Trust Across America-Trust Around the World™

Is loneliness at the top a trust buster? You bet. But don’t believe me, just read this Wall Street Journal article and pay particular attention to #3.

We must not forget that our organization’s leaders are humans first and executives second. How can we expect leaders to be trustworthy when rising in the ranks impedes the growth of trust?

I’ve spoken to CEOs who joke about how lonely it is at the top, but I never stopped to think about why. Imagine getting to where you are only to find that you are forced to trust fewer people as more try to take advantage of your position?

If building organizational trust rests squarely on the shoulders of leadership, this Catch 22 must be overcome. Leaders can start by availing themselves of the myriad of resources (many free) to avoid the “loneliness trap” by building organizational trust in incremental steps.

Trust Across America-Trust Around the World has spent six years sourcing trust tools and bringing them together on our website- books, magazines, videos, reports, speakers, and even a master research bibliography. If you are the leader of an organization and feeling the “loneliness at the top” and diminishing trust, please stop by. If you can’t find what you are looking for, drop us a note at barbara@trustacrossamerica.com . We’ll be glad to help (no strings attached.)

Barbara Brooks Kimmel is the Executive Director of Trust Across America-Trust Around the World whose mission is to help organizations build trust. She is also the editor of the award winning TRUST INC. book series and the Executive Editor of TRUST! Magazine. In 2012 Barbara was named “One of 25 Women Changing the World” by Good Business International.

Our 2015 Poster, 52 Weeks of Activities to Increase Organizational Trust is available to those who would like to support our work by making a small donation.

Copyright 2015, Next Decade, Inc.

The World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos is in full swing, and as Sebastian Buckup, the Director of the Program’s Development Team reports, the world has lost trust in:

Progress

Markets

Government

Few would disagree, but on closer read, one will not find the word “leadership” mentioned until the discussion on government. I will continue to contend that the world has not lost trust in progress, markets or government, for that matter. The world has lost trust in the leaders who are impeding progress and innovation, fostering inefficiency in markets and placing their governmental “power” before the best interests of the people who elected them.

The world is not facing a crisis of trust, but rather one of untrustworthy leadership. Until the focus shifts from inanimate objects like progress, markets and government to the human beings behind these institutional walls, the global trust crisis will continue unabated.

On Monday, and for the fifth year, Trust Across America-Trust Around the World will be announcing its Top Thought Leaders in Trust, a group of approximately one hundred professionals who collectively hold the key to reversing the cycle of mistrust in all organizations, via the “human” approach.  And while a few are even in attendance this year at Davos, no one individual can change the course of this negative trust trajectory.

Imagine if this Top Thought Leader group convened in Davos (or maybe even somewhere warmer) with the sole intent of tackling the real crisis and building the tools leaders need to put trust back in their organizations. That’s the meeting I want to attend. How about you? How can we make that happen?

Barbara Brooks Kimmel is the Executive Director of Trust Across America-Trust Around the World whose mission is to help organizations build trust. She is also the editor of the award winning TRUST INC. book series and the Executive Editor of TRUST! Magazine. In 2012 Barbara was named “One of 25 Women Changing the World” by Good Business International.

Our 2015 Poster, 52 Weeks of Activities to Increase Organizational Trust is available to those who would like to support our work by making a small donation.

Copyright 2015, Next Decade, Inc.

According to newly released data from the 2015 Edelman Trust Barometer the world has witnessed “an alarming evaporation of trust across all institutions, reaching the lows of the Great Recession in 2009. Trust in government, business, media and NGOs in the general population is below 50 percent in two-thirds of countries, including the U.S., U.K., Germany and Japan. Informed public respondents are nearly as distrustful, registering trust levels below 50 percent in half of the countries surveyed.”

