Trust Across America-Trust Around the World™

This week we are providing a quarterly wrap up of our Trust Insights series. Many of the world’s leading trust scholars and practitioners are collaborating on this project to bring you actionable insights that you can use to elevate trust at both the team and organizational level.

 

 

Simply click on the blue link in the list below to read more.

 

Trust Insights Week #1: Stephen M.R. Covey Trust is both earned and given. January 7, 2020 Trust Insights Week #2: David Reiling Developing trust starts in the C-Suite. January 14, 2020 Trust Insights Week #3: Margaret Heffernan Trust is always and only about what you DO; nothing else matters. January 21, 2020 Trust Insights Week #4: Special Announcement 2020 Top Thought Leaders. January 28, 2020 Trust Insights Week #5: Charles H. Green Trust is what happens when a risk-taking trustor meets a virtuous trustee. February 4, 2020 Trust Insights Week #6: Walt Rakowich Real leadership starts by building trust; without trust, you have no platform from which to build positive influence with others. February 11, 2020 Trust Insights Week #7: Bob Vanourek Three trust questions are the best way to deal with the ethical dilemmas we face. February 18, 2020 Trust Insights Week #8: Barbara Brooks Kimmel The benefits of high trust are too numerous for leaders to ignore. February 25, 2020 Trust Insights Week #9: Bob Whipple The absence of fear is the incubator of trust. March 3 , 2020 Trust Insights Week #10: Doug Conant Building trust doesn’t have to be overwhelming… March 10, 2020 Trust Insights Week #11: Lea Brovedani It is easier to trust someone and for others to trust you if there is genuine care… March 17, 2020 Trust Insights Week #12: Sean Flaherty Developing trust starts with building a culture that values trust. March 24, 2020

 

 

Before you leave, Tap Into Trust and complete our 1 minute/1 question quiz. Find out how the level of trust in your workplace compares to hundreds of others. 

Have you reviewed how our workshops are helping teams and organizations just like yours elevate trust? Schedule an ONLINE webinar today.

Did you miss our previous 2020 Trust Insights? Access them at this link.

Contact us for more information on elevating trust on your team or in your organization or email me directly: barbara@trustacrossamerica.com

Copyright 2020, Next Decade, Inc.

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.

 

Brand Trust has become a “big deal” for marketers in 2019.

While some define brand trust as building trust with your customers and consumers, not everyone agrees.

A recent article in Adweek called Consumer’s Trust in Brands Has Fallen to a New Low highlights the confusion that often arises when “talking trust” from a brand standpoint, or any point for that matter. This particular article ran the “building trust gamut” from:

• Elevating trust with consumers
• Through data privacy 
• Relationship building
• To increasing transparency
• Meeting the needs of millennials and Get Z
• And even being good corporate citizens.

I don’t know about you, but for me that’s a pretty tall and confusing trust order.

So I asked the members of our Trust Council to read the article and share their professional observations about what brand trust is and what it isn’t. Here’s what five members had to say:

Bart Alexander, a seasoned CSR professional opined that most consumers, including young adults, are still choosing products and services based on functional attributes more than responsibility performance of the parent company. Similarly, most investors still seek to maximize total return rather than focus on long-term sustainability performance. But we may well be on the cusp of a tipping point where the approaches referenced in the article become mainstream. At the same time, we must acknowledge that most of the economy is continuing to operate on far more traditional views about value.

Nadine Hack, a leadership consultant and educator, concurs. All of this activity makes me wonder (hopefully, yet cautiously) if we may have finally reached a tipping point where corporate social responsibility is something businesses must act on, not just talk about.

Randy Conley at Ken Blanchard adds that in the digital world, organizations are having to constantly make deposits in the “trust bank” of their customers, because sooner or later, there will be an instance where trust is broken. It’s not a question of if they’ll break trust, but when. The vast majority of consumers are starting to realize that we only live under the illusion of privacy and data security.  At the end of the day, each of us as consumers has to decide our own comfort level of risk in sharing our information with others and trusting those individuals/organizations to keep it safe.

