Good news abounds, or so the world’s media would have us believe. Green shoots everywhere and entire economies lumbering out of recession like gigantic stegosaurs freeing themselves from the clutches of a Jurassic tar pit. Let us all pray that the green is from new buds of growth and not just the early bloom of algae on the cesspit of our financial infrastructure.

You may have gathered that I’m more than a little cynical of the triumphal fanfare that three giant economies are “officially” out of recession, after a mere quarter of miniscule growth. I also lack trust and confidence in the ability of our leaders, globally, to manage us out of it without even more erosion. Especially after the press and government barrage earlier this year that attempted to gloom us into a psychological recession, leaving us in fear that our jobs, our houses and our savings would be subsumed into repaying the debts of the greedy kleptocrats.

This dissonance of message to real experience has left me confused and concerned for both my future and the future of those I care about. It’s going to take tremendous will and some very tangible examples before I take any prognostication at anything more than passing face value. Trust has taken a hammering and its more than just on the surface. It’s deep-seated and embedded in the common psyche.

I remember sitting on a lovely paved deck watching the sun go down on a balmy Greek evening when all of a sudden I noticed the birds had taken flight and within seconds an earthquake shook the entire floor and surrounding buildings. I was left with an almost unearthly feeling of disquiet deep in the very essence of my being, engineered, no doubt, by this sudden lack of safety in the formerly rock solid foundation of the earth. No more could it just be taken for granted and the dissonance created probably lives with me to this day, albeit in a subtle way.

Yes, I am getting to a point soonish…

This cognitive dissonance, this uncomfortable feeling engendered by the disconnection between what’s happening and what you’d imagined to be true from past experience is a very real issue for all management going forward. Mostly, we’re not even aware of it at a conscious level because it’s invisible, insidious and roots deep.

Have you, as an IT leader, taken your department through a series of redundancies in response to the global economic meltdown? If you have then chances are the logical inconsistency of working hard and putting their all into building their IT career with their chosen employer (you) and seeing colleagues fall by the wayside, quite blamelessly, in the attrition of redundancy has probably left your staff feeling fearful and unstable. Unconsciously discomforted and prone to all the behaviours you have laboured so hard to eradicate over the years, as they struggle to come to terms with the new reality.

Is the new leaner IT group faster to turn things round or slower because a climate of distrust has developed? Are you seeing more politics, more rivalry and less transparency between teams than you did before - and I’m not just talking about IT here. Distrust is infectious. And we don’t need sluggish right now, we don’t need more politics and we certainly don’t need an endless negative debate on intent, competence or values.
 
We need to build trust back up again, just as we’ve tried to build the trust between front office and back office over the years. We need speed to market in our ultra-competitive and upside-down world and we won’t achieve that with friction, internecine rivalries and a laager mentality.
 
It is up to us all from the very top to the very bottom to eliminate the “punishers” in our operant conditioning and beget the reinforcing and positive stimuli that will rebuild trust and the behaviours for growth as we prepare for the recovery.
 
It’s worth remembering in our linear and metrics-obsessed world that, as Einstein said: “Everything that can be counted does not necessarily count; everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted."