Clear CIO Communication Strengthens Trust, Retention, And Execution Across Tech Teams

Lack of transparency is not a sign of careful leadership. It's a catalyst for anxiety. When technology leaders delay feedback, hide intent, or communicate inconsistently, employees default to constant second-guessing. That cognitive overload triggers a fight-or-flight response that shuts down problem-solving and accelerates attrition.

Mike Cartoscelli is the Head of IT (PCF-49) at Pepper Advantage, a global credit management and loan servicing company. With over 30 years in technology and a master's degree in business psychology, he leads a team of 40 across multiple countries. His background spans CIO roles at BNY Mellon and senior infrastructure positions at Salesforce. He believes trust is built or broken in the moments where leaders choose clarity over caution.

"At the end of the day, people don't follow a faceless set of goals or metrics. They follow a human being. If they don't see empathy and trust in that person, they won't stay," said Cartoscelli. The problem starts when leaders mistake caution for discretion. Cartoscelli argued that culture is built on visible values. When those values are unclear, employees fill the gap with anxiety.

• Living on the edge: When trust erodes, the fallout accelerates quickly. "If you lose trust in somebody, they’re gone. They have no faith in you," Cartoscelli explained. "You lose one person, it becomes a psychological death spiral. You lose everybody around you." In the absence of transparency, teams operate in a constant state of uncertainty. "They get very anxious. Do they mean this? Do they mean that? All these questions start firing in people’s heads," he added, describing an environment where mental energy shifts from doing the work to decoding leadership intent.

• Strategic filtering: The solution is not radical openness. Senior leaders are paid to absorb complexity and filter it appropriately. The skill lies in knowing when to protect teams from unnecessary panic and when to be blunt. "They pay us as leaders to understand the entire picture and boil down the view to each individual person that needs to know it. It's our responsibility to keep all that weight above us," he said.

• Blunt when it counts: Cartoscelli pointed to the experience closing an office and relocating or exiting his entire team as an example. "I sat them all down in a room. I said, in exactly 90 days from now, this is the path the company has taken. Here are the options," he recalled. "There was no 'you're amazing, you're great.' People hear rumors. Just give them the information and let them make their decision."

That same principle applies to incident response. When something breaks, panic from leadership floods teams with cortisol and shuts down clear thinking. Cartoscelli's team feedback from a recent 360 review made the impact explicit.

• Calm under pressure: Calm leadership creates the conditions for clear thinking when it matters most. "They said, thank you for not yelling at us when something goes wrong. You’re being very calm when things break. You let us take the time to fix it, then we look through how we can fix it going forward. But you’re not mad that something broke," Cartoscelli said, pointing to how emotional restraint preserves focus and keeps teams out of fight-or-flight mode during critical moments.

The economics reinforce the approach. Cartoscelli noted that the cost of replacing an employee has climbed from 50% of salary two decades ago to roughly 125% today. His team is approaching two years of zero attrition. The key to retention lies in intrinsic motivation: competence, accountability, and relatedness. People stay when they learn, own their work, and see how it connects to the business.

Cartoscelli's advice for leaders who want to start building trust is simple: get out of the boardroom. Conduct skip-level meetings. Ask junior staff what gets them excited. "We've gotten to where we've gotten based on education, experience, and training," Cartoscelli said. "But our training doesn't end. It has to accelerate the higher that we get."