Trust Across America-Trust Around the World™

Welcome!

While our monthly roundup is normally a collaborative undertaking of our Trust Alliance, this month we gave our members a well-deserved holiday and instead assembled a handful of Barbara Brooks Kimmel’s most popular articles and interviews of 2015.

Our goal is to provide our readers with  a better appreciation for the importance of embracing trust as an organizational imperative.

Let’s get started!

In this Forbes article some tough organizational trust questions are answered, including:

• “How can individuals and organizations capitalize on trust?”
• “Jack Welch recently said that the only thing an executive today should be focused on is trust. Why do you think Mr. Welch have arrived at that conclusion in 2015?”

Our July Trust Quest asked: Which is the greater problem facing today’s society? Is it an unwillingness to trust others or alternatively, that people just aren’t trustworthy enough? Here’s the results of the poll. Our August poll launches on August 1. We hope you will participate.

The terms compliance, ethics and trust are often used synonymously when they shouldn’t be. What’s the difference and how can leaders ensure that trust stands alone? This Culture University article answers those questions.

Our most popular post year-to-date simply asks “Is it Too Lonely at the Top for Trust?

And finally, the most downloaded article from our website, and perhaps the key that unlocks the trust door is called “Return on Trust.” It’s a reprint from our quarterly magazine called TRUST!

Enjoy!

How do low-trust leaders communicate when faced with a trust breach? Here’s a quick sampling of 10 “one- liners” pulled from the headlines over the past several weeks.

1. “It was our legal right to do so.”
2. “I had no hard evidence.”
3. “Errors are inadvertent and happen.”
4. “We will increase our compliance monitoring.”
5. “There was no calculation to mislead people.”
6. “We’re all a bit stunned by the news.“
7. “I mean it when I say we screwed up.”
8. “No comment at this time.”
9. “We continue to cooperate with the relevant authorities on pursuing those responsible for this criminal act.”
10. “I was totally unaware that this was in the works.”

Huh, what and are you kidding?

Why do we continue to read these rehashed headlines after a trust violation and why do leaders use these excuses? Very simply because organizational trust is not regulated; it’s voluntary. And because of this one simple fact, trust is largely ignored in most organizations. It’s not practiced proactively unless leadership places trust high on it’s business agenda. That’s called intentional trust, and it’s very rare. Instead, most leaders wait for the next crisis (which is a “given” in low trust organizations) and then pull an excuse from the list above, usually with the assistance of the legal department.

If ANY leader of ANY organization actually believes that these “one-liners” build long-term trust with stakeholders, please drop a note to barbara@trustacrossamerica.com . I have a bridge I’d like to sell you.

Barbara Brooks Kimmel has been the Executive Director of Trust Across America-Trust Around the World  since 2008. The program’s mission is simply to provide tools and assistance to organizations interested in building trust. Barbara runs the world’s largest organizational trust membership program. 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.

Barbara is an award-winning communications executive and former consultant to McKinsey who has run her own firm, Next Decade, Inc., that has been unraveling and simplifying complex subjects for over twenty years. She holds a BA in International Affairs from Lafayette College and an MBA from Baruch (City University of NY).

Do trustworthy CEOs share similar profiles?

What about their untrustworthy counterparts?

Since 2010, Trust Across America™ (TAA) has been conducting an annual review to identify The Most Trustworthy Public Companies in America. Over 2000 companies are independently screened through our custom FIDES™ software using our proprietary Framework called FACTS®, ranking the trustworthiness of companies on five primary indicators of trustworthiness: Financial stability, Accounting conservativeness, Corporate governance, Transparency and Sustainability. No internal assessments or surveys are completed and companies do not know they are being analyzed.

This past April we released our fifth year of findings and named our Top Ten Most Trustworthy Public Companies (over 5 years.)

What do the CEOs of these “Top 10” companies have in common and how do their profiles compare to the “least trustworthy” in our model?

Most Trustworthy Profile:

• All are men
• All were born between 1950 and 1960
• All were promoted from within to CEO
• Seven of the ten have been the CEO for at least five years (well above the national average CEO tenure)
• Undergraduate education is diverse and less than half have MBAs

We then took one additional step, reviewing the profiles of the CEOs from the ten LEAST trustworthy companies (with market capitalization over $10 billion) and here’s what we found:

Least Trustworthy Profiles:

• All are men
• Born between 1934 and 1967
• Five of the ten were promoted from within (three of the five became CEO through mergers)
• Six of the ten have been CEO for over five years
• Undergraduate education is diverse and one has no college degree

What conclusions, if any, should be drawn from this small study?

Barbara Brooks Kimmel has been the Executive Director of Trust Across America-Trust Around the World  since its founding in 2008. The program’s mission is simply to provide tools and assistance to organizations interested in building trust. Barbara runs the world’s largest organizational trust membership program. 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.

