Trust Across America-Trust Around the World™

What is the average lifespan of a public company?

“A recent study by McKinsey found that those companies listed in Standard & Poor’s 500 was 61 years in 1958. Today, it is less than 18 years. McKinsey believes that in 2027, 75% of the companies currently quoted on the S&P 500 will have disappeared.” While some might question this conclusion or argue that disruptive technology is primarily to blame, maybe lack of trustworthiness is the real culprit.

Every year Trust Across America-Trust Around the World creates a “Top 10” Most Trustworthy Public Company list. The 2022 list can be found here. Four of the companies were founded in the 1800s and all but one has been in business for more than 18 years. The average life span of the ten companies is 77 years. Could it be that the most trustworthy companies are not only great innovators, but also tend to stay in business because they are well governed?

Some of warning signs of poor governance and low trustworthiness may surprise you.

1. Trust is taken for granted and viewed as a soft skill. Either leadership never discusses it, or worse yet attempts to delegate it.
2. There is a new chief in town who holds the title of Chief Trust Officer but it is not the CEO (see #1 above) as it should be, and the job description is similar if not identical to the Chief Risk Officer. Trust building and risk mitigation skillsets are not one and the same and trust always starts at the top.
3. The skillset of the “leadership” team needs a serious reset. For example, layoffs are a first line of defense.
4. Employee turnover is high but no one is asking why.
5. The company website contains lots of Kumbaya “words” that do not translate into action. Just ask the employees.
6. Strategies for elevating organizational trust and trustworthiness have never been discussed let alone described, shared or agreed upon.
7. Leadership focuses on survival and short-term profitability. In fact in many cases, compensation is directly tied to quarterly earnings.
8. Board diversity in gender and race are present but sorely lacking is diversity of thought or opinions.
9. A well defined/aligned hiring strategy has not been implemented resulting in cultural confusion and non engaged employees.
10. Expensive Short-term “perception of trust” programs/workarounds are abundant. (Hint: Think about whether the program can easily tick a box.)

Take a look at this infographic for some additional insights.

Elevating trust and trustworthiness does not require complex formulas. Most of these warning signs can be easily addressed given the right tools and resources, and a willingness to fix what is broken. Want to learn more about building organizational trust and trustworthiness? Our website provides an endless number of tools and resources.

Barbara Brooks Kimmel is an author, speaker, product developer and global subject matter expert on trust and trustworthiness. Founder of Trust Across America-Trust Around the World she is author of the award-winning Trust Inc., Strategies for Building Your Company’s Most Valuable Asset, Trust Inc., 52 Weeks of Activities and Inspirations for Building Workplace Trust and Trust Inc., a Guide for Boards & C-Suites. She majored in International Affairs (Lafayette College), and has an MBA (Baruch- City University of NY). Her expertise on trust has been cited in Harvard Business Review, Investor’s Business Daily, Thomson Reuters, BBC Radio, The Conference Board, Global Finance Magazine, Bank Director and Forbes, among others.

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Are you hiring only for competence trust?

Don’t forget character trust.

To date, almost 25% of 600+ survey respondents say “Talent” is lacking in their workplace.

Talent is the sixth of *12 behaviors in our Tap Into Trust (TAP) framework having now been accessed over 150,000 times in 16 languages. 

Trust Across America-Trust Around the World created The “Art” of Trust visual “cues” to start a discussion about workplace behaviors that build and weaken stakeholder trust. Together these cues form a “Wall” of Trust to enhance learning and retention.

In building team and stakeholder trust, we define “Talent” as follows:

We reward moral character – we hire and promote in alignment with our purpose and values.

Our Trust Alliance members suggest the following discussion questions to elevate talent and build workplace trust.

1. How are we promoting, nurturing and rewarding people for their character strengths?
2. Is moral character inherent in our job descriptions and employment ads?  If not, what phrases might we create to capture moral character as a prime company value? (For more information on hiring for trust click here.)

The “Art” of Trust  is one of many resources designed for our Trust Action Project to help leaders, teams and organizations move from trust talk to ACTION in 2021 and beyond.

Would you like to build a Wall of Trust for your team? Take the first step.

Join our global Trust Alliance and participate in our programs.

Learn more about the Trust Action Project 2021 at this link.

