I just finished going through a Leadership Academy, and one of the concepts that has stayed with me is this: trust matters more than performance. It is not a new idea, but the way it has been unpacked has given me a much deeper appreciation for what it actually means in practice. I want to share some of what I am learning.
I am not writing this as an expert. I am writing it as someone who is still in the process of growing as a leader. Most of us in EVS already understand that trust matters. We know our teams perform better when they feel respected and supported. But the Leadership Academy has pushed me to think about trust not just as a soft value, but as the actual foundation that performance is built on.
The framing that has stuck with me is this: it is not trust instead of performance. It is trust before performance. Because in my experience, performance is a byproduct of culture, and culture is built on trust.
When staff trust their leadership, something changes. They show up differently. They speak up when something is wrong. They adapt faster when protocols change. They stay longer. And over time, that produces better outcomes than any dashboard-first management approach ever will.
Trust is the currency that unlocks high-quality performance. Without it, you are managing compliance. With it, you are building a team that owns the outcome.
What trust actually does in EVS
Think about the last time you had a real safety concern on your floor but were not sure whether to say anything. That hesitation is a trust problem. High-trust environments reduce that gap. Staff feel safe to report contamination, protocol breaks, and near-misses because they believe leadership will respond with support rather than blame.
That matters enormously in infection prevention. When reporting goes up, early intervention becomes possible. When people stay quiet, problems compound.
Research backs this. Studies on patient safety culture consistently find that higher trust scores predict lower incidence of healthcare-associated infections. Edgar Schein’s foundational work on organizational culture identifies trust as the core antecedent to effective team performance. And change management research shows that trusting teams comply with new protocols at higher rates because they believe leadership will support them through the transition.
Why performance metrics alone are not enough
Metrics tell you where you are. They do not tell you why you got there, and they rarely tell you how to sustain it.
A team hitting strong audit numbers under a low-trust culture is fragile. Remove the pressure or the manager, and those numbers move. A team hitting strong numbers inside a high-trust culture is durable. They own the outcome because they understand why it matters.
There is also a retention dimension. Turnover in EVS is expensive, and institutional knowledge walks out the door with every person who leaves. Staff who trust their leadership are less likely to leave. That means fewer vacancies, fewer onboarding cycles, and fewer experienced people pulled away from patient care areas to train someone new.
Prioritizing trust does not mean ignoring performance. It means embedding performance metrics within a culture that values improvement and safety over short-term numbers.
Practically, this looks like sharing data transparently with your team rather than just reporting out to leadership. It looks like holding listening sessions when you are about to change a process, not after the complaint comes in. It looks like recognizing honest reporting as a sign of a healthy team rather than a red flag to manage away.
The leaders I have seen struggle are the ones who try to build performance first and earn trust later. What I am learning is that it works better in the other direction.
In environmental services, we protect patients every day through the work our teams do in the background. That work only happens at its highest level when the people doing it believe in who they are working for.
The Leadership Academy has given me a better framework for something I already believed. I am still applying it and still growing. But the question it keeps bringing me back to is a good one: am I building trust, or am I just managing numbers?
John Weir, CHESP, T-CNACC, CMIP, is the Director of Environmental Services at MultiCare Health System, overseeing Auburn and Covington Medical Centers. He writes about EVS leadership, infection prevention, and frontline team development at johnmichaelweir.com.