“There has been a startling decrease in trust across all institutions driven by the unpredictable and unimaginable events of 2014,” said Richard Edelman, president and CEO, Edelman

Many global experts claim that “trust” is the issue of the decade and they may be right. Our society continues to be plagued by breaches of trust in business, government, academia, medicine, sports and the media, to name just a few.  But behind every trust violation is an individual or a team that has allowed it to occur. There is no doubt that low trust comes with hard costs to society and its citizens.

Is There a Silver Lining? Yes indeed. Many thought leaders are placing trust on their daily docket and teaching others through their actions and words.  On January 26 via TRUST! Magazine winter issue, Trust Across America – Trust Around the World will be releasing its 5^th annual Top Thought Leaders in Trust, recognizing approximately 100 global trust researchers, consultants, writers and/or business leaders. Today we announce 15 honorees that have been continuously recognized by our program for their thought leadership over the past five years, and are receiving our Lifetime Achievement Award.

Please join us in congratulating the following outstanding individuals:

Patricia Aburdene

Hank Boerner

Stephen M.R. Covey

Jed Emerson

Leslie Gaines Ross

Robert Galford

Mary Gentile

Bill George

Charles H. Green

Jim Kouzes

Linda Locke

Edward Marshall

Jeffrey Seglin

Frank Sonnenberg

Robert Whipple

Well done ladies and gentlemen!

Barbara Brooks Kimmel is the Executive Director of Trust Across America-Trust Around the World whose mission is to help organizations build trust. She is also the editor of the award winning TRUST INC. book series and the Executive Editor of TRUST! Magazine. In 2012 Barbara was named “One of 25 Women Changing the World” by Good Business International.

Our 2015 Poster, 52 Weeks of Activities to Increase Organizational Trust is available to those who would like to support our work by making a small donation.

Copyright 2015, Next Decade, Inc.

Has CEO compensation destroyed trust in corporate America?

Will the real root cause of the destruction of trust please stand up. While many blame Wall Street and the financial meltdown in 2008, trust began to gasp for air many years earlier. The financial meltdown just added a nail to the coffin.

Trust had a quick descent  in the 1990’s with the explosion of stock option grants and an increased focus on shareholder value. In fact, By 2000, stock options accounted for more than half of total compensation for a typical S&P 500 CEO.

Over the 14-year 1992-2005 time period, the average US S&P 500 company awarded over €1 billion worth of
options to its executives and employees (or €500 billion across all 500 companies). Moreover, the average S&P 500 company transferred through options approximately 25.6% of its total outstanding equity to its executives and employees (Murphy, Jensen and Wruck (2011).

And lest we forget the accounting scandals like Enron, Sarbanes Oxley, pay for performance, options backdating and Dodd Frank, perhaps sealing the fate of trust for good. Unfortunately, regulation is punitive and does little if anything to create value or trust. For those interested in read more about the global history of CEO compensation and it’s impact on trust, this is an excellent paper.

A more recent July NY Times article written by Eduardo Porter called Motivating Corporations to Do Good contains the following:

In 1993, some 20 percent of executive compensation was based on stock, according to Lynn Stout of Cornell Law School. Today, equity accounts for about 60 percent of the remuneration of executives at companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index. With so much money tied up in stock options and the like, it is not surprising that executives will do almost anything to give their share price a boost regardless of what costs this might incur after their options have vested. (and regardless of how much trust must be compromised along the way)

And finally, as described in this September article in The Week, written by James Pethokoukis, most US companies and their CEO’s are stuck in the short-term and quarterly earnings mentality, again both killers of trust.

The Silver Lining

In a recent blog post called The Good News About Leadership  Bob Vanourek describes more enlightened versions of capitalism that are emerging and go beyond the “maximize shareholder value” mantra that is becoming increasingly obsolete and discredited. He references this article in McKinsey Insights called Redefining Capitalism.

Have We Yet to See Any Examples Of CEOS Embracing a New Way of Thinking about Trust?

Yes indeed! I wrote about the Top Ten CEO Trust Stories of 2014 in this recent post. It includes examples from enlightened CEOs like Howard Schultz at Starbucks and Capital One’s Richard Fairbank.

