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When Leaders’ Words and Actions Don’t Match, Trust Becomes a Safety Issue

Renee Robson
2 days ago
5 min read

The thing that I love the most (I think?) about Gen Z is their rejection of corporate bullshit and incongruence.


The neurodiverse community, trauma-informed practitioners and many others have been warning of the dangers of incongruence and jargon-overload for years, but Gen Z might just actually be the ones to make a difference.


If you’re into social media and cultural trend-watching, you’ll be hearing about and noticing a shift: away from corporate and polished, towards authentic and imperfect.


Part of the reason? A lack of trust in the polished, an acknowledgement that marketing and corporate whitewashing are everywhere, and a desire for authenticity. Or really, just not being whacked in the face with polished corporate messaging at every turn.


What Boomers, Gen X and Millennials have been taught over the last few decades, that looking MORE professional = competence, is being chewed up and spit out by AI.


Now:

Perfection = a sign of incongruence. 

Generic platitudes = a computer wrote this for you. 

Corporate branding and promises to employees = untrustworthy and not real.


I don’t think AI’s biggest impacts are going to be restricted to process improvements or shaving entry-level admin job numbers. I think it will also affect what we recognise as good leadership.


Technical skills are easy to find, but the ability to be the type of leader that people trust is rare.


Deloitte’s 2025 global data suggests this isn’t just Gen Z getting loud on social media. Forty-four per cent of Gen Z respondents said they had left a role that lacked purpose, while around 40% had rejected an assignment, project or potential employer because it conflicted with their personal ethics or beliefs.


Only 6% of Gen Z and millennial respondents said reaching a leadership position was their primary career goal.


So that’s just a trend, right? What does it actually change when it comes to how we market, how we hire, and how we train our leaders and staff?


Because this is where incongruence shows up.


Oh, you thought we were talking about too much use of the word “quietly” and the rule of three?


No babe, we’re talking about:


  • Corporate values that say one thing and every employee says the opposite.

  • Inclusion of the words ‘transparency’ and ‘goodwill’ when the processes you’re running don’t adhere to them.

  • HR and safety investigations led by HR norms from 2002 that are actively damaging to psychosocial safety initiatives.

  • Managers that bag out organisational leadership and their decisions in order to maintain credibility with their teams.

  • ...and a whole lot more.


Researchers call this behavioural integrity: whether employees perceive a match between what a leader says and what they do. Tony Simons’ research shows that this perception shapes trust.


Gartner found that only one in three employees thought their organisation consistently delivered on its employee value proposition promises. Employees who believed they could depend on their manager to follow through on those promises were five times more likely to say the organisation delivered on them.


To see what happens when this incongruence goes unchecked, look at the ‘values-led’ nonprofit sector.


I’ve spent my career in HR, leadership and change roles chasing great leaders. In government, nonprofit and private orgs alike, I’ve reported to brilliant executives who genuinely upheld their own values and tested their decisions against the mission of the organisation.


I’ve only worked in one organisation where this wasn’t the case.


Funnily enough, of all the places I’ve worked, it’s easily the one that spent the most time and cash externally marketing its values and superior moral approach. Very ‘for the people, by the people’ vibe.


Right down to a new manager who, when she took over our team, made an almost literal song and dance about how she was such a values-led person she would ‘never’ behave the way our organisation was known to treat employees. She said that if higher-ups ever lied to us or secretly tried to screw us over in our jobs, she’d always tell us the truth.


It was the first time I’d ever received a speech like this, especially after only ever reporting to people who lived those values implicitly anyway.


It was strange having her differentiate herself as a values-led leader within an organisation where the external articulation of its values had become far more developed than the internal practice of them. What followed was a series of ‘what not to do’ leadership examples that will supply me with training scenarios for years. Silver linings and all that.


Given that my Master’s research focused on unintentional organisational drift in large nonprofits, I’ve got a clear perspective on what happened in that organisation: the gap was culture and leadership competence. 100%.


Here, culture means the behaviour leaders reward and the behaviour they allow to continue. A culture where leaders aren't questioned and accountability is missing creates an environment where hypocritical behaviour becomes systemic.


Because it wasn’t just this one manager. It was the organisational culture:

Visibility > substance. 

Connections > aptitude. 

Marketing > reality.


This is where incongruence can move beyond a loss of credibility and become a psychosocial risk.


Safe Work Australia describes unfair or inconsistently applied processes, poor decision-making, failures to keep workers informed and failures to treat workers with dignity as forms of poor organisational justice. Poor organisational justice becomes a psychosocial hazard when it is severe, prolonged or frequent.


Preaching psychological safety and integrity while operating with double standards can create the very conditions that increase the risk of psychological harm.


Psychological safety means people feel able to speak honestly or challenge a decision without being punished. Psychosocial safety is broader: it concerns how work is designed and managed to prevent psychological harm.


For a long time, behaviour like this went unchecked. Honestly, that’s what a lot of leaders are counting on continuing.


But the regulatory environment is changing. And employees are getting louder and clearer about the type of behaviour they will and won’t put up with.


I’m curious about how the first wave of prosecutions testing these newer psychosocial hazard duties will change employer behaviour. I think it will be significant.


Across Australia, employers have duties to manage psychosocial risks, although the legal framework differs between jurisdictions. Victoria is one recent example: its Occupational Health and Safety (Psychological Health) Regulations took effect on 1 December 2025 and require employers to identify psychosocial hazards, control the risks and review those controls.


Fiddling around the edges, adding a new policy and mandatory e-learning will not be an appropriate defence for shoddy organisational design, investigations where evidence isn’t properly tested, or continual ‘right sizing’ when the actual issue is a lack of planning.


Maybe Gen Z will help push this change. The law will do some of it too. Either way, organisations will have to pay closer attention to the gap between what they say and how they operate.


The test is what happens when an employee raises a concern, questions a decision or challenges a leader’s conduct.


Does the organisation’s response match the promise?





Sources referenced:

 
 
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