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Building Trust: How to Cultivate a Culture of Credibility
When it comes to your employees, what do you value most? Sure, they have to be hardworking and dedicated, and …
Work used to travel through a strict organizational hierarchy, passing from the top down through several layers of management before reaching the people who acted on it. That path is getting shorter. Organizations are increasingly reducing management layers, a shift known as de-layering that gives employees and teams greater autonomy and shortens the distance between decisions and action.
This new reality is the influence economy, where thriving in a workplace with fewer layers depends less on titles and more on shared understanding. Influence is about building the trust and credibility that move people toward a common outcome, a skill that matters more as organizational flattening continues to reshape how work gets done.
As work increasingly depends on influence across teams rather than authority within one, organizations are asking more of their leaders and structures than a title alone can deliver. Traditional hierarchies relied on a clear chain of command to create alignment. Flatter organizations still value that structure, but they increasingly rely on people who can build agreement on their own, independent of a shared boss.
The two concepts work differently:
In a flatter workplace, the second skill determines how much someone can actually get done, regardless of position. Influence often determines the outcome in scenarios like these:
Influence expands what positional authority alone can accomplish, especially in situations where formal power reaches its limits. Organizations that build collaboration, communication and relationship-building skills across their whole workforce and invest in leadership at every level put more people in a position to lead. That makes it easier to navigate decisions that cross departments as layers disappear.
Flatter organizations redistribute leadership across more people, more often. Influence builds through small, repeated behaviors that compound over time. The seven habits below turn influence into something you can practice daily, wherever you sit in the organization.
Influence rarely begins when you need someone’s support. It starts with the small track record you build through consistency, reliability and sound judgment. Colleagues remember who follows through on commitments and who explains their reasoning clearly, even through difficult or unpopular decisions. That track record becomes a culture of credibility that others draw on when deciding which ideas to support.
People support ideas more readily when those ideas visibly advance shared team or organizational goals, benefiting more than just the person who proposed them. Framing a request around a shared priority, such as a department goal or a customer outcome, gives colleagues a reason to invest that goes beyond doing you a favor. This kind of alignment often creates stronger commitment than compliance alone because people carry ideas forward when they see themselves in the outcome.
As fewer layers separate departments, more work depends on people who can perform well with teams beyond their own. Influence in these settings depends on understanding a colleague’s competing priorities well enough to find common ground. Learning to influence across functions turns collaboration into a core skill rather than an occasional exception, giving you the relationships and context needed to move initiatives forward across different and departments.
Fewer organizational layers often speed up decisions but can leave people unsure of what to do next. Providing that clarity is itself a form of influence:
The person who can explain what’s happening and why often shapes a project’s direction as much as the person with the highest title in the room.
Directing someone to complete a task produces compliance. Building genuine ownership takes a different approach. Bringing colleagues into a decision before it’s finalized gives them a stake in the outcome, and seeking someone’s perspective signals that their judgment matters as much as their labor.
Invite shared problem-solving by working through a challenge together to build deeper commitment than a top-down directive.
Learning to adapt your communication means paying attention to who you’re trying to reach, including their:
Flexibility in delivery is what makes a consistent message land across a varied group of stakeholders.
Sustainable influence is built by consistently contributing to the success of the people around you. Helping colleagues solve problems faster builds your reputation as someone worth consulting. Introducing people who can help each other makes you valuable beyond your own to-do list.
People naturally seek out colleagues who make their work easier, and that reputation becomes one of the most durable forms of influence available.
Flatter organizations don’t reduce the need for leadership. They expand who is expected to demonstrate it. Leadership shows up less in a job title now and more in the ability to create movement, whether that’s aligning a cross-functional team, clarifying a confusing rollout or helping a colleague succeed on a task outside your formal role. A leader creates value at every level of an organization, from frontline teams to the top, not just wherever the organizational chart happens to draw a box.
In a workplace with fewer layers, influence creates alignment, inspires action and carries work forward. Building on that skill, deliberately and consistently, is one of the clearest ways to succeed in the influence economy taking shape across today’s workplaces.
Influence requires practice, and the right framework can accelerate how quickly your team builds it. At The Center for Leadership Studies, we help leaders and employees turn influence into a skill anyone can build. Our Situational Leadership® Essentials course teaches teams how to diagnose what a task requires and adapt their approach to match, building the flexibility that influence depends on.
For teams ready to take ownership further, our Situational Performance Ownership® course helps individuals advocate for their own support needs. This creates accountability that runs in both directions, something flatter organizations reward. Explore our curriculum to start building influence that moves your organization forward.
