Trust Across America-Trust Around the World™

If your life is anything like mine, you spend waste at least an hour every week, sometimes more, on a customer service issue involving some third party vendor who claims to be in business to enhance your personal or professional life. Comcast, Verizon, First Energy and all health insurance providers top this list. I’m not sure why these companies still bother using the word “service.” CHR or Customer Hindrance Representative would be more accurate.

These calls usually begin by pressing lots of buttons, entering many codes and personal information, and then being put on hold due to “heavy call volume” while being told the “call is important to us.” Often, before the offshore CHR picks up, the call is disconnected, and the process must be repeated. The latest “innovation” is notification that the call is being recorded. For whose benefit is that? One can only guess.

Who remembers when customer service meant something? When customers came before profits, calls were answered by an actual living being who had at least an elementary command of the English language, and who hadn’t been handed a robotic script to answer questions? It wasn’t really that long ago. But apparently now companies think they can save redirect money by hiring minimum wage, offshore CHRs and then, in the name of “training” hand them a list of responses that were certainly written by the legal department, and from which they cannot deviate. Not only are these companies sending a message that they do not trust their employees, apparently they also have little regard for their customers. The term “I apologize” is #1 on this script and so companies have taken two sacred words and devalued them into meaningless drivel that is supposed to solve all customer issues, regardless of the problem.

Is it any wonder why consumers have so little regard for the companies with which they do are forced to do business? Is it any wonder why trust in business continues to decline? Is it any wonder that more than 70% of employees are disengaged at work?

Who decided this was a “better way?” How did this happen? Is there a solution?

I propose a simple experiment.

• Put every manager on phone duty for one week. Heck, call it “The Golden Rule” CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) program and kill two birds with one stone.
• Send the entire legal department on vacation during this same time period.
• Replace the script with these 7 words: Let me see what I can do.

Barbara Brooks Kimmel is the CEO & Co-founder of Trust Across America-Trust Around the World . Established in 2008, the program’s mission is simply to provide tools and assistance to organizations interested in building stakeholder 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 at the City University of NY.

I wish I could take credit for the title of this article but it belongs to Marillyn A. Hewson, Lockheed Martin’s CEO and a Trust Across America 2015 Top Thought Leader in Trust. In a recent article in National Defense Magazine, Ms. Hewson discusses the steps required to integrate trust and ethics. If you don’t have time to read the full article, these are the five steps:

• Establish an ethics program grounded in values
• Build a culture of communication
• Lead by example
• Address issues quickly
• Hold business partners to the same standards

As Hewson shows, this process pays off.

The leadership consulting firm KRW International recently looked into business ethics. They found that moral leaders actually tend to make their companies more profitable. Employees rated their bosses on attributes like character and integrity, and sure enough, businesses led by upright CEOs saw an average return on assets nearly five times greater than those led by bosses perceived to be less moral.

This is further evidence of  Trust Across America’s updated business case for trust, the first article in the spring issue of TRUST! Magazine and our claim that trust is the “ultimate” compliance and ethics program.

The majority of business leaders continue to hold fast to their beliefs that trust is a “soft” skill, while the enlightened minority embraces trust as a business imperative and reaps the rewards.

Barbara Brooks Kimmel is the CEO & Co-founder of Trust Across America-Trust Around the World . Established 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 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).

What can we learn from organizational trust missteps, and occasionally the steps that propel us forward in a positive way?  This was the question we asked when designing our new Trustlets series (quick case studies on organizational trust.)

The following is a sample Trustlet from our first series:

Takata/General Motors/Fiat Chrysler: Automakers and the Public Trust

Overview:

The largest consumer product recall in U.S. history was announced in May 2015 when Takata, after numerous deaths, doubled its faulty airbag recall to 34 million vehicles, impacting 11 automakers. This comes in the wake of the General Motors airbag crisis that claimed over 100 lives, as well as a Fiat Chrysler airbag recall. All three cases are attributed to “cost cutting” measures.

For the first time in history, the NHTSA (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) is exercising legal authority that it gained about 15 years ago from the Transportation Recall Enhancement, Accountability, and Documentation Act, or TREAD Act.

Articles to be read before discussion:

Read Newsday: Automakers Risk Losing the Public Trust Forever

Read Reuters: Takata Faces Questions Over Airbag Fix

Read Detroit Free Press: NHSTA Tightening Oversight

What industry conditions or behaviors lead to greater regulatory action? What social solutions are available to create greater trust on the part of consumers?