Linda Fisher Thornton, an ethics educator and consultant had this to say… Reputation and brand used to be considered separate things. You built your brand (what you wanted people to believe about your company) and you sought to protect the image of your brand that you had built. That approach is outdated. With social media transparency, reputation and brand have converged to the point that reputation defines and shapes the brand. People believe what they see a company doing rather than any pretty picture it has created to represent itself.The way to build trust is not to pretend to be a trustworthy brand, but to actually live it.

“The Trust Ambassador” Bob Whipple concluded with these thoughts…The thing I was reminded of is that we all need to be cognizant of the reputation of our own brands and the jeopardy we could put people in unwittingly. The real test is how diligent the company is on the front end to design a robust system and how the company reacts if and when something goes wrong. That is the test of their leadership.

Which brings us back to the question in the title of the article. What does Brand Trust mean?

I suppose it depends on one’s personal and professional perspective. If you are a marketer in 2019, apparently it’s a big deal, not unlike “purpose,” another big deal. Sadly, many of these are merely PR “campaigns” designed by those who have no subject matter expertise. The result is not only less trust, but more cynicism and confusion for both customers and consumers. 

Marketers who choose to talk about brand trust, should consider shifting their focus to helping build trustworthy and enduring brands. That’s not accomplished through data security or meeting the needs of a certain generation, and it’s certainly not the sole responsibility of the marketing department. The way trustworthy brands are built is similar to the way people build trust between themselves. It always boils down to principles and values, and either leaders, teams and organizations have them or they don’t. If brands want to be trustworthy and trusted, it’s leadership’s responsibility, along with their Board, to first clean up their own house from the inside out. Building a foundation of trust via principled leadership and trustworthy employees is the only solution to elevating brand trust. And then the marketing team can step in and craft an authentic message, not just a PR campaign.

As Bob Whipple said earlier, the real test is how diligent the company is on the front end.

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

Copyright 2019, Next Decade, Inc.

Organizations and their leaders often find themselves caught in “trust and ethics traps.”

Jes Staley the newly appointed American CEO of the beleaguered British Barclays Bank is one such leader. In fact, as he recently announced in this BBC News Article “I do believe that trust is returning to our institution. But we will never rest, we are never done. We have to focus on building that trust every day.”

Eerily, Staley’s comments have a familiar ring. In the wake of the Libor scandal in 2012 the Bank’s new CEO, an insider named Antony Jenkins also spoke extensively about rebuilding trust. Yet in an all too common response when faced with a crisis of trust and ethics, the Board Chair John McFarlane recently passed blame to regulators for picking on the bank.

We asked our Trust Alliance members to weigh in on the steps Barclays new CEO should take to build trust and ethics, carrying on the legacy of his predecessor.

Leadership Momentum’s Elizabeth Doty emphasizes the importance of building on the company’s new purpose and values, by making clearer, stronger commitments to stakeholders:

Though outsiders can never know a company’s internal reality, Mr. Staley’s comments show that he recognizes that trust is earned by being trustworthy. It is also positive that Mr. Staley’s predecessor, Mr. Jenkins, clarified the company’s purpose and values, and outlined specific behaviors, such as “I honour my commitments.” Still, given the turmoil of repeated leadership changes and reorganization, Mr. Staley and his team are likely to face serious credibility challenges, regardless of their intent.

The purpose of a commitment is to reduce others’ uncertainty, so they feel less risk in trusting us. Making and keeping meaningful commitments is a powerful way to proactively demonstrate trustworthiness. Yet, despite Barclay’s clarification of its purpose and values, stakeholders are still left with their primary uncertainty: How will you make tradeoffs under pressure? “I see nothing to indicate rates and markets will not be rigged again in future or that schemes to enhance bank profits at customers’ expense…could not repeat,” posted one commenter. One solution is to make clearer, stronger commitments specifically related to the side-stepping stakeholders worry about. For example, Barclay’s could commit to doing whatever most contributes to a customer’s goals, or to a level playing field in the market. Though it takes courage, companies that put such a stake in the ground and learn how to deliver a) increase credibility by showing they understand stakeholders’ true risks, b) reduce the potential for mixed messages to staff, c) force themselves to innovate, and d) differentiate themselves in a way that is extremely difficult to emulate. The key will be not to underestimate the challenges of re-shaping their culture to get there.