*TAP INTO TRUST is an acronym. The 12 behaviors are equally weighted. The weakest behaviors break the trust chain.

Copyright 2021, Next Decade, Inc.

How many of the following are present in your workplace?

Leaders trust their employees

Employees trust their leaders

Team members trust each other

Ethical behavior is rewarded

In most workplaces the answer may be “None.” How do we know that? Our global Survey of Workplace Trust continues to reveal trust gaps that should concern every stakeholder.

Trust is always interpersonal and the outcome of principled behavior. The reasons for low trust vary from relationship to relationship and team to team making “one size fits all” box checking impossible. The good news, trust can be a learned competence and need not be “shelved” until the next crisis, only to be used as a talking point with no followup action to support it. Instead, trust can and should be a proactive business strategy that is practiced by leadership and reinforced daily.

This past November I wrote an article for SHRM Executive Network Blog called Hiring for Trust.

Many of our Trust Alliance members including Charles H. Green, Lea Brovedani, Olivia Mathijsen and David Belden were quoted, all subject matter experts in their own right.

As I mentioned in the article… Sadly, most leadership teams and their HR professional staff have never considered the role trust plays in organizational success, beginning with hiring practices. Even sadder, working from home has now further compounded the glaring lack of trust that exists between employees and employers, making hiring even more challenging.

Hiring for trust does not just “happen” and when leadership fails to consider the role trust plays in organizational success, let alone adopt it as a core value of the organization, hiring for trust makes little to no sense. Given this all too common scenario, leaders should be prepared for new employees quickly to become disengaged and to jump ship once they realize that their personal values and those of the organization do not align.

Since the publication of this article, I have been asked numerous times for some “pointers” on the kinds of questions interviewers might ask if trust were, in fact, a core value of their organization. The list of questions provided below are drawn from some of the behaviors in our TAP Framework, the basis for our Workplace Trust Survey, that strengthen or weaken trust in a team.

Thirteen questions to consider asking if hiring for trust

• How do you feel about telling “white” lies?
• If you failed at achieving a goal, would you openly and candidly acknowledge it?
• Do you feel that your values are aligned with the values of this organization? 
• Can you provide an example of how you have recently acted with integrity in either your personal or professional life?
• Do you consider yourself a good listener and why? 
• Are you more competitive or more collaborative?
• If someone on your team disagrees with you, how do you react?
• What do you consider your top three character strengths?
• What would keep you from having open and frank conversations?
• Is transparency the best option if it compromises kindness?
• Could you respect a teammate you didn’t trust?
• Should employees feel safe to fail?
• What ethical behavioral goals have you set for yourself?

These questions are meant to address specific trust-building behaviors like truth, accountability, purpose and respect, among others. If you are in a hiring role and can’t personally answer them or don’t know the “right” answer, Tap Into Trust for more free resources. Rest assured, if you start incorporating some of these questions into your practices you will be not only be hiring for competence but also for those character traits that build interpersonal trust.

Join over 150,000 global citizens who have accessed our behavioral principles to not only hire for trust, but to strengthen both team and organizational success.

By Barbara Brooks Kimmel, Founder & CEO, Trust Across America-Trust Around the World

Copyright 2021, Next Decade, Inc.

Have you heard about The “Art” of Trust? It’s our newest tool!

Copyright 2021 Next Decade, Inc.

What role does TRUTH play in the core values and culture of your workplace?

Truth is the first of *12 behaviors in our Tap Into Trust (TAP) framework having now been accessed over 150,000 times in 16 languages. 

Trust Across America-Trust Around the World created these visual “cues” to start a discussion about behaviors in the workplace that build and weaken trust. Together these cues form a “Wall” of Trust, telling a story to enhance learning and retention.

In the context of a team, we define Truth as follows:

 We are honest & humble. We put the truth ahead of personal or professional gain.

If truth is lacking on your team how do you begin to address it? These are two questions our Trust Alliance members suggest to foster a discussion and improve trust.

1. Does our organization tolerate or even encourage “white lies” to avoid conflict and produce results? If so, how can we safely bring that out in the open and change it?
2. Do we put down people who willingly share their truth? If so, how do we create a forum that invites appropriate candor?

