Nobody Believes You: The Leadership Comms Problem with Jenni Field

About this episode

Oliver Atkinson discusses leadership communication and trust issues with Jenni Field, exploring how to rebuild belief in leadership.

Oliver Atkinson sits down with speaker, consultant and author Jenni Field to explore why so many people inside organisations have quietly stopped believing their leaders, and what it actually takes to earn that belief back. Drawing on her book Nobody Believes You, Jenni traces how trust erodes not through one dramatic moment but through small broken promises that accumulate over time. She explains why low engagement scores are almost always a trust problem in disguise, why flooding teams with more communication when confidence is already shaky tends to make things worse, and why you simply cannot message your way out of a credibility problem. She also introduces the "royal visit" effect: every interaction a leader carries more weight than they realise, which means showing up with integrity, support and genuine vision has to be a deliberate choice, not an afterthought. The conversation goes further into why "authenticity" has become a slippery and sometimes weaponised word, what genuine behaviour actually looks like day to day, and why AI-written leadership messages risk widening the very distance they are meant to close. With Gallup finding only 21 percent of US employees…

People in this episode

Host: Oliver Atkinson

Guest: Jenni Field

Topics covered

• leadership communication
• trust in organizations
• employee engagement
• authenticity
• change management

Keywords

• leadership
• trust
• communication
• engagement
• authenticity
• AI
• employee trust

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Gallup

Books & works: Nobody Believes You

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