The Science of Humans at Work
Oct 17, 2025
You don’t always see the moment trust breaks. There’s no memo. No headline. No confrontation.
It starts quietly.
A high performer stops offering ideas. A manager starts following rules instead of leading people. A team grows silent in meetings but loud in private chats.
Something invisible has shifted.
What’s eroding isn’t skill or strategy, it’s the unseen current that powers both.
Dr. Katherine Meese calls this The Human Margin: the living, breathing space between people that makes everything else work. When that space weakens, even the strongest systems begin to crack.
Dr. Meese isn't just theorizing—she's the CEO of the HuMargin Group and an award-winning researcher with 15+ years studying workforce wellbeing. Her research is cited by 160+ universities and has transformed how leading organizations approach leadership and trust.
Her findings reveal something both scientific and deeply human. Her research confirms that performance isn’t sustained by strategy alone; it’s fueled by the energy that moves between people: trust, hope, respect, and the belief that what we do matters.
When that energy fades, so does everything built upon it.
That’s where the story of leadership truly begins.
The Margin that Matters Most
While organizations obsessively protect financial margins, Dr. Meese's research reveals a more critical asset: the human margin, that internal reserve of energy, trust, and respect that fuels performance when pressure rises.
Her data is clear: When trust rises, engagement climbs and turnover drops. In fact, toxic culture is TEN TIMES more likely to drive turnover than compensation. Your people aren't leaving for money, they're escaping broken trust.
In their book, The Human Margin, Building the Foundations of Trust, Dr. Meese and Quint Studer prove that trust in leadership predicts everything that matters: whether people stay, speak up, and believe their work has meaning.
The Trust Blueprint: 10 Essential Building Blocks
The book outlines ten building blocks that reinforce this foundation: Trust, Communication, Belonging, Recognition, Fairness, Autonomy, Well-being, Peers/Coworkers/HealthyTeams, Leadership Development, and Change Management.
What struck me most while reading The Human Margin wasn’t just the strength of the research; it was the way Meese and Studer translated complex data into language you can feel and use.
Each building block is clearly defined and deeply human. They don't just explain abstract concepts; they go as far as to name the specific behaviors and words that bring these principles to life in the real world.
This isn't just theory, it's immediately actionable leadership wisdom you can apply TODAY.
Understanding the concepts is one thing. But pairing them with such clear, concise application? That's what makes the book brilliant.
Rebuilding Trust from the Inside Out
At The Healthy Leader Group, we focus on both individual self-leadership and influential leadership within teams. These are not separate skill sets. They inform and strengthen each other.
Influence doesn't begin in the boardroom. It begins in how you lead yourself when no one is watching. The more grounded and self-aware you are internally, the more clearly your leadership resonates externally.
You can lead while depleted. Many do. But that kind of leadership is fragile. It leans on adrenaline rather than alignment.
What makes leadership sustainable is internal steadiness: a grounded mind, a regulated nervous system, and a physical rhythm that supports your fulfillment and presence rather than sabotaging it.
This isn't just a coaching idea. It's backed by neuroscience. When your internal systems are strained, leadership becomes reactive. When you are centered, your influence flows naturally.
Dr. Meese doesn’t just diagnose what’s broken inside organizations. She shows how individual leaders shape trust. In every interaction, we're either restoring trust or eroding it.
⭐️ POWERFUL MOMENT: One of my favorite moments comes early in the chapter on autonomy. It opens with a line from the poem Invictus, a poem I asked my youngest daughter to memorize when she was little:
“I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul.”
Invictus, by William Ernest Henley
Seeing that line in a research-driven book on organizational trust hit me with an unexpected force. Autonomy is not just a leadership responsibility. It is also a personal one.
Yes, leaders must create the conditions for autonomy. But we also have to take responsibility for how we present ourselves. Our mindset, emotional presence, and physical patterns shape every conversation and culture we enter.
And our teams pick it up fast.
They see you skipping meals and assume recovery isn’t valued here. They watch you carry everything alone and think vulnerability must not be safe. They match your pace and slowly begin to burn through their own human margin, too.