Barbara is also an award-winning communications executive and former consultant to McKinsey who has run her own firm, Next Decade, Inc., that has been unraveling and simplifying complex subjects for over twenty years. She holds a BA in International Affairs from Lafayette College and an MBA in Marketing from Baruch (City University of NY).

Which is the greater problem facing society? Is it an unwillingness to trust others or alternatively, that people just aren’t trustworthy enough? This is the question we posed in our July Trust Quest and here are the results. Apparently it is an unwillingness to trust others. Do you agree?

Our next Trust Quest poll will launch on August 1 on the home page of the Trust Across America website.

The summer issue of TRUST! Magazine has just been published. If you are interested in the subject of organizational trust, you can read more about the summer issue at this link.

Barbara Brooks Kimmel is the Executive Director of Trust Across America-Trust Around the World whose mission is to help organizations build trust. She runs the world’s largest membership program for those interested in the subject. Barbara 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 annual 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.

Did you know we have published 3 books in our award-winning TRUST Inc. series. They are yours when you join our Alliance.

Copyright 2015, Next Decade, Inc.

What happens when a group of openminded trust, ethics and compliance experts meet for lunch to discuss the intersection of the three disciplines?

One of the tasks at hand was to create a visual representation of the functional interaction between compliance, ethics and trust in an organization.

Copyright (c) 2015, Next Decade, Inc.

What does this mean?

Compliance: While organizations require compliance as a minimum “rule setting/obeying standard,” compliance does not necessarily have an ethics OR a trust mandate. Compliance is merely the starting point, not the end. In fact, it can be trust’s worst enemy when it is assumed that compliance encompasses trust and ethics. Compliance is regulated while ethics and trust are voluntary. In most companies, this distinction is not made and the C&E Officer is usually an attorney who simply enforces the “laws.” He or she may have no understanding of ethics, let alone trust.

Ethics: The “character” component of trust is ethics, and unlike compliance, it is a personal choice. It’s the individual and organizational value system that must be debated, decided and set in place by the Board of Directors, not the CEO.  A Chief Ethics Officer, not a C&E Officer, is the distiller of these values. He or she need not be an attorney. So what role does trust play? Unfortunately, both individuals and organizations can be “ethical” without being trustworthy because there are two more attributes that must be present for trust to flourish.

Trust: In order for an individual or organization to be trustworthy it must, at a minimum exhibit not only character (ethics) but competence and consistency in all internal and external relationships. “High trust” companies understand the distinction between compliance, ethics and trust. Going beyond compliance and ethics by adding the trust component results in:

• Less need/emphasis on compliance and it’s oppressive laws and regulations
• Greater employee satisfaction and lower turnover
• Faster decision-making and innovation
• Less risk and fewer crises
• Better relationships not only with customers but all stakeholders
• A happier workplace
• Higher profitability

Companies that understand the distinctions described above and embrace trust as a business imperative are beginning to hire Chief Trust Officers (CTrO), and for good reason(s). They are the “keepers of the golden ticket,” and perhaps the organization’s most valuable employee.

Barbara Brooks Kimmel is the Executive Director of Trust Across America-Trust Around the World whose mission is to help organizations build trust. She runs the world’s largest membership program for those interested in the subject. Barbara 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 annual 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.

Did you know we have published 3 books in our award-winning TRUST Inc. series. They are yours when you join our Alliance.

Copyright 2015, Next Decade, Inc.

Welcome!

Our monthly roundup is another collaborative undertaking of our Trust Alliance, selected blog posts on a variety of organizational trust topics. The subjects are as diverse as the expertise of our members!

By reviewing these posts, our readers will have a better appreciation for the importance of embracing trust as an organizational imperative.

Let’s get started!

What is the outcome when terms like “brutally honest” are used? Holly Latty-Mann discusses this in Trust and Honest Feedback: Up Close and Personal

Do you trust your employees to tweet about the company? Nan Russell shares some excellent advice in Psychology Today.

Taina Savolainen an academic partner from Finland discusses the role of story-telling in building organizational trust.

Linda Fisher Thornton wonders what our workplaces would be like if every leader cared about others.

My most popular post this month introduces Trust Across America’s VIP Model. Take a look!

And finally, what does your “place” smell like? This is an excellent 8 minute speech by Professor Sumantra Ghoshal at the World Economic Forum. It’s about corporate environments and the faults of management in creating a positive work place. The goal is “trust” and Professor Ghoshal explains why in “The Smell of the Place.” The speech has been accessed almost 85,000 times.

Barbara Brooks Kimmel is the Executive Director of Trust Across America-Trust Around the World whose mission is to help organizations build trust, and runs the world’s largest membership program for those interested in the subject. 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 annual 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.

Did you know we have published 3 books in our award-winning TRUST Inc. series. They are yours when you join our Alliance.

Copyright 2015, Next Decade, Inc.