Perhaps there is still a ray of hope for trust to make a comeback in corporate America, but it won’t be through increased regulation and mandatory rules. After all, trust is voluntary.  Let’s see what happens in 2015.

Our library of our own award-winning books and many others on building organizational trust can be accessed here and provide a good starting place for learning more about the subject, especially if you are an enlightened CEO, or want to be one.

Barbara Brooks Kimmel is the Executive Director of Trust Across America-Trust Around the World whose mission is to help organizations build trust. She is also the editor of the award winning TRUST INC. book series and the Executive Editor of TRUST! Magazine. In 2012 Barbara was named “One of 25 Women Changing the World” by Good Business International.

Copyright 2015, Next Decade, Inc.

There is no doubt that trust is broken in most organizations. If you doubt the validity of this statement, here’s a quick test.

1. Do you look forward to getting up and going to work in the morning? Now ask the person sitting next to you the same question.
2. What was the level of employee turnover in your organization in 2014?
3. Do you like your boss, or does he like himself more? When was the last time he/she spoke TO you instead of AT you?
4. Has trust as a “business imperative” ever been discussed at a staff meeting?
5. Can you list the three most important values in your organization?

Get the picture? The good news…. if leadership hasn’t woken up to the value of trust, appoint yourself as the Chief Trust Officer today, start instilling some trust in your organization, and chances are, you will like your job more by the end of 2015. Your colleagues will thank you and maybe your boss will wake up too! It’s a win/win for all.

Late last year we published the 3rd book in our award-winning TRUST Inc. series. It’s called TRUST Inc. 52 Weeks of Activities and Inspirations to Build Workplace Trust . We also published a year-end companion poster with 52 ways to increase organizational trust, as recommended by some of the world’s leading experts, and members of our Trust Alliance.

The first activity can be completed in less than one hour. It’s called “Listening for Leaders” and was written by Charles H. Green, one of the world’s foremost authorities on trust-based relationships.

This is a brief introduction to the activity:

Objective: Concretely demonstrate to leaders a way of interacting with others that increases influence through empathetic listening.

Requirements: 3 persons, each with a particular “difficult client/colleague” situation.

30 – 40 minutes elapsed time.

Can be done in multiples of three persons, with a strong facilitator

Process overview: The exercise is done in three iterations. Each of the three gets a chance to role-play:

Person A. a difficult client of their own

Person B. an advisor or follower of the difficult client/colleague

Person C. an observer

Each iteration proceeds as:

a. 60 seconds for the “client/colleague” person to describe the situation – out of role character

b. 4 minutes for the role-play – in character

c. 3 minutes debrief, led by the observer

This activity also includes Notes to Facilitators, Debrief Instructions & a Wrap Up.

Interesting idea?  It’s the first of 52. Get the book, print the poster and hang it on your wall. Start your new career as the Chief Trust Officer in your organization today. There’s no reason to wait for the boss to do it. I dare you!

If you need help along the way, visit our website for free resources on building organizational trust. We can even recommend a local expert to visit and share their expertise.

Barbara Brooks Kimmel is the Executive Director of Trust Across America-Trust Around the World whose mission is to help organizations build trust. She is also the editor of the award winning TRUST INC. book series and the Executive Editor of TRUST! Magazine. In 2012 Barbara was named “One of 25 Women Changing the World” by Good Business International.

Copyright 2015, Next Decade, Inc.

Did you know that Trust Across America-Trust Around the World is celebrating the 2nd anniversary of the formation of its Alliance of Trustworthy Business Experts? This global group includes corporate executives, consultants and academics from a variety of silos- leadership, innovation, compliance, teams & HR, entrepreneurship, etc. The common thread is a shared interest in elevating levels of trust within organizations.

Our members are prolific writers. Some of them have shared their “best” 2014 suggestions on building organizational trust. If you are doing more than just “talking trust” and actually “walking it,” don’t miss this!

