#504 Leadership, Trust and The Benefit Of The Doubt: Why Modern Organisations Fail Without It
Leadership, Trust and The Benefit Of The Doubt: Why Modern Organisations Fail Without It
by Niels Brabandt
Trust is universally acknowledged as a cornerstone of leadership. Yet in practice, it is increasingly absent from modern organisational behaviour. This contradiction defines one of the most critical leadership challenges of our time.
In this analysis, Niels Brabandt examines the growing disconnect between talent shortages and rising barriers to entry in the labour market. The conclusion is stark. Organisations do not suffer from a lack of talent. They suffer from a lack of trust.
The Structural Breakdown of Trust
Across industries, leaders consistently report shortages of skilled professionals. At the same time, data shows rising youth unemployment and increasing difficulty entering the workforce.
This paradox reveals a deeper issue. Organisations systematically reject candidates as either too inexperienced or too experienced. In reality, these labels often conceal risk aversion and bias rather than objective assessment.
The consequence is a system that excludes talent at both ends of the spectrum.
The Cost of Risk Aversion
Modern leadership is increasingly defined by fear. Leaders fear making the wrong hiring decision. Recruiters fear being held accountable. Organisations fear the consequences of perceived mistakes.
As a result, decision-making becomes defensive. Opportunities are avoided rather than pursued. Trust is replaced by control.
Niels Brabandt identifies this as a fundamental leadership failure. Leadership requires the willingness to take calculated risks, not the avoidance of them.
The Benefit Of The Doubt as a Leadership Principle
At the core of effective leadership lies a simple yet powerful concept. The benefit of the doubt.
This principle requires leaders to make informed decisions based on potential rather than certainty. It involves granting individuals the opportunity to prove their capability, even when outcomes are not guaranteed.
Importantly, this is not about blind optimism. It is about structured risk-taking supported by robust processes such as onboarding and probation.
Without this principle, organisations stagnate.
The Role of Organisational Culture
A critical barrier to trust is organisational culture. Many organisations claim to tolerate mistakes, yet in practice they penalise them.
This inconsistency creates an environment where leaders avoid risk and employees avoid initiative. Over time, this erodes engagement, innovation, and performance.
Brabandt emphasises that sustainable leadership requires cultures where learning from mistakes is not only accepted but expected.
The Importance of Reflection
One of the most overlooked aspects of leadership is reflection. Many leaders fail to recognise that their own careers were shaped by others taking a chance on them.
Opportunities were granted. Risks were taken. Trust was extended.
Without this reflection, leaders risk denying the very opportunities that enabled their own success.
Economic and Social Implications
The implications extend beyond individual organisations. High levels of exclusion from the labour market create broader economic and social challenges.
Individuals disengage. Alternative and often unsustainable forms of income emerge. Confidence in systems declines.
Trust, therefore, is not only a leadership issue. It is a societal one.
Conclusion: Leadership Requires Courage
The message is clear. Leadership without trust is ineffective.
Organisations that succeed are those that balance risk and opportunity. They invest in people. They create pathways for development. They recognise that not every decision will be perfect, but that inaction carries a greater cost.
Niels Brabandt demonstrates that the benefit of the doubt is not a soft concept. It is a strategic imperative.
In a complex and uncertain world, leadership requires courage. And courage begins with trust.
Niels Brabandt
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Mehr zu diesem Thema im dieswöchtigen Podcast und Videocast: mit Niels Brabandt: Videocast / Apple Podcasts / Spotify
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Niels Brabandt ist Experte für Nachhaltige Führung (Sustainable Leadership) mit mehr als 20 Jahren Erfahrungen in Praxis und Wissenschaft.
Niels Brabandt: Professionelles Training/Seminare/Workshops, Speaking/Vorträge, Coaching, Consulting/Beratung, Mentoring, Projekt- & Interim-Management. Event Host, MC, Moderator.
Podcast and Videocast Transcript
Niels Brabandt
How important do you think trust is? And of course you will now say, well, trust is of course crucial. How important do you think is that leaders have trust in what you do? And of course you say, well, that's obviously crucially important. So when you say this is all so obvious, the question is why are we where we are right now?