The “Art” of Trust  is one of many resources designed during our Trust Action Project 2021 to help leaders, teams and organizations move from trust talk to ACTION in 2021 and beyond. Build a “Wall” of Trust for your team as the first step down the road to trust.

What behaviors do you think impact trust the MOST in teams and organizations? Our 1 minute/1 question AIM Workplace Diagnostic compares your response to more than 600 others.

Join our global Trust Alliance and participate in our programs.

Would you like more information about how to purchase The “Art” of Trust? Let us know.

Learn more about the Trust Action Project 2021 at this link.

*TAP INTO TRUST is an acronym. The 12 behaviors are equally weighted. The weakest behaviors break the trust chain.

Copyright 2021, Next Decade, Inc.

Why should business leaders care about trust? This is why:

Performance of Trust Across America’s

Most Trustworthy Public Companies vs. the S&P 500 (2014-2019)

The chart above is the cumulative “Return on Trust” of America’s annual “Top 10” Most Trustworthy Public Companies over the past six years. Through its FACTS® Framework, Trust Across America has been analyzing, assembling and publicly reporting on this data for ten years.

If you are the CEO of a public company, or any company for that matter, who claims there is no Business Case for Trust, now may be the time to reconsider. Why DO business leaders require proof or ignore trust as their most valuable strategic advantage?

Leaders take trust for granted

Trust doesn’t just “happen.” It is not bestowed upon leaders by virtue of their title.  Trust is a learned competence and an intentional business strategy that must be crafted, practiced, modeled, and reinforced daily.

Leaders focus on the wrong metrics

Growing quarterly earnings, over reliance on sales quotas, focus on “old school” risk and/or “new school” ESG metrics will not satisfy the trust imperative that stakeholders are increasingly demanding. Neither will talking rather than acting on trust.

Leaders treat trust as a “soft skill”

Organizational trustworthiness is a hard currency. The proof is in the chart above.

Leaders are “trust reactive” 

Rarely do we hear proactive leadership discussions about building stakeholder trust. Instead, trust becomes a communications talking point only after a breach. This is both a missed and lost opportunity for leadership.

Leaders delegate trust

Trust is not a function of legal, compliance, HR, communications, or any other department. Boards of Directors and executive leadership teams must spearhead trust, making it central to the organization’s core values, so that all stakeholders can benefit.

Note: In 2010 Trust Across America introduced the FACTS® Framework, an EXTERNAL quantitative measurement of the corporate trustworthiness of America’s largest 2000+ US public companies. The Framework identifies companies whose leadership is going beyond doing just what is legal and compliant to choosing the right core values that satisfy all stakeholder needs. The FACTS® Framework is the most comprehensive and data driven ongoing study on the trustworthiness of public companies. We analyze companies quarterly and rank order showing trends by company, sector and market capitalization. Read more about the Framework at this link.

In 2018 Trust Across America-Trust Around the World’s Trust Alliance, a group of global trust scholars and practitioners, introduced its Trust Alliance Principles (TAP), and in 2019 our AIM Survey tool was created to guide leaders and teams in building trust INTERNALLY. It is based on universal behaviors that strengthen and weaken trust. To date, almost 150,000 global professionals have tapped into trust, and dozens of teams and organizations have used our simple survey tool to start a trust discussion.

For more information visit our website at www.trustacrossamerica.com or contact us.

Purchase our books at this link

Copyright © 2020 Next Decade, Inc.

Two significant news headlines recently caught my attention:

Why 2020 Will See the Birth of the Trust Economy (World Economic Forum)

Covid-19 Vaccine Push Lacks a Key Ingredient: Trust (Bloomberg) (links below)

Missing from both articles is a 1) A concise definition of trust and 2) a comprehensive solution.

We define trust as the OUTCOME of principled behavior.

Trust is:

• Always built from the inside out by ethical leaders.
• It cannot be delegated.
• It should not be the subject of a PR or marketing campaign.
• It cannot be measured through external surveys (that is perception of trust)
• It is not “one size fits all.”

Our global Trust Alliance comprised of business leaders, departmental managers, consultants and scholars worked collaboratively for over a year (2017-18) to identify the primary behaviors driving trust in teams and organizations. These 12 behaviors are our Trust Alliance Principles (TAP) and they have now been accessed, at no cost, over 140,000 times in *16 languages. The weakest behaviors break trust. Administering our AIM Assessment has shown that from team to team and organization to organization, these weak behaviors vary. In other words, elevating trust is not “one size fits all.”

