Trust Across America-Trust Around the World™

Taken from this week’s “Rebuilding Trust” headlines…

Facebook promises to rebuild trust via a “feel good” marketing campaign.

Boeing hints that perhaps a name change is (not) in order. There’s been “no discussion” of a name change, Johndroe said, including dropping “Max” and referring to the jet family by product numbers such as 737-8.

Danske Bank picks a new CEO and states, without details “We have a big task ahead of us in continuing to rebuild trust,” Danske Bank Chairman Karsten Dybvad said in a statement.

Who is doling out all this misdirected advice? And what does rebuilding trust even mean?

Ad campaigns, name changes and new CEOs are not the solution. Trust is internal and interpersonal, and is built from the inside out. It is an intentional and holistic business strategy that is practiced and reinforced daily starting at the very top and impacting every stakeholder group. As we have seen with almost every corporate crisis in the past, putting a Band-Aid on the elephant in the room doesn’t heal the wound. It just covers it up.

And why do these business leaders, and their respective “advisors” believe that trust was present in the past and now needs to be rebuilt? When was the last time trust building was a proactive agenda item at the Board level or in the C-Suite in any of these organizations? Until a deliberate acknowledgement is made that “perception of trust” is no replacement for trust itself, the “headlines” will repeat themselves, and the proposed solutions will not only be very costly, but ultimately lead nowhere. The crisis will blow over and it will be “business as usual.” No need to utter the “T” word again.

For authentic leaders who want to build trust from the inside out, please visit our website and read more about our new diagnostic, AIM Towards Trust.

Copyright 2019, Next Decade, Inc.

When leaders bust trust, employees play all sorts of games, and I don’t mean the video or tennis variety.

In my first post-college job, the “leaders” were intolerable jerks.

They defaulted into leadership by being company founders. One couldn’t keep his eyes (or his hands) to himself, while the other was insecure, abusive and lazy. Both thought nothing of lying to employees or clients. They also believed that if they threw enough money at their employees, they would earn their loyalty and respect. These two were a good match until one outsmarted the other and the partnership dissolved.

The office manager (also the head of HR and everything else) took care of all the “soft stuff.”

The problem was she also lacked leadership skills. She played favorites, made dumb rules and ultimately had no say in the owner’s decisions.

“Game playing” became the office norm. Among the games:

1. Four day weekends
2. The hour-long lunch break was always taken, plus a few more
3. The water cooler was the most popular gathering spot
4. Friday couldn’t come fast enough
5. 9AM turned into 9:30 and 4:30 became the new 5PM
6. Minimal effort was exerted. Through observation, I once calculated that the average employee spent less than 3 hours each day productively working.
7. Many employees treated their clients the same way they were treated
8. Turnover was very high and people quit without notice
9. Employees spent hours on personal phone calls
10. Loyalty was nonexistent, and employees often left their jobs to work for clients (including me.)

Any of the above sound familiar? What, other than more regulation, has changed in workplaces over the past 20 years?

Employees take their cues from their leader. Leaders who want to avoid game playing in their organization must not only be trustworthy but also make elevating internal trust their first priority.

For more information on elevating trust in your team or organization please visit our website and read more about our diagnostic AIM Towards Trust, now being used in companies worldwide.

For inquiries contact:

Barbara Brooks Kimmel, CEO and Cofounder

barbara@trustacrossamerica.com

Copyright 2019, Next Decade, Inc.

Leaders should never take trust seriously.

After all, trust is just one of those “soft skills” that needs no particular attention, especially from leadership. For your next corporate event, instruct your communications department to hire a stand up comic to cover that “stuff” and provide the script in advance. Make sure it’s “compliance approved” and that your Board members attend.

1. Never trust a tree. They are always shady.
2. My trust issues started when my Mom said “come here, I’m not gonna hit you!”
3. Raisin cookies that look like chocolate chip cookies are the main reason I have trust issues.
4. Never trust an atom. They make up everything.
5. I got trust issues because people got lying issues.
6. It’s funny how trust disappears when you are looking for the TV remote. Me: “Do you have the remote?” Him: “No.” Me: “Stand up.”
7. People say I have trust issues. I don’t believe them.
8. Watch who you trust. Even your teeth bite your tongue now and then.
9. I don’t trust these stairs. They are always up to something.
10. I am pretty sure the definition of trust is giving your friend your phone without clearing the history.

I take no credit for any of these one-liners. I’m way too serious about trust! Our new diagnostic AIM Towards Trust doesn’t deliver any jokes. Instead, it provides a baseline measurement from which to improve trust in any team or organization. It’s designed for trustworthy leaders who embrace trust as an intentional business strategy, not a joke.

Contact us for more information: barbara@trustacrossamerica.com

Copyright 2019, Next Decade, Inc.

What gets measured gets managed – Peter Drucker

In preparation for the first anniversary of Tap Into Trust, we have been running an anonymous one question/one minute survey to identify the primary causes of low trust in organizations. The results may surprise you and provide insight into what needs fixing.

Which of these 12 trust principles do you consider the weakest in your organization?

Transparency? Integrity? Respect? None of those would be correct.

• Truth
• Accountability
• Purpose
• Integrity
• Notice
• Talent
• Openness
• Transparency
• Respect
• Understanding
• Safety
• Tracking

Take the survey and find out.

Remember, You can’t manage what you haven’t measured.

Trust is always internal and must be built from the inside out. Everything else is simply “perception of trust.”

Learn how you can bring this trust diagnostic into your team or organization.

For more information contact:

Barbara Brooks Kimmel, CEO and Cofounder Trust Across America-Trust Around the World barbara@trustacrossamerica.com

Copyright 2019, Next Decade, Inc.

Trust Across America has been writing about Wells Fargo and making public suggestions to leadership on how to fix the Bank’s low trust since 2016, apparently to no avail.

The recent “trust building” communications “horse and pony” show was predictably a huge and expensive fail.  Anyone with even a basic understanding of organizational trust knows that trust is internal and must be built from the inside out, not through a PR campaign. So now the sudden resignation of the current CEO comes as no surprise to us, nor does the appointment of the “interim” CEO who “by chance” happens to be a lawyer.

Over the weekend we asked members of our cross functional Trust Council to weigh in on the actions required to right what appears to be a sinking ship. We appreciate the thoughts of our Council members who took the time to weigh in.

Acknowledge trust as a hard asset: Do not assume that trust is a “soft skill” and do not attempt a fix via exclusive input from legal and compliance. Form a cross-silo team to attack low trust with the support of the “right” Board members, possibly necessitating some “reshuffling” at the highest level. In other words, clean house.

Make trust building the first priority: A foundation of trust must be built before culture can be fixed. 

Be accountable: Embrace responsibility and accountability and avoid the deadly Watergate sin of tip-toeing up to the line but not crossing it, perpetuating the sense of cover-up. You’ve got to own it—and then some.

Measure what matters: Assess the current level of stakeholder trust and use this baseline to begin attacking the weaknesses. What can be measured can be managed.

Practice and reinforce values: Saying or printing them is mere cant. You’ve got to propagandize them, talk about them in application to specific instances, hold leaders accountable for a quota of such applications.

Model humility: Place truth-telling ahead of personal or professional gain.

Be transparent: Reject hidden agendas and be transparent wherever and whenever possible.

Hire and fire: Nothing builds trust faster than firing and hiring people. Hire/fire/promote on visible demonstrations of the bank’s values. Cull out the middle managers who still think they can get away with hiding unethical behaviors. 

Erase fear: Drive out fear and ensure every voice is heard and every trust breach is fully investigated. “The absence of fear is the incubator of trust.” Reward moral character and reinforce candor.

Track performance:  Define and scorecard performance against both values and value.

Perhaps the most difficult question came yesterday when someone asked me “Who would want the job of CEO?” That’s a tough one. Hiring another banker may not even be the best solution as finance is not generally considered an industry to exhibit high trust behavior. Regardless, the hope is that whoever the brave soul is who steps in to take the position begins their tenure by first acknowledging that trust is internal and must be elevated from the inside out. Only then can the required culture work begin.

PS- CNN just (attempted to) weigh in on how the bank can end the crisis. They may want to go back to the drawing board and craft a followup article.

For more information and tools to elevate trust, head over to our website at www.trustacrossamerica.com

Copyright 2019 Next Decade, Inc.

In the words of Abraham Lincoln…. You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.