Niels Brabandt
We're going to talk about leadership, trust, and the benefit of the doubt today, because we have a situation at the moment which developed. It's almost like a déjà vu for me, because we are reliving through times which I thought we pretty much had behind us 20 years ago. When we now look at what we recently saw in press and also in science, we see that many young people at the moment say anyone is talking about a lack of talent. Anyone is talking about a lack of workforce. We have workforce shortage. We have talent shortage. However, at the same time, people struggle to find a job, especially when they're younger. So the entry to the job market gets more and more complicated almost all over the planet.
Niels Brabandt
So when we now look into this topic, hello and welcome to this week's episode. We're going to talk about leadership, trust, and the benefit of the doubt. And I will again, of course, quote from real world press sciences, press sources, and of course science backs what I'm saying here. And everything I quote here very important is disclaimer always. I can always show because when you now watch on YouTube, you will see the real world sources. And of course, when you're on the podcast, I'm going to tell you what the sources say. I'm allowed to quote them under fair dealing, fair usage in the UK, in the US, and cite a quotation right in the German speaking area.
Niels Brabandt
So when you now saw the article, there are young people now who say they have been turned away from 500 jobs, and that is not a propaganda newspaper. That was published by the BBC, backed by sources, 500 jobs. And I mean, let's face it, my time was probably quite tough. However, back in the days when I grew up, we had the reunification of Germany, which of course was a historic event. Lots of people came from East Germany to Western Germany for better jobs, other opportunities, the collapse of the socialist communist GDR. That was a very special situation. Of course, the workforce pushed in, making it very challenging for many people to find enough work. And almost two out of three of my back in the day student colleagues didn't find the work they wanted. I was lucky to be one of the picked ones who found a job which I actually liked to do.
Niels Brabandt
When you now look at the data and we now have data where you can see proven we have youth unemployment, which in the UK already is at 15%, but in London is up to 24%, 24% amongst the 16 to 24 year old people. At the same time, people say they are constantly labeled as either bleak or lazy. They think no one of you wants to work anymore. And of course, that is of course not the case when you just mass generalize here. At the same time, says the government says we are doing more to get young people into work, and we have to talk about the law and the legal situation as well of hiring young people and hiring people when you have certain doubts about should you hire or should you not hire them.
Niels Brabandt
So welcome to today's episode. How do we deal with this as leaders? When we now say we have this situation, it is pretty obvious that we know that we need to give people jobs for the future of any country. High youth unemployment always is a massive issue. The situation at the moment says we have high youth unemployment. And of course you can say, well, that's temporary. We had that in the 90s. We probably had it somewhere in the 70s. So roughly every 20 years this just happens. It always sorts out. That's of course one approach. However, the fingers crossed approach, as Chris Hatfield says, is never an approach. By the way, Chris Hatfield is an astronaut, and the astronauts always say you're not going to sit on 500 tons of kerosene or whatever they use to get into space, saying fingers crossed this is going to work because fingers crossed is not an approach in leadership.
Niels Brabandt
When you have this youth unemployment, you create a situation where we have so-called needs spelled NEET. And needs means they don't need well. Obviously they need work, but NEET, the term needs means they are not in education, employment, or training. And that of course is becoming a massive issue because what happens when you are not in education, not in employment, and not in training? It simply means that people say I lose hope for the future. I probably, when I'm lucky, I live at home. If I don't have an abusive home or anything else of a situation where I say my life is basically unbearable, then people lose completely faith in anything they have and any kind of optimism they have towards the future.
Niels Brabandt
Some people then fall on the state system. They receive benefits or anything similar. And at the same time, people say, well, maybe I can do, let's say, when there's no proper job out there, maybe I do a bit of job on the side, being paid cash in the hand, and cash in the hand work then suddenly becomes very appealing because people say, look, when I have cash in the hand work, it simply means I can do something with that benefits plus cash in the hand work.
Niels Brabandt
Maybe not great, but pretty decent. And that is something where no system, where no country can work on, no economy is able to work with that. No economy is able to sustain with that. The consequences of that is severe because people, once they're out of the system and they say, look, I may be a loser or the system isn't for me or no one wants me or whatever else conclusion they have, usually it goes south from there.
Niels Brabandt
So we have to see which challenges do we have? And one challenge I really thought we have behind us, but especially today, people apply for jobs and the answer is they are too inexperienced. And when I asked them, OK, where should they get the experience from? And often people then said, you know, when people are just 19, 20, 21 years old, then OK, here we go. You're not saying they are too inexperienced. You just change the terms. I remember back in the days when I came from university, end of the 90s, I started my part of the working world started end of the 90s, and back in the days they simply said too young. They don't say too young anymore for a very simple reason, because there are laws in place now which prevents them from doing so. When you say too young today, it is an active case of discrimination. And people of course know you shouldn't discriminate because that can become pretty expensive pretty quickly. But what they do is they simply change the term. They do not change anything with the real consequence of it. They simply change the word.
