The Global ESGT Megatrends 2025-2026 | #2 - Leadership Trust Recession
· 10 min read
This article is part of a seven-piece series on the Global ESGT Megatrends 2025-2026. You can find the first piece in the series here.
In this third of our seven-part series examining the most important Global ESGT Megatrends leaders should consider for governance, strategy, and decision-making over the coming year, we focus on a critically important piece of the global puzzle – the need for good to great leaders and institutional leadership to exist in all sectors and the concomitant need for trust by key stakeholders – regardless of sector - locally, nationally, internationally and virtually.
We view “Leadership Trust Recession” first from a a big picture standpoint and then through several lenses. These include the fact that we rely on our leaders to exhibit integrity, avoid conflicts of interest and corruption and instead we are seeing more of it, even exponentially. We rely on our leaders to provide reliable resources, information and data and instead we are seeing a disinformation dystopia rising. We are seeing technology replace or affect humans and our cultures dramatically – leaders have a key role to play in managing the tech transition, protecting against the dehumanization of culture and work. Finally, leaders must set the tone from the top on keeping stakeholders safe and secure in a world of increasing and converging virtual and kinetic dangers and harms.
And, much of the time, leaders do not seem to know what to do, hence the continuing deterioration of stakeholder trust.
For years, even a couple of decades, starting perhaps at the beginning of this century, a number of gauges of leadership and/or institutional trust – as well as organizational reputation – have shown a steady and sometimes dramatic decline of stakeholder trust in leaders and institutions, on the one hand, and the erosion of organizational reputations, on the other.
I asked ChatGPT to combine information from several annual surveys for the past decade that track various aspects of leadership trust. These surveys included the OECD Trust in Public Institutions Survey, Gallup Trust in Public Institutions (Gallup World Poll), the Edelman Trust Barometer (which tracks four sectors) and the PwC Trust in Business Survey. Below is the compound graphic of these trend lines showing the relative decline across the board for leadership and/or institutional trust.
This figure reveals three main developments:
• Though trust in government and media were the lowest in 2015 (of the 5 categories tracked in this graphic) at around 40% and 45% respectively, both sectors have plunged in stakeholder trust by 2025 landing at around 28% and 26% respectively.
• The highest scorer throughout the decade – from 2015 to 2025 – was trust in “my employer” which fluctuated back and forth between 60-65% landing at 60% this year.
• Both NGOs and business were close in stakeholder trust during this decade but both declined substantially as well – NGOs from about 50% to 42% and business from about 52% to 45% in 2025.
This means that of the five categories tracked in this compound graphic only one – my employer – exhibits a degree of trust (60%) from stakeholders while all the others are under-water (below 50%).
The bottom line on all this is that global stakeholders do not have strong or enduring feelings of trust or faith in their leaders and institutions across all sectors. However, and critically important to our collective wellbeing as global citizens, is the downright freefall in trust in both government and media worldwide. Considering that each of these sectors is supposed to be, on the one hand, a purveyor of laws, regulations, security, protections and guardrails, and on the other hand, a disseminator of quality, correct and provable information and data as well as accountability, these twin deep declines in trust in government and media worldwide are alarming to say the least. Let’s now turn to some possible explanations for these declines.
In its 2025 Trust Barometer, Edelman underscored that the 2024 elections “failed to improve trust” - that in the biggest year for voting in world history with more than half of the global population (4 billion) living in countries with elections political leaders generally failed to enhance trust. While this is a very broad statement and details may be different on the ground, this is an indictment of politics as usual in democracies or quasi-democracies. See graphic below.
Freedom House which tracks the health of democracy worldwide, has found as well that over the past 19 years that there has been a decline in global freedom (see Figure below). What this means is that fewer countries have experienced increases in their political and other freedoms while more have experienced an increase in human rights violations, and the curtailment of individual, press and association rights.
The convergence of political distrust and the decline of democracies with another critical trend – the rise of the techno-plutocrats within democracies – and their anointed leaders (Trump and Musk come to mind) is a concerning development, Combine this development with the rise of a new wild west of financial activity – crypto – and you have yourself the potential for vast fraud, abuse and corruption as we are seeing unfold in the United States under Trump. This dangerous combination is revealing a gigantic and uncontrollable new source of corruption across borders. And, for now, all this is happening in a frontier-less sea of impunity.
Another gauge of leadership trust – specifically in the realm of business - can be seen through the company reputation and brand lens. The Axios Harris Poll 100 is a trusted annual survey ranking stakeholder trust in company brands.