Davia Temin, a leading reputation and crisis response consultant speaks of the trust challenges continuing to plague most of the largest global financial institutions years after the 2008 financial meltdown.

Rebuilding trust in financial institutions is a complex algorithm that can test the skills of the best financial engineering “rocket scientist.”  

Far from simply making a pronouncement of one’s intent (although that can be the first step), the organization needs to first deconstruct all the elements that went into building trust in their particular firm in the first place, analyze all the things that went wrong, and then construct a plan to overcorrect the breaches. Because simply fixing them will not rebuild trust, it will only, maybe, stop the erosion. 

But this is seriously hard work. Barclays, as most banks, has a number of critical audiences, each of whom needs a different set of fixes in order to begin to restore their trust. And some of those fixes are in direct conflict with others. Individual customers, shareholders, institutional clients, counterparties, regulators and legislators in every country in which they operate, and even the public at large must each feel that the bank puts THEIR INTERESTS in front of its own. Because it has been the self-dealing aspect of financial institutions’ behavior that did the most damage to their reputations and caused the greatest loss of trust.   

So, to rebuild trust, Barclays and others will need to show their audiences that the bank puts them first…and that’s a hard thing to do and remain profitable. But it is almost impossible to make such a promise and then ignore it, or to fail in its announced attempt. So, now that Mr. Staley has thrown down the gauntlet, perhaps he can get his financial product rocket scientists to reverse-engineer all the elements that went into the losing of public trust, share them with us all, and then announce how he will redress them, one by one. That, indeed, just might work, and would be my prescription.”

And finally Bob Whipple of Leadergrow reminds us where trust starts in all institutions.

It sounds like a lot of problems have been swept under the rug for some time and are impacting all facets of Barclays. I applaud the resolve to rebuild trust in the bank and the candor at admitting the many unpopular steps it will take.  My advice is to recognize that rebuilding a culture starts at the top and works its way down the organization.  Establish an understanding that it is safe for people to tell you the things that are hard to say. Do not punish people when they bring up issues that are uncomfortable or difficult to address.    

Similar to Barclays many organizations find themselves in trust traps because they hold on to the notion that trust and ethics are “soft skills.”

And because trust is ignored or taken for granted, its decline continues across all major institutions. Some of the warning signs of low trust include:

• Disengaged boards with minimal diversity- not only must the board be “on board” with the mission and vision of the organization but research, including our own points to a correlation between high trust organizations and gender diversity.
• Frequent crises- identifying core values, practicing and reinforcing them daily heads off many “would be” crises. Leaders who view trust as “soft” often find themselves spending the majority of their time putting out fires instead of improving their culture.
• Short-term profit maximization at all costs including layoffs and job cuts as a first line of defense- it’s not unusual for companies like Barclays to think the bleeding can be stopped by cutting jobs and divisions, but these are simply bandages and they never cure diseases.
• Decreasing CEO tenure and increasing compensation packages tied to quarterly earnings- try tying CEO compensation to some point in the future (3-5 years) and suddenly the focus changes from the short to the long term.
• Increasing regulation (and scrutiny from regulators) and larger legal and compliance departments- as we have discussed in the past, trust simply can’t be regulated. It’s voluntary.

Fortunately the most progressive organizations have begun to recognize the strategic advantages of a high trust culture.

• Fewer crises and the ability to recover more rapidly
• A large trust “bank account”
• Faster decision making and improved execution
• Higher employee engagement
• Higher customer loyalty and retention
• Greater innovation (high trust fuels high innovation, not the other way around)
• Increased long-term profitability

The trust and ethics crisis at Barclays will not end until insiders, beginning at the Board level, not only accept blame and take responsibility, but also put actionable measures in place to clean up the culture. Will Jes Staley be the CEO who turns Barclays around? Will he walk the trust he is talking? What do you think?

