WHEN GOOD ORGANISATIONS LOSE PUBLIC CONFIDENCE

By Tegan Thompson

Have you ever noticed how quickly people fill in the blanks?

Miss one family dinner and suddenly someone thinks you're upset.

Don't answer your phone for a few hours and your friends assume something is wrong.

As humans, we don't particularly like uncertainty. So, when we don't have information, we create our own.

Organisations are no different.

One of the biggest misconceptions I come across is that organisations lose public confidence because they've made a catastrophic mistake. Sometimes that's true. More often than not, though, confidence is chipped away in much smaller moments.

A delayed update.

A promise that quietly disappears.

A leadership team that goes silent because they're waiting for all the facts.

The funny thing is your stakeholders generally don't expect you to have all the answers. They're much more interested in knowing that someone is steering the ship.

Think about turbulence on a flight. Most passengers have absolutely no idea what's happening outside the cockpit - and they certainly don't expect to. What they do want is for the pilot to come over the intercom and say, "We've hit a patch of rough air. We've adjusted our altitude; everything is under control and we'll keep you updated."

Has the turbulence disappeared? No. But suddenly everyone relaxes because someone is communicating.

Leadership works much the same way. Whether you're leading an agricultural organisation, a business, an industry association or a community initiative, people don't expect perfection. They expect presence.

I've seen organisations navigate incredibly difficult situations and come out stronger because they stayed visible, acknowledged concerns and kept people informed.

I've also seen relatively small issues grow into reputational headaches simply because people were left wondering what was going on.

Silence has a funny way of sounding like avoidance, even when it isn't.

One lesson has stayed with me throughout my career.

If you don't help people understand what's happening, they'll write their own version of events. And trust me - they're usually far more creative than reality.

Good communication isn't about having a perfectly polished statement. It's about reducing uncertainty. It's about helping people feel that someone is listening, someone is leading and someone is prepared to have the difficult conversations.

No organisation gets everything right. The organisations people continue to trust aren't the ones that avoid challenges. They're the ones that show up when challenges arrive.