Watch the recording of the webinar:
Listen to the recording via our podcast:
View the Slides:
ay through the session that's worth lifting because it changes how leaders should read what they're seeing.
Organizations are operating in an unusually difficult moment for trust building. Several forces are compounding. The pandemic produced widespread, low-grade post-traumatic stress that hasn't fully resolved — people are walking around with reservoirs of anxiety they may not even recognize. Political polarization has made non-work conversations harder, which constrains the kind of casual relationship building that builds trust. Geopolitical turmoil adds another layer of uncertainty. High mobility within and between organizations breaks the institutional relationships that took years to build.
Remote work compounds all of this. Roughly 80% of communication is non-verbal — body language, facial expression, tone, the small cues people pick up from each other in shared physical space. Remote work doesn't eliminate non-verbal communication, but it dilutes it significantly. Trust is harder to build through video calls than through hallway conversations and shared lunches.
Colleen's reframe: the conventional Lean framing of "respect for people" may be too narrow for the moment. The bigger issue is trust at the organizational level — and trust requires more than respect. It requires the kind of human connection that the current environment is actively making harder.
The implication for CI leaders: the trust deficit you're seeing in your organization is partially structural to the moment. That doesn't excuse leaders from working on it. It does mean that leaders need to be more deliberate, more patient, and more invested in the work than they would have been ten years ago.
Most organizations respond to trust problems with surveys and workshops. They run engagement surveys to measure trust. They run leadership workshops to teach leaders how to be more trustworthy. They expect those interventions to move the needle.
Colleen's framing: surveys and workshops are like x-raying a sick patient back into a state of health. The x-ray gives you information. It doesn't heal the patient. Trust building requires practice, not assessment.
The mechanism is similar to physical therapy. People who have lost capacity in some skill — communication, empathy, focus, the ability to be vulnerable in interpersonal contexts — don't recover that capacity by reading about it or talking about it. They recover it by practicing it, in low-stakes settings, with feedback, repeatedly, over time.
The pandemic and the broader cultural shift have left many people with diminished interpersonal skills. Connection was already hard for many. Two years of distance and disruption made it harder. Rebuilding the capacity for trust at the organizational level requires methods that let people practice the underlying interpersonal skills — not methods that measure how broken those skills currently are.
The session points to three categories of innovation Colleen has been tracking that are producing real results in trust building.
Social networking methods. Specifically, the working out loud peer support network model that originated in Germany and has spread through GE and other large organizations. Small circles of four to six people meet for an hour a week over twelve weeks. The structure has five elements — relationships, visible work, generosity, purposeful discovery, growth mindset — and a clear mission, but the day-to-day is about practicing connection in a structured peer setting.
Colleen ran a 25-person pilot at her organization after avoiding the launch for 18 months (her honest framing: she was too arrogant to think she needed it). The pilot produced a 94% satisfaction score, and 80% of participants started their own peer circles afterward, spreading the practice organically. Her own experience: there was a Colleen before the pilot and a Colleen after. The method showed her — kindly — her own gaps in focus and her own gaps in empathy. The method spreads because it works and because participants want others to have the same experience.
The framing she lands on: this is immune therapy at the organizational level. It changes organizations at the cellular level by changing the people inside them, not by issuing top-down directives that the organization is supposed to absorb.
The neuroscience community. Business is finally catching up to neuroscience. Researchers like Carol Dweck (Mindset), Paul Zak (The Trust Factor), and Bob Sutton (The Friction Project) are translating findings about how the brain responds to trust, threat, and learning into practical implications for organizations. Trust isn't just an interpersonal nicety — it has measurable effects on cognitive performance, learning capacity, and physical stress response. Leaders who understand the neuroscience are equipped to design environments that support trust rather than fight it.
Ecosystem frameworks. Collaborations between universities, companies, and professional organizations to build capability differently. Colleen highlights the FAME program (Federation for Advanced Manufacturing Education), which originated at Toyota and is now run by the Manufacturing Institute. FAME identifies high school students, places them in part-time work at Toyota factories, and produces graduates with advanced manufacturing degrees, no debt, and deep cultural fluency in Lean principles. The model produces stewards of the culture rather than implementers of tools.
The pattern across all three categories: methods that build capability through practice rather than assessment, that work at the cellular level rather than the structural level, and that treat trust as a real organizational capability rather than a soft cultural feature.
Colleen mentions during the session that she's part of a learning collective called CI Countermeasures, working on a Lean readiness assessment built on the trust model.
The instrument is simple. Five questions, one per dimension of trust, delivered to about thirty people closest to the product or service. The aggregate score gives a snapshot of organizational readiness.
The framing is provocative. Below a certain threshold of trust, attempting a Lean transformation is probably premature. The relationships with management, with co-workers, and with the work itself aren't strong enough to hold what a transformation requires. The methodology will land in soil too thin to grow it.
The diagnostic value isn't just yes-or-no. It also surfaces which dimension is weakest. A organization weak on respect needs different work than one weak on credibility or pride. The assessment helps leaders focus their trust building where it's most needed rather than running a generic engagement campaign.
The instrument is being made openly available. CI practitioners interested in using it can reach out to Colleen directly.
Colleen's stated mission: reduce suffering in manufacturing, specifically in aerospace and defense.
Mark asks her about the word during the Q&A. Of all the words she could have chosen — improve, optimize, transform — why suffering?
Her answer: she watched the Netflix documentary on Boeing. The stories of quality engineers trying to do the right thing and not being supported. The pain at multiple levels of the organization. And then the suffering at the customer level — the people paying the price when quality systems break down. In aerospace and defense, those customers can be astronauts and members of the armed forces. The stakes of trust failure aren't abstract.