The same applies to trust. These commonly taken shortcuts to trust may fool some of your stakeholders, but won’t fool them all, and over time they may come back to haunt you.

• Narrowly defining trust in a way that suits the trustee. Brand loyalty, check the box sustainability, philanthropy, “feel good” CSR, blockchain solutions and data security are not trust. Neither are reputation, loyalty or transparency.
• Delegating trust to a motivational speaker instead of a subject matter expert.
• Paying for a “great workplace” award.
• Beefing up the legal and compliance staff.
• Making trust a PR campaign based on “talk” rather than action.

Do we really need more proof that shortcuts to elevating workplace trust do not work?

Take a look at the following data:

Trust within an organization is essential to its success. But “Global Generations 3.0” research, released by Ernst & Young, showed trust isn’t a given. The survey of nearly 10,000 workers ages 19 to 68 in eight countries revealed that just 46% of employees placed “a great deal of trust” in their employer, and only 49% placed “a great deal of trust” in their manager or colleagues. June 2016

According to a new global study by BBMG and GlobeScan, “Brand Purpose in Divided Times,” net trust in global companies to act in the best interest of society is negative (-2). And for the first time since 2009, more consumers say they have punished companies for their behavior (28%) rather than rewarded them (26%), and the number of those who are punishing brands is up by 9 percentage points since 2013.

According to 2018 polling by the Public Affairs Council, only 7 percent of Americans believe that major company CEOs have high ethical standards, and only 9 percent have a very favorable opinion of major companies. Only 42 percent of Americans trust major companies to behave ethically, down from 47 percent last year.

Gallup’s 2017 reports: A highly engaged workforce means the difference between a company that outperforms its competitors and one that fails to grow. And according to their recent State of the Global Workplace report, 85% of employees are not engaged or actively disengaged at work. The economic consequences of this global “norm” are approximately $7 trillion in lost productivity. Eighteen percent are actively disengaged (up from 2015) in their work and workplace, while 67% are “not engaged.

Building a “principled culture” of high trust and ethics is not difficult. It simply requires leadership buy-in, and a bit of vulnerability. High priced quick fixes might fool some of the people in the short-term, but in the long-term sustainable businesses are built on trust from the inside out, not the outside in.

In our recently launched one minute (free and totally anonymous) diagnostic survey called “Building Trust One Principle at a Time,” we ask which of twelve universal trust principles (TAP) are weakest in your organization. At the end, respondents will see how their workplace compares to all others. Bringing this tool “in house” will provide enlightened leaders, teams and organizations with a baseline trust “temperature” from which to build long-term business health. Just tap on the Take our Quiz button or go direct to the Survey.

If trust is the “new currency,” as some have recently claimed, the challenge will be to “get it right” by avoiding the shortcuts and embracing the solutions.

Barbara Brooks Kimmel is an award-winning communications executive and the CEO and Cofounder of Trust Across America-Trust Around the World whose mission is to help organizations build trust. Barbara has consulted with many Fortune 500 CEOs and their firms, and also runs the world’s largest global Trust Alliance . She is  the editor of the award-winning TRUST INC. book series and TRUST! Magazine.  Barbara holds a BA in International Affairs and an MBA.

Copyright 2019, Next Decade, Inc.

The trust “talk” is increasing in frequency and volume, and that’s a good thing. Or is it?

At least leaders are thinking about it. Yet when it comes to defining trust, those same people are either getting stuck (at best) or using the word “trust” as a placeholder (at worst.) When trust is misdefined or misidentified, it not only gets diluted, but stakeholder cynicism quickly builds.  If you choose to talk it, keep in mind that trust takes many forms, each with it own distinct definition. Make sure you are using the right one!

Trust:  (the noun)

Trust: (the verb)

Trustor: (noun)

Trustee: (noun)

Trustworthy: (adjective)

Trusting: (gerund)

Propensity to trust

For those who want (or need) a refresher course, Charlie Green and I wrote this article, complete with definitions (and much more,) almost 3 years ago. And if you want to see how you are doing in the “trust department,” we offer this brand new one-minute quiz. How are you defining trust and how does your organization compare to others?

Copyright 2019, Next Decade, Inc.

Building Trust One Principle at a Time

This past week the World Economic Forum held its annual meeting at Davos and the global elite were buzzing like bees around the word “trust.” 

