Trust Recession
Kirryn Zerna CSP Published July 2026
These school holidays I found myself at the movies with my little people, watching the live-action Moana — and yes, spoiler alert: it’s not that different from the animated version.
It’s a story of adventure. What should have been a happy island life is interrupted when a disease of darkness is discovered creeping through their home: a slow and silent decay that spreads through the harvest and eventually empties the fishing nets. Why the decay? Because the heart has been stolen. What heart? Stolen by whom, you ask? The heart, a small glowing stone that holds the power of life itself, was stolen by the demi-god Maui (he of the very large pecs), and for a thousand years both the heart and the demi-god have been missing. No one has given it a thought… until the Ocean, and one very insightful Grandma, show Moana that she is the answer to retrieving it.
But what’s interesting from a work perspective is that the decay had been happening for years, in tiny moments — one brown leaf on a coconut tree, one less fish in the harbour — and no one realised how bad it was until the cumulative effect hit.
I couldn’t stop thinking that this is exactly how trust erodes at work.
A recession nobody is measuring
We all know what an economic recession is: a significant, widespread downturn in economic activity — not one bad day, but a sustained decline, months in the making, brought about by a series of events.
What I’m seeing inside organisations right now runs parallel to it. A trust recession is a widespread, prolonged downturn in confidence — in leaders, brands and institutions — eroded not by one scandal but by small unkept promises accumulating over time.
And here’s what strikes me most at this time of year: everyone is auditing budgets for the new financial year, but no one is auditing trust.
What it looks like from the inside
A trust recession never announces itself, because like the island, it decays in small moments.
It’s the leader who doesn’t consistently do what they said they’d do — a commitment here and a follow-up there forgotten, overlooked, rescheduled.
It’s the team thinned by AI-related restructures, heads down with more work and fewer people, learning a new technology on the side while nobody names the strain.
It’s the micro-tribes forming inside the business — pockets of sameness pulling away from difference, the lines of insularity deepening one lunch table at a time.
And it’s the customer you speak with less and less while transacting with more and more, the small moments of rapport skipped until the relationship grows a little thinner every quarter, and a little more willing to walk.
One brown leaf becomes a fallen crop, and then the nets come up empty — and now acquiring a new customer costs more than keeping the one you just lost, because sceptical buyers need more proof, more touchpoints and more convincing before they’ll commit.
Why don’t employees trust their leaders?
Because trust erodes in small moments, not scandals — a commitment forgotten here, a follow-up rescheduled there — until the decline is months in the making before anyone names it. The 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer found “my employer” is the most trusted institution in people’s lives, trusted by 78% of employees globally; yet in December 2025, Harvard Business Review reported that most employees don’t trust their leaders. That gap is the trust recession made visible.
Here’s the curious part. Those two findings aren’t measuring the same thing. Edelman’s is about the organisation — ahead of business, NGOs, the media and government, the only institution people still comfortably trust. HBR’s is about the people running it. Which means employees are handing their organisations a level of trust they extend to nothing else in their world — and watching the leaders inside them leak it, one small moment at a time.
And it leaves a question worth sitting with: your people trust your organisation more than they trust almost anything else — so are you leading like the most trusted institution in their life?
Trust is not one thing
Part of why trust erodes unnoticed is that we talk about it as if it were a single substance, when it isn’t.
Trust has three layers — personal, public and relational — and most leaders only manage one of them.
Personal trust asks: can I rely on you? Public trust asks: what story do people believe about us? And relational trust asks: can we stay connected when it gets tense? Most leaders work hard on the first and assume the other two will follow, and they don’t. (I’ll unpack all three layers — and where yours is probably thinnest — in the next essay.)
The assumption worth retiring
We say “trust takes time,” as though time itself does the building. But trust takes courage and kept micro-promises; time just accumulates the evidence.
That’s confronting when trust is falling, because it means the decline was never inevitable. But it’s freeing when you want to rebuild, because it means recovery doesn’t require a decade — it requires a decision, repeated.
Which brings me back to the island. It wasn’t healed by a taskforce, a restructure or a values refresh; it was healed because one person made one move to restore the heart (through an epic quest, no less).
Through my work with The Connect Effect, this is what I see over and over: the invisible human dynamics — the mask lowered so a real conversation can finally happen, the second question asked instead of the quick assumption, the small wow moment that makes a customer encounter (or the missed one that quietly undoes it), the rhythm that tells a team it’s safe here without anyone saying the words — are the balance sheet no CFO can see. And they compound in a sequence: Trust → Tribe → Thrive. Trusted relationships build loyal tribes, and loyal tribes create the conditions where people and results thrive.
It always starts with trust — and trust always starts with one human move.
So here’s the tiny question
Your FY27 plan has a revenue line, a cost line and a headcount line. Where’s the trust line?
If you want to know where yours stands, I’ve put together The Trust Audit — a simple scorecard across the three layers of trust, rating where you think you are against where your people would say you are. The gap is the work.
And if this is the year your leadership team or sales conference makes trust the strategy — becoming the first person clients ask for — explore working with Kirryn →
This essay is part of One Human Move, where the Trust series continues — subscribe on Substack. It belongs to the Trust movement of The Connect Effect: Trust → Tribe → Thrive.
Kirryn Zerna CSP is a keynote speaker and author on trust, connection and the invisible human dynamics that shape performance. She works with leadership teams and conferences across Australia. About Kirryn →