The bar in most organizations is set low. People hate coming to work. The aspiration is for them to not hate it. Colleen's argument: the bar should be higher. Deming's phrase is the one she points to — joy and pride in work. That's what organizations should be building toward, and trust is the prerequisite for getting there.
The framing matters because most CI initiatives are pitched as efficiency or quality or cost. Pitched as suffering reduction, the work has different moral weight. The people doing the work, and the people who depend on what they produce, deserve better than what most current systems provide. CI at its best is an instrument for delivering that better.
A few specific things the platform does that connect to the substance of this session.
KaiNexus makes improvement work visible across the organization in a way that supports several dimensions of the trust model. Respect — when people see their ideas captured, routed, and acted on, they experience the kind of professional involvement that builds respect. Pride — when standardization is visible and accessible rather than locked in one team's tribal knowledge, people can take pride in well-defined work. Camaraderie — when teams can see what other teams are working on, opportunities to collaborate and learn from each other emerge that wouldn't otherwise.
The platform also closes the futility loop that erodes trust over time. People stop submitting ideas in organizations where ideas disappear into a void. KaiNexus makes the response to ideas systematic — every idea gets routed, acknowledged, and either acted on or explained. The process of engaging with ideas becomes infrastructure rather than depending on individual managers' good intentions.
For the impact tracking that justifies continued investment in CI, the platform produces the kind of data that lets leaders demonstrate trust-building work is producing real outcomes. The aggregate impact of an engaged workforce — the ideas implemented, the time saved, the safety incidents avoided, the engagement scores moving — becomes visible at the organizational level.
If your organization is struggling to sustain CI because the underlying trust foundation isn't strong enough, the gap is rarely the methodology. It's the infrastructure that makes trust-building behaviors visible, consistent, and reinforced over time. That's the gap KaiNexus is built to close.
Colleen Soppelsa is a Lean and Six Sigma transformation leader with more than 20 years of experience across automotive, aerospace, and defense industries. She has held key roles at Toyota, GE Aviation (now GE Aerospace), and L3Harris Technologies, where she currently leads continuous improvement efforts. Colleen is deeply committed to the Lean principle of respect for people and views trust as a non-negotiable foundation for a healthy improvement culture. Her work focuses on reducing organizational suffering by strengthening human connection, psychological safety, and systems thinking — especially in complex, high-risk environments. A native of Cincinnati, she lived and worked in Japan and Italy for 13 years before returning to the United States.
Why is trust foundational to continuous improvement?
Because every meaningful CI activity asks people to be vulnerable to the actions of others — surfacing problems, proposing changes, running experiments, reporting failures honestly. Charles Feltman's definition of trust is "choosing to make something important to you vulnerable to the actions of others," which describes what improvement work requires of its participants. In environments where that vulnerability isn't safe, the improvement work doesn't happen. The methodology can be perfect and the program will still stall.
What's the difference between trust and psychological safety?
Trust is the broader category. Psychological safety is one of its most important manifestations in the workplace context — specifically, the belief that you can speak up, ask questions, admit mistakes, and propose ideas without being punished or marginalized. Both depend on the same underlying willingness to be vulnerable. Psychological safety is more operationally defined (with research-backed dimensions like the four stages framework), which makes it easier to discuss concretely. Trust is the larger reservoir that psychological safety draws from.
What are the five dimensions of trust in the Great Place to Work model?
Respect (do employees feel respected by management), credibility (is management seen as believable and trustworthy), fairness (does the organization treat people equitably), camaraderie (are relationships among co-workers genuine and supportive), and pride (do people feel good about their work, their team, and their organization). Each dimension shows up in specific operational symptoms when it's broken — poor strategy deployment, unethical behavior, high turnover, low engagement, and poor standardization, respectively.
Why aren't engagement surveys and leadership workshops enough?
Because they measure the problem rather than treat it. The analogy in the session: x-raying a sick patient back into a state of health. Surveys produce data. Workshops produce knowledge. Neither produces the kind of practiced, repeated, low-stakes interpersonal work that actually rebuilds the underlying capacity for trust. People who have lost capacity in interpersonal skills — communication, empathy, focus, vulnerability — recover that capacity through practice, not assessment.
What does "working out loud" do that other methods don't?
It creates a low-stakes, structured environment where people practice connection, focus, and vulnerability with peers over twelve weeks. The structure has five elements — relationships, visible work, generosity, purposeful discovery, growth mindset. Participants meet in circles of four to six, one hour per week. The method works because it doesn't ask people to perform trust at scale; it lets them practice it in small groups, with peer support, repeatedly. In Colleen's pilot, 94% of participants reported satisfaction and 80% started their own circles afterward, which suggests the practice is meeting a real need.
How can leaders actually build trust if they can't just tell people to trust them?
Through reward and recognition systems that reinforce the behaviors trust depends on, through participation in trust-building methods (like working out loud) alongside their teams rather than directing from above, and through behavior consistency over time. The hard truth from McKinsey research is that 33% of failed change initiatives fail specifically because management behaviors don't support the change — even when management endorsement is present. The behaviors are what teach people whether the leader is trustworthy. Words alone don't.
What's the connection between trust and the SQDC hierarchy?
SQDC — safety, quality, delivery, cost — is one of the foundational value hierarchies in Lean. The order is non-negotiable. Cost is the positive outcome of getting safety, quality, and delivery right. When credibility breaks down at the management level, the SQDC hierarchy is one of the first casualties — leaders say one thing in town halls and reveal a different priority order through resource decisions. People throughout the organization notice the inversion, and trust in leadership erodes accordingly. The Boeing situation has been the most visible recent example, but the pattern isn't unique to Boeing.
.svg)
Copyright © 2026
Privacy Policy