Articles & Blog Posts

Nan Russell offers 5 Tips to Fix Your Broken Communications and Build Trust

Deb Mills-Scofield asks Are You Just a Leader or a Just Leader?

Mark Fernandes shares his thoughts on what it is like Inside the Walls of a Values-Based Leadership Organization

Taina Savolainen on Trust & Innovation Interplay

Barbara Brooks Kimmel’s Most Popular Article of the Year asks the question, What Quote Does Trust the Most Disservice?

Bob Vanourek explores how to Learn to Trust Your Own Judgement

Charles H. Green offers advice on What to Do When Others Abuse Your Trust

Donna Boehme weighs in on GM’s DIY Compliance

Linda Fisher Thornton reminds us that in Building Trust We Must Know What to Weed Out

Lea Brovedani reviews what happens in  Messing Up and Keeping Trust

Books

In 2014:

Trust Across America-Trust Around the World added two new books to it’s award-winning TRUST Inc. book series:

TRUST Inc., a Guide for Boards & C-Suites

TRUST Inc., 52 Weeks of Activities & Inspirations for Building Workplace Trust

Carol Sanford’s The Responsible Entrepreneur: Four Game Changing Archetypes for Founders, Leaders and Impact Investors, is the WINNER of the Best Entrepreneurship Book of 2014 via 800CEOREAD.

Karin Hurt’s Overcoming an Imperfect Boss discusses ways to elevate trust at work.

Bob Whipple wrote Trust in Transition, Navigating Organizational Change

Magazines

Did you know that we released the first issue of our quarterly magazine TRUST! in the fall of 2014? Our next issue will be out at the end of January,

Posters

Finally, we have created a poster for 2015 called Weekly Activities to Increase Organizational Trust. For a small donation, you can download this poster and help build trust in your organization in the coming year.

Barbara Brooks Kimmel is the Executive Director of Trust Across America-Trust Around the World whose mission is to help organizations build trust. She is also the editor of the award winning TRUST INC. book series and the Executive Editor of TRUST! Magazine. In 2012 Barbara was named “One of 25 Women Changing the World” by Good Business International.

Copyright 2014 Next Decade, Inc.

We all know that startup businesses have high failure rates. Just how high is open to debate but this graphic, showing them by industry, is worth a look. Trust holds the key to long-term business success and profitability, yet it remains the most frequently ignored business strategy. Without trust as a foundational element, the chances for long-term business survival are little to none.

Yesterday someone asked me to enumerate, from a “trust” perspective, ten sure-fire business failure warning signs. I’ll bet several are present in your organization.

1. Trust is taken for granted or viewed as a soft skill. There is no Chief Trust Officer (not to be confused with ethics or compliance. Trust is voluntary while compliance is regulated.)
2. Your corporate credo or core values are nonexistent, or the ones in place are simply “words” tossed up on a website.
3. Goals have yet to be defined, shared or agreed upon. Nor has a course been plotted with a one, three and five-year plan.
4. Leadership is focused on survival and short-term profitability only, instead of a unique corporate value proposition and the customer.
5. The “leader” lacks leadership skills. Worse yet, he is a total jerk and everyone knows it but him.
6. There is not a single woman in sight on the executive leadership team.
7. Everyone is a boss and no one is held accountable, resulting in a lack of consistency and a great deal of finger-pointing.
8. Board members are “Yes men” for the CEO, and “yes” they are all men.
9. There is lots of talk and little action, and everyone is always “very tired” from all the “hard” work.
10. A well-defined hiring strategy has not been implemented resulting in misalignment and inefficient staffing.

How many of these are present in your startup? Each one is an indicator that your business will fail.

We have published a brand-new 2015 poster listing 52 weekly actions you can take to build trust and secure and ensure long-term business success, drawing on expert advice from around the world. A donation of $10.00 (minimum $5.00) might hold the key to your long-term business success. Make the investment for the good of your organization and all your stakeholders. See you in 18 months!

Want to learn more about building organizational trust? Our award-winning 3-book TRUST Inc. series that can be ordered here,

Barbara Brooks Kimmel is the Executive Director of Trust Across America-Trust Around the World whose mission is to help organizations build trust. She is also the editor of the award winning TRUST INC. book series and the Executive Editor of TRUST! Magazine. In 2012 Barbara was named “One of 25 Women Changing the World” by Good Business International.

Copyright 2014 Next Decade, Inc.

Trust Across America- Trust Around the World’s

Year-End Letter (and what a year it’s been)

Dear Friends and Colleagues:

We will close the year with almost 400,000 website visitors accessing close to 1.5 million pages of material, confirming that organizational trust is on the minds of many people worldwide, and so the “I” goal above has been met. We expect to continue this positive trend going forward.

The “You” phase began in late 2013, asking and answering the question “What cost-effective or free resources do you, our audience, need that will help you build trust?

To meet this objective we completed the following twelve projects in 2014:

• Published two additional books in our TRUST Inc. series, and our anchor book, won two national gold awards in business from Nautilus and Eric Hoffer.

• Continued to build the Business Case for Trust using our proprietary FACTS Framework as the foundation.

• Expanded our free You Tube Trust Talks video series which have been watched by thousands of people.

• Added several new free Building Trust Reports. Our Building Trust in Community Leadership Report has been downloaded almost 4000 times this month alone! One need only read the headlines to understand why. Print it and give it as a gift to your local Mayor or Police Chief.

• Launched our free living Trust Bibliography with the help of Bob Easton at Accenture. It’s the largest of its kind in the world and is updated every 6 months. Update coming soon.

• Hosted a series of regional Trust Circle breakfasts and luncheons, engaging in lively discussions and making new friends and business relationships.

• Spoke at colleges and conferences.

• Created a trustworthy leadership survey called the Leader’s Project and began to aggregate data and great stories.

• Launched TRUST! Magazine.

• Brought awareness to the topic of organizational trust with our first global TRUSTGiving Campaign in November, right before Thanksgiving.

• Organized our Alliance members into a Trust Speakers group to meet national and global demand.

• Published our 2015 Weekly Activities for Increasing Organizational Trust poster.

And now we are entering the “We” phase.

During 2014, our Alliance of Trustworthy Business Experts continued to grow, and with each new member came a new trust perspective and more engagement. We collectively began to ask “How can we, as a growing Alliance, collaborate to meet the needs of our global audience?” This will be our focus in 2015 as we move into year #3 of the Alliance formation.

On January 1, 2015, our Alliance will be temporarily closing to new members, and we will maintain a waiting list. Some existing members will be invited back when their membership expires, while others will not. This will be based on shared interest and objectives as we move forward, and on specific areas of organizational trust expertise which may be lacking in our existing group.

If you are considering joining, please do so before the end of the year. All new members are vetted.

I wish each of you the best in 2015 for health, happiness, and more trust. I hope you have enjoyed getting to know us and choose to show your ongoing support for our very important work.

Barbara Brooks Kimmel is the Executive Director of Trust Across America-Trust Around the World whose mission is to help organizations build trust. She is also the editor of the award winning TRUST INC. book series and the Executive Editor of TRUST! Magazine. In 2012 Barbara was named “One of 25 Women Changing the World” by Good Business International.

Organizational Trust this Week is a new feature beginning with the “Good”, moving through the “Debatable” and occasionally ending with the “Ugly.” Each story contains a trust component and at least one lesson for organizations seeking to make trust a business imperative. This week’s news moves our focus away from business and in to trust in communities, government, the media and medicine.

THE GOOD

Building trust is not all that complicated regardless of whether the relationship is personal or professional. It all boils down to something that looks like character, competence and consistency with a bit of compassion on top.

This cop knows his trust “stuff” and should share it with our President. It would save the taxpayers a bundle!