AIM (an acronym for Acknowledge, Identify, Mend) uses the TAP behaviors to identify those that are breaking trust in order to have a starting place to begin a discussion on how to fix them. (We also provide resources to help our clients quickly resolve the primary weaknesses.)

Leaders and managers who acknowledge that trust is critical to organizational success and choose to elevate it to avoid the next expensive crisis, can do so in 3 steps with an inexpensive plan:

1. Identify what you believe may need fixing by starting with the checklist below.
2. Take our 1 minute master survey “Building Trust One Principle at a Time” to determine how your answers compare with over 500 respondents.
3. Administer our AIM Survey to your team and start a trust discussion by holding a workshop.

Barbara Brooks Kimmel is the founder of Trust Across America-Trust Around the World, whose mission is to help organizations build trust. Now in its 12th year, the program has developed two proprietary trust-evaluation tools, the latest is AIM Towards Trust. She also runs the world largest global Trust Alliance and is the editor of the award-winning TRUST INC. book series. Kimmel is a former consultant to McKinsey who has worked across multiple industries and with senior leadership. She holds a bachelor’s in international affairs from Lafayette College and an MBA from Baruch.

Copyright © 2020, Next Decade, Inc.

Articles cited:

www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/08/2020-birth-of-the-trust-economy/

www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-08-17/warp-speed-s-covid-19-vaccine-push-lacks-a-key-ingredient-trust

*Download our principles as a PDF:   English, Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese (Brazilian), Romanian, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish

Last week a business owner inquired if I could help his company build a roadmap to a high trust culture. First I asked what he thought the roadmap might include, and his answer was not surprising. “My business coach instructed my office manager to hire a motivational speaker, enter us in a “great workplace” competition, donate money to charity, and have an annual picnic. Then we can call ourselves trustworthy.” ( I didn’t dare ask for the name of the coach, as it was immediately apparent that trust subject matter expertise was not their forte.) My next question was a bit more difficult. I asked him what role he would play in designing the trust roadmap. His response, “That’s why I hired a coach, so I would know how and what to delegate to my staff.” Suffice it to say, it’s a good thing the conversation was occurring by phone so I could end the call quickly.

With unemployment at record lows and employee engagement and retention looking very bleak, one might think that leaders would pay closer attention to building a culture of trust, which some have gone as far as calling the “new currency,” but apparently not so. In fact, over the past ten+ years, I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard similar (and sometimes worse) answers to the questions posed above. 

So once again I turned to the members of our Trust Council  and asked them for what they considered to be the first three steps in building a culture of trust.

• Inform them of this effort.
• Ask for their help in supporting it.
• Ask for their help in finding resources (written, video, or in-person) to support it.
• Ask their help in creating periodic measures for all of them for how to observe progress.

3. Commit to keep trust-building as a top professional priority in the future.

Bob Whipple of Leadergrow approached the question from the perspective of what a small business owner might do:

Have a staff meeting and tell your team there are some new rules for the enterprise:

1. We will admit our mistakes, and model that behavior by admitting a mistake you have made during the last week that you have not shared yet.
2. Ask that every time a person receives help or some special effort from someone else on the team – that person writes a thank you email to the person and copies you on it.  You then read a selected few of those notes at the start of every meeting. Build a culture of reinforcement at all levels of the organization.
3. Insist that when you say or do something that someone in the organization believes is not right or consistent with our values, that person is obligated to tell you what the concern is and promise that you will make that person glad he or she brought it up.  Then do exactly that without fail – ever.  Practice reinforcing candor!

My approach to constructing a high trust culture, encompasses some of the suggestions made by “the Bobs” above, and will work in any organization of any size.

1. Establish an organizational trust-building committee comprised of a Board member if applicable, a member of the executive team, one senior employee from the compliance, finance, communications and HR functions. Set a one-year goal to build a culture of trust from the inside out, at the team level, including the Board and executive team.
2. Since trust is an outcome of many universal principles, step two is for each team to determine which principles are weak, and which are strong. As our past surveys have shown, the results won’t necessarily be the same from team to team within the organization. (If the organization is relatively small, it may not be necessary to survey each team individually.)
3. Spend the first six months addressing the weakest principles on each team and celebrating the strengths. Repeat survey in 6 months and continue working on the principles that remain weak. By the end of one year, the hardest part of the trust “construction project” will have been completed. Now go have that ice cream social!