Niels Brabandt
They say, oh, I don't use that word anymore, meaning I simply use the exact same meaning, just exchanging the term young to young with too inexperienced. And here, of course, is the question that many young people have. You expect me to have experience at the same time. You do not pay according to someone being experienced. And besides that, when you don't hire me because you say, hey, you need a network, you need a reference, you need an internship, you need any kind of connection to get into the organization, the application without any connections, basically pointless.
Niels Brabandt
So. When you say all of that and you say you need to have experience, where should young people get the experience from when no one hires them? Or people simply say, oh, I always go for the more experienced person. And by the way, what they really mean here, just to be very straightforward, they don't mean too inexperienced. They simply mean too young. It's an arbitrary number where people say, I don't like the two numbers next to your name.
Niels Brabandt
Only to then because then say, hey, there are experienced people on the market. Look here. And then they say, oh, you know, these people when you're over 40, over 50, you know, bit too, you know, they are, how to say, yeah, I think they are too experienced for the position. What you really mean is you don't like their salary wishes, which is based on the experience you actually asked for. And also what you don't like is their name and their age.
Niels Brabandt
Again, you simply say, oh, the number over 40, the number over 50, they don't want to change. They don't want to do that, especially today when you hear people saying, oh, you know, the older people and the older people, meaning usually anyone over 40 already today. So people say the people who are older can't deal with AI. Piece of information here. Who do you think invented the computer systems on which everything today is based?
Niels Brabandt
These are the people who today are over 40, over 50, or over 60. Mass generalization. You basically split the whole thing in two halves. You say, oh, people at 19, 20, 21, somewhere there, all too young. Oh, sorry, too inexperienced. And on the other hand, over 40, yeah, you know, we say maybe too experienced because too old is age discrimination, right? So you basically give a window of 10 years, maybe 15, where people are the right fit.
Niels Brabandt
But then you say, oh, don't ask for too much money, right? You should be highly motivated, but you can't get much money. I know that life becomes more and more expensive and rent goes through the roof, but you can't make much money because our industry doesn't pay that well. And then you are surprised that motivation and the job market goes down. People calling in sick goes through the roof, while at the same time people say it all feels a bit pointless at the moment.
Niels Brabandt
It feels a bit like we're going downhill at record speed, and I'm not going to join the chumbo womb of everything's getting worse and worse here. However, we need to see a situation that recruiting at the moment is, let's say, not in the best shape, very politely said. When you say on the one hand too inexperienced, too young, on the other hand, you tell people they are too experienced.
Niels Brabandt
What you really say here is you simply do not trust anyone anymore. And sometimes you have recruiters who simply say, look, I only do what I got told by other leaders. I do not trust people because no one trusts me here. As soon as I say, oh, I think this young person should be taken in, they show great attitude. They say, really? You want to bring that person in from that background with a bachelor's degree and not a single year of experience?
Niels Brabandt
What kind of recruiter are you? Find better candidates. Or when you say, hey, we have this great person, really great experience, 55, really engaged, want to really wants to get into the market. And then your senior leader says, oh, you want to get one of these old farts in here? You know what the risk is? We can't get them out if we want to. You know they stay here forever. They're going to sue us. It's going to be really expensive. No, we don't hire anyone there.
Niels Brabandt
You shouldn't be surprised that any system acting like this is not going to sustain. It's going to be a big bang in one way or the other. Worst cases, you get regulation where you suddenly have to hire people. And then usually the regulation only knows one way, and it means tighter, tighter, tighter. So we need to be more open, and we're talking about trust here.
Niels Brabandt
What you need to do, and that is something which is of crucial importance as a true and excellent leader, you need to give people either a leap of faith, make a leap of faith, or give them the give them simply the benefit of the doubt where you say, look. You leave a good impression. I don't know if you're up to the job. You look like you really want to do this, and we try it from here.
Niels Brabandt
You're a young person, and I give you the chance to really prove that you're worth your salt here. And by the way, one aspect which I now fully understand is that people say, look, when I give people the benefit of the doubt and I am wrong, I might get fired or I might get serious consequences from that because they don't. They always talk about, oh, we are open for errors, but they're actually not. And that's an organizational cultural problem.
