When leaders plan a change, they usually work through the org chart: brief the managers, cascade the message, ask managers to bring their teams along. But trust doesn't follow the org chart.
The study
Happily.ai analysed behavioural data — not survey answers — from 3,446 employees at 31 companies over a year (April 2025 to April 2026). Each person's trust score was built from how often colleagues asked them for feedback (60%) and from reciprocal recognition (40%).
What they found
- 72% of the most-trusted people (the top 10%) were not managers — 265 of 368.
- Managers made up 19.5% of the workforce but only 28% of the most trusted.
- Around 35% of individual contributors scored above the typical manager.
- Non-managers carried roughly twice as much of the overall trust network as managers.
In every company examined in detail, the five most-trusted people included individual contributors.
Why it matters
If your change effort relies only on managers, you're using a fraction of the trust in the system. The colleague everyone quietly asks for advice may influence how a change lands far more than any cascade briefing.
What to do
- Include high-trust individual contributors in change pilots alongside managers.
- Add them to succession and promotion conversations — informal influence is a leadership signal.
- Watch for concentration: if trust rests on very few people, that's a risk to your culture.
- Create senior individual-contributor paths that recognise influence without forcing people into management.
The researchers note limits: tenure wasn't adjusted for, the sample leans towards Thai and Malaysian workforces, and business outcomes weren't measured.
Related: The 70/10 rule · Crack the Egg
Adapted from research and writing by the team at Happily.ai, a Rituals of Work partner. Figures come from Happily's own platform data and are observational — they show associations, not proof of cause.
