Trust Across America-Trust Around the World™

It’s Week #24 of 2016. This latest article is part of a series drawn from our 3rd annual 2016 Trust Poster….now hanging in hundreds of offices around the world. Get yours today!

52 Ideas That You Can Implement to Build Trust

As the CEO and Cofounder of Trust Across America-Trust Around the World, I offer this week’s idea:

When trust is made a business imperative, leadership must “own” it.

Ask almost any employee from the ground floor to the C-Suite who “owns” trust in the organization and don’t be surprised at the blank stares coming back your way. The truth is, “trust” is an orphan child simply because most leaders suffer from two false assumptions:

• Trust is a soft skill.
• Trust can’t be measured or tied to profitability. 

But our own FACTS(R)  Framework research paints a very different picture. Trust is NOT soft and it CAN be measured. During the three-year period from February 2013-February 2016 America’s most trustworthy public companies outperformed the S&P 500 by 1.8x. The composite results translate to 16.7% annualized for FACTS® vs. 9.5% for the S&P 500.

This was not a “test” but rather actual money under management, followed by an independent audit verifying the returns.

When leaders embrace trust as an intentional business strategy it translates into a hard asset and profits soar. Building organizational trust is a top down strategy and almost always involves a period of culture change. If the leader doesn’t recognize the need for change, own it and budget for it, it will never happen. The most progressive leaders are out of the “trust” gate and ahead of their peers.

Barbara Brooks Kimmel is the CEO and Cofounder of Trust Across America-Trust Around the World whose mission is to help organizations build trust. Now in its seventh year, the program’s proprietary FACTS® Framework ranks and measures the trustworthiness of over 2000 US public companies on five quantitative indicators of trustworthy business behavior. Barbara is also the editor of the award winning TRUST INC. book series and the Executive Editor of TRUST! Magazine.

Copyright 2016, Next Decade, Inc.

Destiny is no matter of chance. It is a matter of choice. It is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved–  William Jennings Bryan

Early this week we published the inaugural edition of TRUST! Magazine. It features stories of companies and leaders in the financial services industry who are NOT the bad apples we read about daily in the press. These stories contain dozens of best practices that can be emulated and replicated in companies that choose to put trust on their daily docket.

The people who contributed to this magazine are as diverse as the subject of trust itself- Jan Lynn Owen, a California Banking Commissioner, Brad Katsuyama, who’s name you may recall from 60 Minutes, Steven Mandis a former Goldman Sachs investment banker, Bruce Cahan a visiting scholar at Stanford University, Jack Hubbard, a member of our trust alliance, who has spent decades teaching bankers how to be trustworthy, and David Reiling the CEO of Sunrise Banks, to name just a few. These are the people who are leading the movement to change the way business is done. These are the people who not only talk trust but walk it too.

In compiling this magazine, I was reminded again and again that industry is not destiny. Similar to the NFL, the good players have their reputation’s tarnished by a handful of thugs.

Five years ago, Trust Across America-Trust Around the World developed the only holistic, quantitative measurement of the trustworthiness of public companies. We call it our FACTS Framework and we have been carefully tracking individual company and industry performance since then. The “trust trends”, and even the risks we see, are very different than what some of the companies choose to talk about, and what the opinion polls would have you believe. Companies that rise to the top of our model have similar DNA, regardless of their industry. Their thinking is holistic and “long-term” and they crush their competition.

Trust begins with trustworthy leadership at the Board & C-Suite level. We’ve published two award-winning books on the subject with a third out in November. Trust is built over time and in incremental steps. It doesn’t matter what the industry. The steps are the same. If trust is considered a business imperative, it is built into the corporate credo, vision and values, and practiced every day by everyone. It is reinforced at every opportunity.

No company is perfect, but trust ALWAYS begins with the internal actions of leadership. Don’t believe for a minute that industry is destiny. Not yet convinced? Read our magazine and see for yourself.

PS- An early observation based on sales… the majority of buyers are not US based. What does that tell you?

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.

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

Have you seen our brand new magazine TRUST!

Copyright © 2014, Next Decade, Inc.