Tuning in to Trust & Ethics is a new monthly column of Trust Across America-Trust Around the World’s Trust Alliance compiled by Barbara Brooks Kimmel

Another version of this article first appeared on the FCPA Blog.

Part I: bit.ly/1Mp9LO7

Part II: bit.ly/1UcHiTJ

Copyright (c)  2016 Next Decade, Inc.

 

 

 

 

A spate of corporate crises in 2015 have only served to fuel the long-term fire of low organizational trust. Under the theory that trust starts at the top and trickles down, we asked our Alliance Members and Top Thought Leaders how Boards of Directors can be the catalyst to drive organizational trust in the right direction in 2016.

Our readers will find twelve suggestions below:

 

Boards must replace fear with trust:

A trust-based culture increases morale, productivity, innovation, speed, agility, pride in the workplace, value to the customer and sustained high performance.

Edward Marshall, The Marshall Group

 

Boards must widen the scope of their membership:

Diverse boards bring different and new types of expertise and perspectives, increasing the range of topics discussed, and most important, encouraging open, candid and provocative discussions.

Nadine Hack, beCause Global Consulting

 

Boards and CEOs must be proactive:

Boards can and should lead certain functions for the firm from defining the desired culture to involvement in strategy development. They should not be passive monitors.

Bob Vanourek, Triple Crown Leadership

 

Board members must have authentic conversations:

They must be provided with sufficient information; a safe space that protects privacy and rejects behaviors to intimidate, ridicule or insult; and enough time to explore systemic issues without jumping to conclusions.

Alain Bolea, Business Advisors Network

 

Boards must avoid entrenching polarized attitudes:

Boards must have synergy. Look for warning signs in communications including “we versus they” or “if only we can get them to do this.”

Bob Whipple, Leadergrow

 

Board members must ask the tough (ethical) questions…and act on the answers:

Tie compensation and bonuses to ethical leadership metrics as well as financial performance.

Donna C. Boehme, Compliance Strategists

 

Boards must demand management accountability:

Mission, purpose, values, culture, strategy, business model and brand must be thoughtfully defined, activated and aligned to create a coherent whole.

Roger Bolton, Arthur Page Society

 

Boards must align their business agenda with societal expectations:

Board members must have an unmistakable sensitivity to the societal issues of the day. Capabilities must be aligned to build a better world AND a better company.

Doug Conant, Conant Leadership

 

Boards must speak with candor:

The canned, compliance-approved double-talk and corporate window dressing must be replaced. It is, at best, a short-term unsustainable business strategy, and hiding behind philanthropic efforts simply doesn’t work. Boards must build cultures of authentic long-term trust, practice it holistically, and regularly communicate it to all stakeholders.

Barbara Brooks Kimmel, Trust Across America

 

Boards must kill the evening before dinner:

Instead take a small group of front-line or mid-level employees to dinner in an informal setting without the presence of other corporate executives.

Robert Galford, Center for Leading Organizations

 

Board must understand their organization’s relationship with their stakeholders:

Take surveys, monitor social and legacy media, and share information across the organization; track the emotions of issues, events and topics, follow changes in the environment; engage and address concerns.

Linda Locke, Standing Partnership

 

Boards must develop their own crisis plan:

Enumerate what kinds of actions will be taken for different issues, their crisis strategy and who will be designated to play “first string.”

Davia Temin, Temin and Company

 

What would you add to these recommendations? Drop me a note at barbara@trustacrossamerica.com

Dozens more suggestions like this can be found in Trust, Inc: A Guide for Boards and C-Suites and in our brand new 2016 annual poster Weekly Ideas That You Can Implement to Build Trust

 

 

 

Welcome to TRUSTGiving 2014, our first annual weeklong trust awareness campaign.  Join the Alliance of Trustworthy Business Experts as our members help our readers navigate the complexities of trust. We will be blogging (several times a day) and posting on Twitter #TrustGiving2014.

In this post, Bob Whipple discusses the bilateral nature of trust.

I have studied trust for two decades.  It is such a rich topic area that the angles of insights are limitless. A concept I want to discuss here is the bilateral nature of trust.  We often think of trust as one dimensional: about how we feel toward another person. In reality, trust goes both directions at all times.

