By Alain Hunkins,Contributor

Copyright forbes

Trust isn’t declared. It’s demonstrated. When leaders back words with action, they send a clear message: trust is the real performance driver.

Most CEOs talk about company culture, but few truly build trust in leadership. Dr. Bill Kent built a company culture so strong that it won a national award from the American Psychological Association (APA).

At Team Horner, a $350 million employee-owned pool-supply company in Florida, culture isn’t a slogan in an Annual Report. Culture lives and breathes in daily experience. From on-site fitness classes to a wellness committee made up entirely of frontline staff and a quiet room for decompressing, at Team Horner, these aren’t perks, they’re signs of a company that truly cares. That commitment earned Team Horner the APA’s Psychologically Healthy Workplace award, placing it in the same conversation as American Express.

For Kent, CEO of Team Horner since 1972, and now in his eighties, wellness isn’t a checkbox: It’s about performance. “If employees are energized about coming to work, they’ll give their best,” he says.

When Culture Starts with Quiet Rooms

Long before ‘well-being’ and ‘wellness’ became HR buzzwords, Kent’s team launched Color Me Healthy, an initiative born from the bottom-up. Team Horner convened its first well-being committee that had only one rule: No managers allowed. The committee’s first request? A quiet room where employees could step away from stress. Kent didn’t overthink it: he approved the space immediately. That humble beginning sparked a broader culture shift. Today, Team Horner invests roughly $300,000–$400,000 annually in wellness, including gyms, personal trainers, and even scholarships for employees’ children.

While such perks sound great, it turns out that wellness alone doesn’t create a psychologically healthy workplace. It takes trust. At Team Horner, that trust was built on Kent’s decades-long practice of treating employees as partners in success.

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When Shared Fate Drives Trust and Resilience

Kent took on the top job at Team Horner over fifty years ago. From the start, he believed partnership had to be more than a slogan. “Profit-sharing started in the 1970s. The Employee Stock Ownership Program (ESOP) came in 2016,” he said. That shared ownership mindset became the backbone of the company’s culture, and the reason it survived when times got tough.

When the 2008 recession hit, Team Horner was already feeling the impact of the broader economic downturn. Between 2006 and 2008, headcount had dropped from roughly 400 to 290 employees, a level Kent described as the company’s “point of dysfunctionality.” Even after those painful cuts, the business was still losing close to $2 million a year. With survival on the line, Kent made the hardest decision of his career: a company-wide wage reduction.

“It directly impacted the lives of all our teammates and their families,” he recalls. “But not doing it would have endangered the company’s future.”

What happened next spoke volumes about the trust Kent had built. Instead of anger, employees responded with understanding and even gratitude. They knew the reasoning, the numbers, and the stakes. That shared transparency turned a moment of crisis into a moment of cohesion, setting the foundation for Team Horner’s recovery and long-term success.

This Isn’t Just Feel-Good: It’s Smart Business

Science backs Kent’s instincts. A landmark study from MIT Sloan tracked nearly one million U.S. Army soldiers over five years. Those with the highest well-being (happy, resilient, optimistic) earned significantly more performance awards than others. Well-being, the research concluded, predicts high performance.

Johnson & Johnson quantified the return of well-being: $250 million saved in healthcare costs between 2002 and 2008, with a staggering $2.71 back for every dollar spent on wellness programs. Meanwhile, a June 2025 Harvard Business Review analysis found that employees experiencing high stress file 2.5 times more health claims than their less-stressed peers. Mental health isn’t an HR problem. It’s a financial one.

On a global scale, the cost of burnout is staggering. Another HBR study found that 12 billion workdays are lost annually due to depression and anxiety. Deloitte’s Women @ Work 2025 report paints an equally sobering picture. Over one-third of women (36%) say their stress levels are higher than a year ago, and just over half (51%) rate their mental health as good or extremely good. Yet only 43% feel they receive adequate mental health support from their employer, and nearly 90% believe their manager would think negatively of them if they disclosed mental health challenges. Gallup estimates lost productivity from disengagement and stress at nearly $8.8 trillion globally each year. The math is clear: ignoring well-being erodes both morale and the bottom line.

At Team Horner, their investment in well-being has paid off in more than goodwill. Internal engagement surveys show higher satisfaction and lower turnover than industry averages, and leaders report fewer stress-related absences than a decade ago. This results in a culture that not only builds trust, but actively buffers against burnout.

Avoiding “Wellness Theater” Builds Trust in Leadership

Despite these truths, many programs miss the mark. HBR has warned that workplace wellness often fails when it’s superficial, tokenistic, or devoid of authentic leadership support. A mindfulness voucher or a health webinar can feel hollow if not grounded in a culture of psychological safety.

This is where Team Horner stands apart. Their wellness culture wasn’t tacked on. It was woven in. The wellness committee was employee-led. The quiet room came from a genuine request. Profit-sharing and ownership weren’t symbolic, but built together over decades. Kent’s leadership wasn’t performative. It was real.

A Playbook for Building Trust in Leadership

Kent’s story offers a practical roadmap for executives who want to embed well-being, not as a perk, but as part of performance infrastructure.

Ask employees first.

Get input directly from employees before designing solutions. Team Horner’s wellness journey began with one small question: What would help you manage stress at work? The quiet room that resulted became a cultural catalyst. Leaders often assume they know what employees need. The real power lies in asking, listening, and acting quickly on small, concrete requests.

Invest with intention.

Treat wellness as essential infrastructure, not a discretionary expense. Team Horner allocates roughly $300,000–$400,000 a year to initiatives ranging from on-site fitness to scholarships for employees’ children. That consistency signals seriousness. Research from McKinsey shows that well-being investments that are visible, sustained, and integrated into strategy tend to improve productivity, retain talent, reduce absenteeism, and strengthen employee engagement over time.

Align incentives.

Culture gains traction when people share in the upside. Team Horner’s profit-sharing plan and ESOP ownership structure give every employee a stake in results. Ownership creates accountability and pride, two forces that reinforce trust far more effectively than slogans. “When people think like owners, they act like owners,” Kent says. “That’s when culture starts to sustain itself.”

Crunch the numbers.

Well-being has a measurable ROI. Multiple studies consistently link lower stress to higher engagement, retention, and profitability. Leaders should track key indicators, such as turnover, absenteeism, and health claims the same way they track revenue and margin. Those metrics are the financials of culture. As Kent puts it, “You can’t manage what you don’t measure. If you believe people are your greatest asset, start treating their well-being like one.”

Lead authentically.

Employees see through “wellness theater.” Programs succeed only when leaders model the behaviors they promote, such as taking time off, setting boundaries, and showing up with empathy. Kent’s decades-long commitment wasn’t performative; it was personal. His consistency built credibility, and that credibility built trust. To build trust in leadership long term, consistency matters more than slogans.

Start Simple

When asked, “If you could give on piece of advice to any leader who wants to create a psychologically heathy workplace, what would it be?” Kent’s response was as profound as it was simple: “Talk to your employees and ask how it feels to work here. That’s always the first step.”

The APA award validated Team Horner’s cultural investment. More meaningful, though, is the loyalty, energy, and resilience they’ve built. In a world where burnout and disengagement are less the exception than the norm, Kent’s story is a powerful reminder: Taking care of your people isn’t just kind. It’s smart. It’s how trust in leadership gets built.

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