Niels Brabandt
Organizational culture needs to be open that certain errors can be made. That does not mean that anyone can mess up massively deliberately. But it means that when you make errors, mistakes, handle something in a way it shouldn't be, that we learn from that. And of course, there's one omnipresent fear, a fear which is all over the place at the moment that people say, oh, when I do something wrong, I will suddenly sit on the other side of the table being somewhere in the mess of looking for a job, not being sure if I find anything out there.
Niels Brabandt
So the fear that is there is it's instilled by bad leadership, and the leadership is simply that people say you can't make any mistakes. We're looking for the best people, but either they are too young, too inexperienced, or they are too old, too experienced, too risky, whatever else. And there's a tiny bit in between where you then say, oh, well, you're somewhere in the midstage. Don't expect too much of payment benefits, whatnot else. So you're basically making the whole working world at the moment one big piece of not you, not here, not right now. And that is becoming a massive issue.
Niels Brabandt
I know that when you, for example, are a managed service provider in the IT field and you sell services, you want to have great salespeople and you wonder, look, you need two years to learn everything we do here. But the experienced people on the market, we can't afford. So first, when you're an MSP, managed service provider in the tech field, usually make good money, and then you can afford to pay people well. If you don't do that, you've done something wrong with your spending. You simply don't want to pay people well. And that is, of course, not reasonable behavior.
Niels Brabandt
Great work needs great pay. And by the way, pay aligns with the living costs around you. And when costs of living go up, up, up, so will salaries. No question about that. However, when you say we need the experienced people, and of course there's a very different price tag with them and you don't want to pay them, you have to go for one route or the other. You can say I hire someone with less experience, a bit of a lower price tag, and then qualify them, or you hire someone who is more experienced with a higher price tag and then benefit from their experience.
Niels Brabandt
However, this fear of doing something wrong, I can tell you first, you have probation time. When you don't know after probation time if people are worth their salt, you really should wonder, do we actually have a structured and documented approach to onboarding, or do we just say, look, my door is always open, go for it, good luck from here? And you do not really have an onboarding process.
Niels Brabandt
Do you really have an onboarding process, or do you have rather a situation of chaos where anyone needs to go along and find something and say, oh, I think the door is always open, but they are always busy, so I'm Googling myself through the Internet, use Google resources, try to find something in Salesforce and figure out everything by myself, which by the way, way too often is the way an organization? Or do you actually have a buddy system where mentors took on different parts, where people go from one person to the other, getting properly onboarded? So you do everything within your means that people actually get the starting point in the organization properly.
Niels Brabandt
On top of all of that, please do me one favor, and that is extremely important now. Look at your own career. Look at your own career because what we are lacking at the moment is the self-reflection of leaders who say, how did my career actually go? And often quite too, quite too quickly, often too quickly, people say, well, no one gave me anything or several platter. I can tell you I grew up in Bamstead, a small village in northern Germany. Please look that up. English is not my first language.
Niels Brabandt
And from this small village, I made it to Hamburg, to Berlin, then London. Today living in Zurich, London. Next week I'm in New York City again, one out of four weeks where I'm going to be in New York City only this year. So it went pretty well. But what happened in due course of this career? I remember vividly that one colleague who I knew in the pharmaceutical industry, my first industry after going from uni and my education was being a teacher, so I already came in with a nontraditional degree into the pharmaceutical world. And one colleague said, look, I'm not sure if you can do this, but I think you can. We will try right now. And he gave me that benefit of the doubt and my career took off from there.
Niels Brabandt
Of course, you have to show engagement. You need to work hard, and you probably that is something where we will disagree with some people here. In my opinion, especially when you want to get into an industry, you need to work hard, which most likely happens beyond the 35-hour working week. And that, of course, comes along with challenges that we need to address. We can't solve this in this episode right now, but if you want to have a career, engagement and highly efficient and effective work as part of that, you can't just sit there and do standard work and expect extraordinary pay and results.