If we recognize this aspect of trust, one of the best ways to receive more trust in your life is to give more of it to others.  If a child trusts us to keep her from falling on her first bike ride, we rise to that trust by being worthy of it.

The same kind of reciprocal trust goes on in the workplace every day.  If we extend more trust to people then we will build more trust for us in return. It is this cycle of giving and receiving trust that is so helpful for anyone in a leadership position.

I work with leaders all the time. Many of them show little trust in their workers because they say, “how can I trust them when they show that they are not trustworthy.”  These leaders foster low trust actions and the cycle continues.  If they would only seek ways to show higher trust, in little ways, there is a Pygmalion way to walk out of the darkness to where higher trust extension is possible.

Take proactive step of extending more trust to people who work for you. This means doing things like:

• Giving people more authority
• Refraining from micromanaging
• Eliminating restrictive rules

These types of actions allow people to know you are serious about trusting them more, and they will rise to a higher level of performance as a result.

Bob Whipple (AKA “The Trust Ambassador”) is CEO of Leadergrow Inc., an organization dedicated to the development of leaders.  He has written four books on trust and leadership and has made contributions to several other trust books.  He has written hundreds of articles on trust and leadership topics.

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.

 

Culture does not change because we desire to change it. Culture changes when the organization is transformed – the culture reflects the realities of the people working together every day – Frances Hesselbein

 

Bob Whipple of LeaderGrow and a member of our Trust Alliance, was kind enough to contribute today’s guest blog post. He tackles the question of how trust is impacted when organizations make major changes.

When organizations make major changes, such as reorganizations, mergers, or acquisitions, the trust that was in the  groups prior to the action is often lost quickly. This happens for a variety of reasons, as I have documented in my book Trust in Transition: Navigating Organizational Change (ASTD Press, 2014)

The success of the entire change process depends on trust—the trust level before integration and the trust maintained during the process. It matters a lot on the conditions going into the action. There are three possible situations as follows:

1. There is high trust within both groups to begin with. This is the best condition because it allows for people to weather the shock of the change, having some faith that things can work out in the end.
2. One group has high trust, but in the other one the culture has been damaged by prior leadership behaviors. The entity with higher trust will usually do better in the negotiation because there is more free flow of information and fewer problems to hide.
3. When both groups have low trust, it becomes extremely difficult to make progress because there is work to be done around all the interpersonal issues at every juncture. If a group has low trust in their own organization before a merger, then there is little hope that they will have more trust in the other group. It becomes a real mess to unscramble.

As the integration unfolds, the level of trust going in to a major change has a lot to do with how successful it will be.  Make sure that you test the level of trust and keep it strong throughout the process for the best result.

Bob Whipple, MBA, CPLP, is a consultant, trainer, speaker, and author in the areas of leadership and trust.  He is the author of: Trust in Transition: Navigating Organizational Change, The Trust Factor: Advanced Leadership for Professionals, Understanding E-Body Language: Building Trust Online, and Leading with Trust is Like Sailing Downwind.  Bob has many years as a senior executive with a Fortune 500 Company and with non-profit organizations.

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. In 2012 Barbara was named “One of 25 Women Changing the World” by Good Business International.

Nominations are now being accepted for Trust Across America-Trust Around the World’s 5th annual Global Top Thought Leaders in Trustworthy Business.

                                                                                               Coming Soon!

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

Copyright © 2014, Next Decade, Inc.

 

 

 

BARBARA KIMMEL INTERVIEWS BOB WHIPPLE

Barbara Kimmel: Bob, tell us a bit about your background, qualifications and expertise. If you have  written a book, please provide the title.

Bob Whipple: I have been in the leadership and trust business for about 40 years. Working as a senior leader in a major corporation, I found that trust is the most significant enabler of exceptional performance. To build trust, you must have exceptional leaders.

