The GITO Approach

There is a moment in most high-performing careers when something quietly shifts. The person still shows up. They still deliver. But the discretionary effort - the initiative, the ideas nobody asked for, the staying late because the work mattered - that stops. And they can often identify the exact moment it stopped.
This is what a broken trust contract looks like. Not a resignation letter. A private recalibration.
The psychological contract governs every employment relationship. It is the layer beneath the formal one: the unwritten expectations that hard work will be recognised, that stated values will actually govern decisions, that a person will be treated as a human being rather than a resource. Research by organisational scholar Denise Rousseau established decades ago that when these expectations are violated - even subtly, even unintentionally - the withdrawal of discretionary effort is immediate and often permanent.
The cost is measurable. Disengaged employees cost organisations an estimated 18 percent of annual salary in lost productivity. In high-context cultures, where direct feedback is moderated by hierarchy and relationship, the pattern is particularly difficult to name before the damage compounds.
The question worth sitting with: what has this organisation asked people to believe - and then quietly not believed itself?
Part of the GITO Podcast Series by MindMagine. New episodes every second Tuesday.

Think about the last significant improvement initiative your organisation ran. Not whether it succeeded on its own terms, but whether the problem it was designed to solve has stayed solved.

If the answer is yes, you are in an unusual position and I would genuinely like to know what you did.

If the answer is no, or more honestly, if the answer is "we haven't checked"; then you are in the place where this series begins.

The pattern is not a judgment. It is not evidence of poor leadership or bad strategy or inadequate investment. It is evidence of something more fundamental: an organisation that has been solving problems without yet learning to see the system those problems live inside.
That is what we are here to change.