ADP CEO Maria Black: Trust in Leadership Drives 41% Higher Engagement

By Olivia Hart

Employees who trust their CEO and senior leaders are 41% more likely to be engaged at work, according to ADP CEO Maria Black. The number climbs to 60% when workers trust the colleagues around them. Black presented the figures at Fortune's Most Powerful Women Summit in California this week, in conversation with Fortune executive editorial director Diane Brady.

What does the data actually say?

"Trust is a direct corollary to engagement," said Black. "So if we want to drive engagement, productivity, and a vibrant world of work that, candidly, I want to be in and I want my children to grow up working, we have to focus there."

The payroll giant's research arm has produced other figures that sharpen the stakes:

• Only 30% of employees are overly engaged at work, Black said.
• For every 1% drop in full engagement, the likelihood of voluntary attrition rises by 45%, according to ADP's prior research.
• Trust in senior leadership raises engagement likelihood by 41%; trust in immediate colleagues raises it by 60%.

ADP's data shifts the burden. Engagement is often treated as a sentiment employees bring — or fail to bring — to their jobs. Black's numbers imply it depends heavily on whether workers believe in the people leading them, placing responsibility on managers and C-suites. In plain terms: if engagement is low, the data points up the org chart, not down.

A caveat is warranted. These are correlations from ADP's own research, not causal proof, and the company sells human capital services built on engagement diagnostics. That does not invalidate the findings, but readers should weigh the messenger.

Why is trust eroding?

Black said the current moment is jam-packed with reasons not to trust: echo chambers, firehoses of information, and the difficulty of discerning what is real and what is AI-generated. All of it chips away at trust, she told Brady.

Her answer as a leader is direct contact. Black said she gets boots on the ground and holds listening posts. She arrived in California after a trip to Las Vegas, where she spoke with 1,000 company leaders, and a Florida visit where she talked with employees over the "universal love language of ice cream."

"The only way to keep current is to be on the ground and be trusted," said Black.

Notably, she did not offer structural fixes — no policy proposals, no metrics targets. The prescription is presence, which is easy to state and harder to scale across 140 countries.

Who is Maria Black?

Black joined ADP in 1996 as a sales associate and rose to become president and CEO in 2023. She is the seventh CEO in the company's history and says she has a ground-level view from growing up in the business.

ADP oversees payroll and human capital for more than 1 million clients across 140 countries, giving it an unusually broad data set on workplace behavior.

What about AI and reskilling?

Black flagged upskilling and reskilling as the other pressing obligation facing companies. She said the new AI era will play out through human agency — how people actually choose, or don't choose, to engage with AI tools.

"We know that, generally speaking, workers in today's workplace don't feel as though their employer has prepared them properly," said Black.

She argued AI can expand workers' expertise beyond their current domain and, in turn, expand their ability to increase their income as they take on new tasks. But she paired the promise with a warning.

"But we have to shepherd them there," said Black. "I think that's the other part that sometimes we don't spend enough time on."

The gap she identifies is concrete: most workers feel unprepared by their employers for an AI-driven workplace, and the head of one of the world's largest HR data companies says closing that gap — through deliberate shepherding, not tool deployment alone — is where leadership attention is still thin.