That is why rebuilding trust cannot just be an organizational initiative. It has to start with you.
The Healthy Leader Operating System™
The Three Domains of Influential Leadership
One of the clearest ways to understand influential leadership is by understanding how internal alignment drives outward behavior and influences our culture.
It’s not just about what leaders believe. It’s about how those beliefs get expressed through behavior in moments of challenge, change, and connection.
A powerful framework for this is the Influential Leadership Architecture™, a model shaped by both lived coaching experience and the neuroscience-based work of Michael E. Frisina, PhD, LTC(R) United States Army.
It focuses on three behavioral domains that make trust visible:
→ Communication: mental clarity becomes shared understanding
→ Connection: emotional presence builds psychological safety
→ Collaboration: aligned behavior drives shared accountability
These aren't abstract ideals. They're daily signals that shape how people feel at work.
Here's how each domain shows up in practice, with Dr. Meese's research-backed strategies:
➡️ Communication: Small Shifts, Massive Impact
Dr. Meese highlights a subtle yet powerful way trust gets eroded: when mid-level leaders are unsure how to respond to tough questions from their teams.
Instead of owning the moment, they often default to, “Let me run it by senior leadership.” The intent is harmless—but the impact isn’t. It reinforces a damaging divide: us versus them.
One of the most useful reframes offered in the book is this:
“Let me do some research so I can give you the best answer possible.”
That simple shift preserves both agency and alignment. It demonstrates leadership, not just compliance. Because how you communicate uncertainty matters as much as how you communicate direction.
➡️ Connection: The Power of Micro-Empathy
Connection is built in small moments.
Peer support and strong coworker relationships don’t just happen by accident; they’re formed through small, intentional acts of what she calls micro-empathy.
A quick pause to ask, “How are you doing?” or “Is there anything I can help you figure out?” creates emotional safety and strengthens team culture over time.
These small moments carry the most weight during times of transition, like moving to a new unit or joining a new team. They signal care, build trust, and reinforce a sense of belonging.
Empathy doesn’t need a program. It needs to be practiced.
➡️ Collaboration Making Trust Visible
Collaboration is more than cooperation. It's how we physically move with each other, signaling "we're in this together."
In dispersed environments, it’s easy to become disconnected. We work on different floors, in different buildings, and start to operate in silos.
Her advice? Create intentional opportunities to bring people together, not just for meetings, but for meaningful moments. Celebrate a teammate’s new baby. Recognize personal milestones. Host a volunteer or social event. Let people see you and see each other.
These aren’t just “extras.” They’re physical expressions of collaboration that make trust real. When people feel seen, supported, and celebrated, they move more freely together, and toward what matters most.
What Trust Really Looks Like
Dr. Meese’s work does more than describe trust; it shows us how it’s built, moment by moment.
She takes trust out of the realm of theory and places it squarely in the everyday behaviors of leaders. The Human Margin turns complex, systemic insights into practical tools, words to say, actions to take, and habits to practice when the pressure is on.
She doesn’t just highlight what leaders should value. She reveals how those values come alive through language, visibility, and small, intentional choices that rebuild trust in real time.
What erodes trust often happens quietly. But so does what restores it.
These aren’t performance hacks. They’re behaviors are rooted in credibility, clarity, and care, the very things that protect our human margin when everything else is stretched thin.
Because leadership isn’t just measured in results. It’s felt in the space between people.
That’s where trust lives. And that’s where it starts.
Be in the Room for What’s Next
You don’t need more theory. You need clarity, language, and tools that work. This is where you’ll get them, straight from one of the most respected voices in organizational trust.
At our next Healthy Leader Expert Forum, you’ll get direct access to Dr. Katherine Meese, the thought leader behind The Human Margin. We’re going beyond the book to talk about the questions leaders must start asking themselves, before engagement drops, before burnout takes hold, and before trust disappears.
This is more than a conversation. It’s your chance to shape how you lead in the year ahead, rooted in data, grounded in trust, and guided by one of the top voices in the field.