Ask most senior managers whether their employees trust their supervisors, and you'll get one of two answers. Either a confident yes or a long pause.

The pause is the honest one. Because the truth is, trust doesn't come with a promotion. It has to be built. And most frontline supervisors were never taught how to build it.

There are three directions of trust that every frontline supervisor needs to develop. When all three are in place, your floor runs. When they're missing, you get a cycle that feeds itself, and most companies don't even recognize it until it's already showing up in their turnover numbers, their safety incidents, and their productivity gaps.

Here's what makes this worth paying attention to. Every one of those trust gaps traces back to the same source. A supervisor who was promoted because they were great at the work and then left to figure out the people part on their own. No people-skills development. No preparation for the trust that leadership actually requires. Just a title, a pay raise, and a hope that it would all sort itself out. It didn't.

And PwC's latest research backs that up: 70% of employees say they don't trust their company's leaders to follow through on commitments. That number doesn't come out of nowhere. It comes from supervisors who were set up to struggle.

The good news is that trust is not a personality trait. It's a skill. And skills can be taught. In my latest video, I break down all three directions of trust, why the hope promotion misses every one of them, and what a confident promotion does instead.

And if you're ready to stop giving hope promotions, visit kevburns.com/supervisors for a free six-day trial of PeopleWork Supervisor Academy.