Same goes for this civil rights attorney

By the way, did you know we released a new book this week in our award-winning TRUST Inc. book series?

 ORDER NOW

GIVE A GIFT OF TRUST THIS HOLIDAY

THE DEBATABLE

What is the media’s responsibility in building and busting trust (not only in itself, but its stakeholders?) After all, if the media is not reporting the facts, why not just watch reality TV and read comic books?

Can you trust those virtual doctor visits? This is new and exciting territory. Maybe someone should also invent virtual health insurance. I’ll bet the premiums would be a heck of a lot lower!

THE UGLY

Is high CEO pay an impediment to building trust?

What’s happened to trust in government since President Eisenhower? I love graphs. This one really does its job!

OUR MOST POPULAR POST THIS WEEK

And finally, Trust Across America-Trust Around the World’s most popular post on LinkedIn Pulse this week. If trust is low in your workplace, fix it!  Send us your stories for consideration in future editions of Organizational Trust this Week: barbara@trustacrossamerica.com

Barbara Brooks Kimmel is the Executive Director of Trust Across America-Trust Around the World whose mission is to help organizations build trust. She is also the editor of the award winning TRUST INC. book series and the Executive Editor of TRUST! Magazine. In 2012 Barbara was named “One of 25 Women Changing the World” by Good Business International.

Our brand new magazine TRUST! makes the case that in Financial Services, Industry is NOT Destiny

   Should you wish to communicate directly with Barbara, drop her a note at Barbara@trustacrossamerica.com

Copyright 2014 Next Decade, Inc.

For many of us, it’s the time of year when we wish for warm weather and the sound of crashing waves. Take a walk on the beach with Rob Galford as he maps out one of the trust-building activities contained in our new book, Trust Inc., 52 Weeks of Activities and Inspirations for Building Workplace Trust.

Rob is a Managing Partner of the Center for Leading Organizations, and a Leadership Fellow in Executive Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

A “Walk on the Beach” for Trust 

Not all of our business relationships are perfect.  In fact, too many of them are far from it.  Yet merely recognizing that reality doesn’t do anything for us, doesn’t make things better.  The quo remains status, conflicts are buried, “work-arounds” are devised, and while an easy (or uneasy) peace may reign, the underlying problem remains unresolved.  It doesn’t go away.  It becomes an opportunity missed.  And it doesn’t have to be that way.

The purpose of this assignment and subsequent action is to provide you with an opportunity to focus on improving one or more of your important working relationships in a way that has not occurred before. The first part of the process entails completing six key questions in advance.  You will then spend some uninterrupted time with your counterpart in a setting away from the workplace, a so-called “walk on the beach”, where you will describe and discuss your respective responses to the key questions.   While at the outset there may naturally be a sense of apprehension, risk or discomfort in addressing things so directly, it will be apparent upon completion just how much has been accomplished merely by having had the conversation.

There are four prerequisites for a successful experience and a worthwhile outcome.

1. A belief that a relationship has the possibility of improvement.  If you firmly, deeply, truly believe there really is zero chance of improving a particular relationship that, in effect, you are “done with it”, then don’t spend the time doing this.  The very fact that the other person might hold out some hope for the relationship, or is willing to do this walk may help you reconsider your view.  If it does not, be ready to discuss with them why you are unwilling to try.

Learn more about all four prerequisites and how to complete your walk on the beach by following the link below.  The book contains 51 other activities and inspirations (a full year) that are certain to not only reverse the cycle of mistrust in your workplace, but enable trust to flourish.

ORDER NOW

Barbara Brooks Kimmel is the Executive Director of Trust Across America-Trust Around the World whose mission is to help organizations build trust. She is also the editor of the award winning TRUST INC. book series and the Executive Editor of TRUST! Magazine. In 2012 Barbara was named “One of 25 Women Changing the World” by Good Business International. Leave a comment or send her a note at barbara@trustacrossamerica.com

Copyright 2014 Next Decade, Inc.