A look at the top ten and bottom ten ranked 100 companies for 2025 reveals an intriguing question: Do the companies in the top ten have more trustworthy leaders than the companies in the bottom ten? I would respond by saying that whether there is correlation or causation (I tend to think there’s a little bit of both), seeing the likes of Patagonia, Microsoft, Costco, Nvidia and Apple in the top ten, and the likes of UnitedHealthcare Group, Fox Corporation, Tesla, Meta, X and the Trump Organization on the bottom and considering who their leaders are may provide some clues.
One of the core reasons for the trust deficit and continuing decline is another massive force that has been rising over the past decade – misinformation and disinformation. As the World Economic Forum Global Risks Report for 2025 determined in their top 10 2-year outlook on global strategic risks – misinformation and disinformation ranked #1 in their top concerns above and beyond all other environmental, geopolitical, technological, economic and societal risks. See Table below.
The rise of political technology - first attributed to the Russians but now pervasive throughout various forms of regime and as a weapon of information war – where information is manipulated, created and distorted for political objectives, has become a serious threat to transparency especially in democracies. Here’s an article I recently wrote on the subject.
Leaders are not doing enough to look after the virtual security of humans. We are all experiencing various degrees of powerlessness, being overwhelmed by the quantity and quality (or lack thereof) of information, by the takeover of AI and GenAI of so much including jobs most visibly in the arts and culture but also in entry level and white collar jobs. Many are overwhelmed and don’t feel that their leaders are doing enough to understand and guardrail these changes to protect stakeholders from serious downsides. This is yet another brick in the wall of leadership distrust.
For example, among the tech leaders exhibiting some humanity about these issues is Dario Amodei, the founder and head of Anthropic, one of the leading GenAI companies. While he acknowledges that his company is one of the companies leading the charge on bleeding edge AI and tech development, he is also warning publicly about downsides – both from a job disruption standpoint and from a technology dangers standpoint. He is also advocating from AI regulation as opposed to many of his peers. Because of his public stance on these issues, leaders like Amodei engender trust, while leaders like Musk and Zuckerberg who don’t seem think twice or care about the human and social consequences of their actions, don’t.
Leaders – in government, business and society - are supposed to protect their stakeholders from safety and security downsides and harms. And stakeholders expect that their workplaces will be safe, their data will be protected and their communities won’t be damaged.
The tenor and conduct of virtual and physical warfare and violence is morphing and converging dramatically. I need only refer to the game changing attack by Ukraine on Jun e 1, 2025, deep within Russia eliminating many of their strategic air fighting capacity as far as Siberia through an ingenious combination of virtual and physical daring do - combining the best of the virtual, cyber and AI worlds with the stealthiest of kinetic warfare and spy craft.
While not every leader must deal with this type of frontline warfare, there’s been enough happening on the cyber front for years for all leaders worldwide to be aware that they have a professional and institutional responsibility for understanding their threat surface and protections. With GenAI tools already turbocharging cyber insecurity worldwide and equipping attackers with asymmetric power (and quantum not so far away) everything about cyber insecurity – turbocharging what bad actors, criminal gangs and nation states can do to all of us, trust in our leaders will continue to decline if they don’t pay close attention to stakeholder and crown jewel asset protection.
How do we individually and collectively as leaders combat the “Leadership Trust Recession” – proactively and painstakingly in every way that we are able to given our role and position. Below are several practical ideas.
Prioritize Integrity and Emotional Intelligence for Leadership Selection. Boards, management and other responsible oversight bodies should do proper in-depth due diligence and prioritize (1) competence/expertise, (2) finances, tax returns, (3) reputation, (4) psychological profile. The latter is critical because sociopaths and similar non-emotionally intelligent people should not be put in positions of power.
Understand your Critical Stakeholders and Cater to Them and Their Needs. Study, engage and solicit key stakeholder views on critical issues, understand their pain points and their desires whether they are employees, customers, partners, the regulators, or the media.
Create Trustworthy Information Ecosystems, Cultures and Roadmaps. Leaders are in a unique position to foster the use and deployment of quality data and it’s their responsibility to do so. This includes building a culture of trust on how tech - AI, GenAI, other relevant technologies - may affect, replace or augment existing jobs, and change the skills and jobs mix forever. Trust begins with transparency about the impact of tech on jobs. Share your well-considered thoughts.
Understand and Provide Safety and Security. Leaders must understand the threat surface for virtual and physical dangers to their stakeholders (and their convergence) and must devote the proper time and resources for budget and strategy to deal with these constantly morphing and potentially existential threats. Those who do will have a much better chance at longterm resilience, sustainability, survival and success.
This article is part of a seven-piece series on the Global ESGT Megatrends 2025–2026. You can explore all parts of the series, including the next piece, Megatrend #3 – “Exponential Technology Unfettered”.
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