Building a culture of trust will only be effective when: 

1. Leaders acknowledge that culture change starts with them, and is always built from the inside out
2. The right tools are used to identify trust weaknesses and strengths
3. Team members are free to discuss survey or other diagnostic outcomes through open dialogue
4. Trust weaknesses are mended and strengths are celebrated

We call this process AIM Towards Trust... Acknowledge, Identify, Mend and it’s been used successfully in teams and organizations of all sizes, shapes and colors; but only when leaders intentionally choose to build trust into their corporate culture AND own it. That must always occur BEFORE a crisis, not after the fact.

Finally don’t get caught up in “work arounds” to building a high trust culture because there ARE no quick fixes. These are a few of the more “trendy” ones that you might have encountered:

• Misdefined trust: This includes brand trust, data trust, blockchain trust, and check-the-box trust. Trust is always internal and interpersonal.
• External trust polls: If the question “trust to do what?” is not answered, the survey is either invalid or misleading.
• Trust as a popular place holder title:  Many will use trust interchangeably with other terms like transparency, ethics or integrity, when it is actually a combination of many universal principles.
• Trust as one-size-fits-all: Because of its complexity, all organizational trust challenges can be attributed to a variety of factors that must be identified and addressed separately and differently.
• Trust that is not “principles” based: Trust is not a function of the PR department or a “purpose” campaign, but rather a function of highly principled trustworthy leadership.

I hope these suggestions will help you in constructing your own trust roadmap. Special thanks to Bob V. and Bob W. Your contributions to elevating trust are always appreciated.

Barbara Brooks Kimmel is the Founder of Trust Across America-Trust Around the World whose mission is to help organizations build trust. For more information on how to build authentic trust, contact her at barbara@trustacrossamerica.com 

Copyright 2019, Next Decade, Inc.

How can organizations ensure that

red lights turn green in 2019?

Please share your ideas.

Is this a useful resource to you and your organization? Please consider making a donation to help us build more tools.

In celebration of the 10th anniversary of Trust Across America-Trust Around the World, our global Trust Alliance “elves” have spent the year hammering away at new (and free) tools to elevate organizational trust in any organization regardless of size, location or industry.

We are happy to provide our readers with “12 days of organizational trust resources.”

Ten years ago, in the wake of the financial crisis, I undertook a study of organizational trust. Ten years later, and with the assistance of hundreds of global experts, I offer the following observations gleaned over the past decade.

Organizational trust is built over time and in incremental steps. There are simply no shortcuts.

Trust facts:

Organizational trust is an “inside out” strategy built through…

1. A shared purpose and tactical vision acknowledging all stakeholders, not just shareholders
2. A high integrity/high accountability board and CEO
3. Long-term and corporate-wide intentional trust building strategies
4. Daily reinforcement
5. Hiring (and firing) in accordance with corporate values
6. Rejection of hidden agendas
7. Vulnerability and a willingness to admit mistakes
8. Transparency, truth telling and promises kept
9. Rewarding moral character
10. Trust measurement and tracking

Recently my colleagues and I have witnessed some “sloppy” use of the word “trust” via short-term thinking attempts to provide quick and easy illusory measurements and solutions.

Trust Fiction:

Trust is not built through…

1. Delegation of trust building to middle management or online ethics training modules
2. Expensive and slick PR or “branding” campaigns
3. CEO activism unrelated to the business
4. CSR “one off” projects and ESG “check the box” practices
5. Self-fulfilling surveys, reports and “best of” awards
6. Philanthropy
7. Empty apologies, lots of talk and little action
8. Social media “strategies” and buzz words
9. More rules and larger legal departments
10. Short-term share price action

There are no short-term solutions to building a trustworthy business. Attempting to cut corners not only wastes time and resources but damages reputation.  For those Boards and CEOs who want to learn more, check back next week when we offer 12 free tools to elevate trust in every organization, regardless of size, industry or location.

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) 2018, Next Decade, Inc.