I have three books published, and a fourth one under construction. They are:

The Trust Factor: Advanced Leadership for Professionals, 2003, Productivity Publications   amzn.to/14p25qp

Understanding E-Body Language: Building Trust Online, 2006, Productivity Publications     amzn.to/WIDWXo

Leading With Trust is Like Sailing Downwind, 2009, Executive Excellence Publishing           amzn.to/YbTbsX

Building Trust and Unity During a Merger or Acquisition, 2014

I have written over 300 published articles on trust, leadership, and other topics on personal excellence in numerous journals and in the online environment. “Leadership Excellence Magazine” has named me as the #14 top rated consultant on Leadership Development, and Trust Across America has identified me as one of the Top 100 Thought Leaders in Trustworthy Business Behavior. 

Barbara Kimmel: Trust Across America’s mission is to rebuild trustworthy business behavior across the globe.  How would you generally define trustworthy business behavior? 

Bob Whipple: I think it’s pretty simple. Trustworthy business behavior means doing the right things at all times, especially when nobody would know if you did something else.

Barbara Kimmel: In your opinion, what are some of the specific components of trustworthy business behavior?

Bob Whipple: Personally, I think the acronym for TRUST below is a good place to start. There are literally hundreds of components that embody trust, but if a leader can consistently apply these five components, he or she is going to do well at enabling trust.

1. Trusting Others – To receive more trust, show more trust.
2. Reinforcing Candor – Praise people for speaking their truth – drive out fear.
3. Universal goals – High trust requires alignment: all pull in the same direction.
4. Sincerity – Treat people the right way: Golden Rule is a good one.
5. Transparency – Share all the information you can legally share.

Barbara Kimmel: We all know that the erosion of corporate trust is a big problem. What are companies doing to combat this, and is it enough?

It is situational. Some organizations continue to shoot themselves in the foot on trust just about every day. Their leaders believe they are heading in the right direction, but they are quite blind to the damage they are doing.  It stems from a lack of Emotional Intelligence.

Fortunately, I am seeing more and more CEOs who are starting to realize what they leave off the table when there is low trust. These enlightened leaders are willing to at least consider the notion that they are a part of the problem when there is low trust. The ones that really “get it” are seeing dramatic productivity gains.

As the word spreads, some of the jerks are starting to wonder if there might really be something to this trust stuff.  That is encouraging, but there are still way too many losers out there. Turning a non-believer into a true enlightened advocate for higher trust is one of the true joys in my life.

Barbara Kimmel: Is the global “trust” climate improving or worsening? What actions will turn things around?

Bob Whipple: I believe the pendulum is heading in a good direction over the past few years. There are still a lot of snakes in the grass, but I believe the worst times of abuse may be behind us.

As the Edelman Trust Barometer shows, the level of trust fluctuates country-by-country depending on what has happened in the prior year. In general, trust in the USA is lagging many other countries. That is why the work of Trust Across America and the individual contributors to the trust movement is so critical for our collective future.

Barbara Kimmel: Can you provide a few examples of companies that are doing the “right” thing in your opinion? What steps are being taken by these companies that set them apart?

Bob Whipple: There are four outstanding companies in my hometown of Rochester, NY who are leading the way with trust. They score well on the top companies to work for in America every year. They are Wegmans (grocery chain), Dixon Schwabl (marketing and advertising firm), Eastman Savings and Loan (Federal Credit Union), and Klein Steel.

All four of these organizations invest heavily in their culture, and it shows in the results they are getting. In each case it is the result of enlightened and passionate leaders that is causing this remarkable track record.

Barbara Kimmel: Anything else you would like to add as a closing comment?

Bob Whipple: I am highly supportive of the work of the Trust Across America Organization and am a proud founding member of the Alliance of Trustworthy Business Experts (ATBE). bit.ly/13TX5Kj Our work is critically important, and we are making a difference. The next two years are going to show wonderful progress on trust in business across the globe.

Barbara Kimmel: Bob, thank you for your time today and all you do to advance the cause of trustworthy business.

What do you think? Send your comments to Barbara@trustacrossamerica.com

Barbara Kimmel is the Executive Director of Trust Across America, global leaders in information, standards, data and Who’s Who in trustworthy business. www.trustacrossamerica.com