ones. Ask each of your direct reports what worries them most about the plan, and what problem they'd want surfaced first if they were in your chair. That's where the truth comes out before it's safe to say in a group. When someone privately hands you a red, protect them and act on it. That, not the meeting itself, is what teaches people that being honest with you is safe.