Niels Brabandt
However, the reflection saying was not your own career based on someone saying, look, I give you the chance to prove if you're worth your salt. It happened with me with my British employer, which was a British pharmaceutical company. And it happened especially with my American employer. I was self-employed already, but they didn't need to give me the trust. I was in my beginning, mid-20s, being a young self-employed consultant there. And there was a senior leader who was way into their 50s, but still had to carry massive personal risk saying, Neils, come on, after your seminar today, sit down, I show you something. And he showed me an intranet where he says, OK, look, this is a place where you can develop yourself, where you can apply for a certain career path, and you can use my name as a reference here.
Niels Brabandt
And from there, I suddenly found myself flying from Hamburg via Frankfurt to Los Angeles, going to Anaheim to a franchise headquarter, and then developing a massive international career based on someone saying, I think you can do this. And of course, I showed engagement. I worked hard. I worked long hours, and I can tell you, and again, I don't want to start an argument here, but I worked way, way more than 35 to 40 hours a week, way more, 60 hours plus. So I really showed engagement here. I think at least that was their feedback.
Niels Brabandt
This reflection we need that you say my career was based on someone giving me the chance because they saw something. They took on personal risk. They took on organizational risk. We need to get back to the point where we really show engagement into a certain level of risk, by the way, especially in free enterprise. Our whole claim against the state where we say you need to lower taxes, you need to lose in regulation, and the whole the whole gist around that is we take the risk. But at the moment, I simply don't see that people take the risk.
Niels Brabandt
There are a few organizations who have a very reasonable approach to risk, many organizations saying, look, it's either too young, too inexperienced, or it's too old, too experienced, too expensive, too risky. We can't get rid of them, etcetera, etcetera, or they simply say we're not hiring anyone because we can never get rid of them. You can get rid of people within probation time. If your probation time simply is an El Dorado of good luck from here, you shouldn't be surprised that your glassdoor.com profile or Kununu profile, that's the German equivalent, looks like the massacre it actually most likely is right now.
Niels Brabandt
You need to engage in proper onboarding and giving people the benefit of the doubt, a leap of faith, where you say I'm not sure if you can do it, but you will find these golden nuggets, the brilliant people who are out there who simply say thank you for the chance, and I will show you that I'm able to do it. I am worth my salt. And also, and that is crucially important from here. You need to see that the whole economy is based on giving people chances. It happened to us. It happened to others. So why did we suddenly stop doing that again?
Niels Brabandt
Because someone higher in the hierarchy said you need to have a 100% hit right with every with every person you hired. Well, we all wish for that. So do I. But most likely it is not going to happen. Most likely it is not going to happen. You need to be aware of the fact that when you hire people, mishires are unfortunately part of the game. And sometimes you have the right people with the right level of experience.
Niels Brabandt
All the criteria are met, and you agree on a working contract very quickly, and then they enter the team and it's simply not a fit on a personal level. They simply don't fit into the team, and you think why does this happen? Finally, we found someone and now we have interpersonal issues. Really, this is like kindergarten. So first it's not humans do human things. However, when leaders suddenly stop to give people the benefit of the doubt and you expect everything that they need to have from the scratch, already being held in their hands and ready for you to use, but at the same time offering a limited package of pay and benefits, you shouldn't be surprised that some people, and in this time, especially the younger generation, say that feels a bit pointless because when I work hard, I want to have a life which is comfortable and not just barely scratch along every month thinking my money ended up being really tight.
Niels Brabandt
So be aware that this is an aspect that you need to invest in, and if you do it in the way that we discussed today, everything in your organization, hopefully in the right arrangement of economy and society, will get better from here. And I wish you all the best doing so. And when you now say I think I need to discuss that, very happy to do that.
Niels Brabandt
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Niels Brabandt
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Niels Brabandt
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Niels Brabandt
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Niels Brabandt
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Niels Brabandt
The most important thing, however, is always the last bit I say on each and every podcast and videocast. Apply, apply, apply what you heard in this episode because only when you apply what you heard, you can see the positive aspects that you obviously want to see in your organization. And by the way, if you contact me now, feel free to contact me. I answer every single matter within 24 hours or less. So no worries. If you contact me, you really get a quick answer. I'm looking forward to hearing from you.
Niels Brabandt
If you want something very specific, you say hey, I need training, speaking, coaching, consulting, mentoring for my business or project interim management. Very happy to discuss that. When you say hey, I just want to have a chat.
Niels Brabandt
Very cool. Let's do that as well. I'm open for absolutely anything. I'm looking forward to hearing from you at the end of this podcast and at the end of the videocast. There's only one thing left for me to say. Thank you very much for your time.