Overlapping was another meeting being held in a remote corner of NJ (of all places), perhaps because the “polar vortex” was about to ground the attendees’ private jets. This gathering was called “Sovad so Good” or “Sovad” for short.)

For those unfamiliar with the annual Davos event, it’s by “invitation only,” and even those who secure an invite might not be able to afford the cost of admission. Most badges require a membership to the World Economic Forum, which costs somewhere between $60,000 and $600,000, plus an additional fee of more than $27,000 per person to get into the conference. (CNBC, January 25, 2019)

Worth noting: Of the 3000 attendees almost 800 were Americans and 22% were women, up from 21% last year! Less than 5% of S&P 500 CEOs are women—that’s just 24 companies. We can’t know how many of those 24 were invited to the event in Davos, but the official attendance list includes four of their names: Heather Bresch, CEO of Mylan N.V.; Adena Friedman, CEO of  Nasdaq Inc.;  Vicki Hollub, CEO of Occidental Petroleum Corp.; and Ginni Rometty, CEO of IBM. Quartz, January 21, 2019

Sovad (the other Davos) didn’t include the high price tag (or any admission fee for that matter), nor the “A” list of celebrities like Matt Damon or Will.i.am, and side deals were not being done off stage, probably because there was no stage. (Over 50% of the SOVAD group is women.) No large “trust signs” were erected at the entrance to our gathering like the one leading up to Davos. It was just too darn cold for anyone to want to climb a ladder, especially those in skirts.

CNN reported, ‘Trust is the new buzzword at Davos,” and as Dana Carvey “The Church Lady” liked to say on SNL, “Well isn’t that special.” (Dana and I lived together at one time but that’s a topic for another post.) So what was all the Davos “buzz” on trust about? These were the trust “themes:”

1. Rebuilding trust (think Facebook.) Sheryl Sandberg was the trust “expert” on this subject.
2. Trust and technology (digital security, AI, blockchain, etc.)
3. Trust and innovation
4. Trust and sustainability
5. Trust and CEOs “taking stands.”

To the attendees at Davos these are certainly important revenue generating discussions to be having. But do they actually get to the heart of trust, or even move the needle slightly to elevate societal trust? That’s a solid “No.”  Here’s why.

It seems only one trust conversation was missing at Davos, and probably the most important one: How do we move our societal institutions from trust buzz to trust action? And that was the ONLY conversation at Sovad.

So while the fine food and drink flowed, and the planes stayed warm on the tarmac in Switzerland, the Sovad attendees arrived by auto and took the following action over a burger and a beer:

With no revenue generating agenda, we created 12 universal principles for elevating trust and began asking those who didn’t travel to Europe, how that “trust thing” is working in their organization. After all, isn’t that where trust starts (and ends)? Apparently, we struck a chord as over 35,000 unassuming folks from around the world have joined the conversation.

Will you take our brand new (one question/one minute) survey? Find out how your organization compares to others.

Note: Some believe that this year’s gathering was a disappointment on many fronts. Perhaps the word “trust” was simply a placeholder until a “real” topic can be identified for 2020. Kenneth Rogoff, the Harvard economist, summed it up: “This is the flattest Davos I can remember. Normally, there is a star country or a star industry that everybody is talking about. But this year, there is nothing.”

Could it be that the “nothing” has “something” to do with trust?

Barbara Brooks Kimmel is an award-winning communications executive and the CEO and Cofounder of Trust Across America-Trust Around the World whose mission is to help organizations build trust. A former consultant to McKinsey and many Fortune 500 CEOs and their firms, Barbara also runs the world’s largest global Trust Alliance, and is the editor of the award-winning TRUST INC. book series and TRUST! Magazine. In 2012 she was named one of “25 Women who are Changing the World” by Good Business International, and in 2017 she became a Fellow of the Governance & Accountability Institute. Barbara holds a BA in International Affairs and an MBA. Don’t forget to TAP into Trust!

For more information contact barbara@trustacrossamerica.com

Copyright(c) 2019, Next Decade, Inc.

This is a timely article about what trust is and what it isn’t! 

www.fcpablog.com/blog/2019/1/24/five-stupid-ideas-about-trust-in-business.html