Questions for discussion:

• What could Takata have done differently?
• Is tightening oversight the only solution to restore consumer trust?
• What steps must the automakers take to restore consumer trust?
• What should an automotive CEO be doing to walk the trust talk?
• When cost cutting measures result in deaths, should executives serve jail time?

Who is the intended audience for Trustlets? A few suggestions…

• Executive Education
• Undergraduate & Graduate Business Classes
• Work Teams in Every Organization
• Boards & C-Suites
• Workshops & Facilitated Discussions

Participants will gain a deeper understanding of the role of trust in organizational strategy. Trustlets compel participants to apply their theoretical ideas and practical trust experiences to real-world cases.

If you are interested in learning more about our Trustlets series, please click here.

Copyright © 2015 Next Decade, Inc.

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.

What can we learn about trust from the great leaders, teachers, writers and philosophers?

JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING

This week we turn our attention to the words of Peter Drucker, an author, educator and management consultant who was hailed by Business Week as the “man who invented management.”  This article pulls together twenty of his most inspiring quotes. Regardless of your role in life- a parent, teacher, business, religious or military leader, the following contain many messages about character, competence and consistency, the key ingredients for building trust.

1. “To do the most good requires saying no to pressures to stray, and the discipline to stop doing what does not fit.”
2. “Effective leadership is not about making speeches or being liked; leadership is defined by results not attributes.”
3. “Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision.”
4. “Every enterprise requires commitment to common goals and shared values. Without such commitment there is no enterprise; there is only a mob. The enterprise must have simple, clear, and unifying objectives. The mission of the organization has to be clear enough and big enough to provide common vision. The goals that embody it have to be clear, public, and constantly reaffirmed. Management’s first job is to think through, set, and exemplify those objectives, values, and goals.
5. “Success in the knowledge economy comes to those who know themselves – their strengths, their values, and how they best perform.”
6. “Rank does not confer privilege or give power. It imposes responsibility.”
7. “People who don’t take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year. People who do take risks generally make about two big mistakes a year.”
8. “Leadership is not magnetic personality, that can just as well be a glib tongue. It is not “making friends and influencing people”, that is flattery. Leadership is lifting a person’s vision to higher sights, the raising of a person’s performance to a higher standard, the building of a personality beyond its normal limitations.”
9. “A person can perform only from strength. One cannot build performance on weakness, let alone on something one cannot do at all.”
10. “1. What is our mission? 2. Who is our customer? 3. What does the customer value? 4. What are our results? 5. What is our plan?”
11. “The focus on contribution by itself supplies the four basic requirements of effective human relations: communications; teamwork; self-development; and development of others.”
12. “Many brilliant people believe that ideas move mountains. But bulldozers move mountains; ideas show where the bulldozers should go to work.”
13. “Meetings are by definition a concession to deficient organization For one either meets or one works. One cannot do both at the same time.”
14. “Gentlemen, I take it we are all in complete agreement on the decision here.” Everyone around the table nodded assent. “Then,” continued Mr. Sloan, “I propose we postpone further discussion of this matter until our next meeting to give ourselves time to develop disagreement and perhaps gain some understanding of what the decision is all about.”
15. “plan, organize, integrate, motivate, and measure.”
16. “Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.”
17. “If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old”
18. “The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said.”
19. “Efficiency is doing the thing right. Effectiveness is doing the right thing.”
20. “The three most charismatic leaders in this century inflicted more suffering on the human race than almost any trio in history: Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. What matters is not the leader’s charisma. What matters is the leader’s mission.”

My favorites are #4, #6, #16 and #20. How about yours? 

Want to read more from this series?

We recently highlighted some of the best quotes on building trust from:

•  John Wooden
•  John C. Maxwell
•  Zig Ziglar
•  Mahtma Gandhi
•  Dr. Seuss  (for Mother’s Day)
•  George Bernard Shaw
•  Military Leaders (for Memorial Day)
•  Napoleon Hill
•  Deepak Chopra 
• Quotes for fathers, from fathers and about fathers (for Father’s Day)

Barbara Brooks Kimmel is the Executive Director of Trust Across America-Trust Around the World whose mission is to help organizations build trust. She facilitates 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.