Building a trust based organization begins with tracking trust in teams and addressing trust weaknesses. Doing so results in the following:
Elevating employee engagement & retention
Reducing workplace stress
Enhancing decision making
Increasing innovation
Improving communication
Reducing costs and increasing profits
How many readers work on teams and in organizations with these attributes?
The growing interest in our Tap Into Trust campaign has brought over 200,000 individuals to our list of universal principles, available in 16 languages. We are now running the largest global (one minute/one question) anonymous survey on workplace trust, with the goal of determining which of our 12 principles of trust are the WEAKEST in teams and organizations. The anonymous survey can be taken here and the results viewed upon completion.
Building a trust based team or organization first requires leadership ACKNOWLEDGEMENT that trust is a tangible asset, not to be taken for granted, and acknowledgement remains the greatest obstacle, requiring vulnerability. If that hurdle can be overcome, the rest is easy: IDENTIFY and MEND. We call this AIM Towards Trust, and the framework is being adopted by enlightened leaders of teams and in organizations of all sizes and across industries, providing a path forward to high trust.
Elevating trust in teams and organizations requires both personal and interpersonal principles.
The weakest principles break the progress.
Trust does not stop at “talk”. It requires action.
Dress down Fridays, ice cream socials and “purpose” statements will not get a team or organization across the trust goal line.
For more information contact Barbara Brooks Kimmel, Founder, Trust Across America-Trust Around the World
Barbara Brooks Kimmel is an author, speaker, product developer and global subject matter expert on trust and trustworthiness. Founder of Trust Across America-Trust Around the World she is author of the award-winning Trust Inc., Strategies for Building Your Company’s Most Valuable Asset, Trust Inc., 52 Weeks of Activities and Inspirations for Building Workplace Trust and Trust Inc., a Guide for Boards & C-Suites. She majored in International Affairs (Lafayette College), and has an MBA (Baruch- City University of NY). Her expertise on trust has been cited in The Financial Times, Harvard Business Review, Investor’s Business Daily, Thomson Reuters, BBC Radio, The Conference Board, Global Finance Magazine, Bank Director and Forbes, among others.
When I was recently asked how trust has changed in the past decade my response was “Not much.” While the people, groups and institutions we should trust keep rearranging themselves in our collective minds, some gain in trust while others fade. Yet according to most major public opinion poll headlines trust has been declining.
But if you think about it, how we experience trust now is the same as it ever was. So is the value of trust – what it does for us – in business, politics, society, and life. Trust is very simply, the outcome of principled behavior. It always has been and always will be. As Stephen Covey has written, “Trust is the foundation for everything we do….” It is part of every relationship we have and undergirds everything we want or need to do together. So it is not that trust has been declining, it is trusting that has declined, and distrusting that has increased.
The Unchanging Experience of Trust
Our bodily experience of trust (and distrust), the sensations we feel, and the underlying neurophysiology that produce them have been with us for millennia. We are hard-wired to trust and to distrust, and we need both. Trusting others allows us to work together to accomplish what none of us can do alone. Distrust is built into our biology to help us stay alive and safe. What we are predisposed to do when we trust or distrust someone, or a group of someones, is also pretty much the same now as when humans were living in small clans and painting on cave walls.
Humans are wired to be drawn towards trust. When we trust others we feel safe enough to be open and at ease with them. At work this translates to collaborating effectively and having fun doing it. We happily share our ideas, good, bad and everything between, with people we trust. When we trust an information source we form opinions and act based on what we hear from them. When we trust a company, we tend to buy from them and invest in them. Distrust, on the other hand, insists we act to protect ourselves. Like a plague, we avoid people, groups, companies, and institutions we don’t trust.
In Whom We Trust (or not)
When you think “I trust this person/group/company/organization” an assessment is being made that their future behavior won’t harm and in fact will support you. That assessment leads to the embodied experience of trust described above, together with feeling certain emotions that travel with trusting, e.g., generosity, curiosity, hope, happiness, care. The same is so with the assessment “I don’t trust” except the sensations and emotions are distinctly different.
Which brings me to what has changed in the past decade and continues to change: specifically who we are trusting, and to what extent we are trusting them to do what they say they will do. According to several recent polls on perception of trust, we are trusting less. For example, over the past decade the Edelman Trust Barometer, an annual global opinion poll of trust levels in business, government, NGOs, and media, has found an annual shift in which of these institutions we are trusting more or less. Similarly public opinion surveys conducted by PwC, Pew Research Center and the Knight Foundation have looked at the trust employees and customers have in companies vs. what company leaders believe, and our trust in science and media, respectively. Again, they find changes in who we are trusting/distrusting.
Couple rotating/decreasing trust in societal institutions with what we know about the outcome of distrusting others and we have the makings of a slow-moving disaster. Unless we start turning this ship around we will see diminishing cooperation with increasing polarization, more balkanization in politics, media and society, and less willingness to talk things out as people pull back from those they distrust.
Trust-Building as Necessary Work
I believe now more than ever it’s time for those of us who work in the field of trust-building, who have the tools and expertise, to focus on helping the people we work with become trust-builders in their chosen fields. We understand that this is a competency that can be learned, developed and practiced. We have frameworks and tools to support people as they try to build their own trust-building capability and capacity. It is incumbent on leaders everywhere to step up and put learning and practicing trust-building at the forefront of their work.
Trusting people at work (where we spend most of our time) and in our communities, and between us and the institutions that hold together the fabric of those communities, is going to be essential for us as a species to make it through the big storms looming on the near horizon: political and social upheaval, and the potential threats posed by AI, to name just a few.
Barbara Brooks Kimmel is an author, speaker, product developer and global subject matter expert on trust and trustworthiness. Founder of Trust Across America-Trust Around the World she is author of the award-winning Trust Inc., Strategies for Building Your Company’s Most Valuable Asset, Trust Inc., 52 Weeks of Activities and Inspirations for Building Workplace Trust and Trust Inc., a Guide for Boards & C-Suites. She majored in International Affairs (Lafayette College), and has an MBA (Baruch- City University of NY). Her expertise on trust has been cited in Harvard Business Review, Investor’s Business Daily, Thomson Reuters, BBC Radio, The Conference Board, Financial Times, Global Finance Magazine, Bank Director and Forbes, among others.
When taken seriously, tracking and addressing the behaviors that build or weaken trust in teams and organizations will have the following benefits:
Elevating employee engagement & retention
Reducing workplace stress
Enhancing decision making
Increasing innovation
Improving communication
Reducing costs and increasing profitability
Is progress being made?
The growing interest in our Tap Into Trust campaign has brought over 212,000 people to our universal principles, available in 16 languages. We are also running the largest global (one minute/one question) anonymous survey on workplace trust, with the goal of determining which of our 12 principles of trust are the WEAKEST in teams and organizations and whether they change over time. The anonymous survey can be taken here and the results of hundreds of respondents viewed upon completion.
Building a trust based team or organization is not one size fits all. It happens in 3 stages. We use AIM as an acronym for our process.
ACKNOWLEDGING that trust (the outcome of principled behavior) is a tangible asset
IDENTIFYING the behaviors that are weakening and strengthening trust
MENDING the behaviors and tracking them over time
We call this AIM Towards Trust, and the framework is being adopted by enlightened leaders in organizations of all sizes and across industries, providing a path forward to high trust.
Elevating trust in teams and organizations requires specific personal and interpersonal principles and skills.
There is no “one size fits all” or check the box fix.
Barbara Brooks Kimmel is an author, speaker, product developer and global subject matter expert on trust and trustworthiness. Founder of Trust Across America-Trust Around the World she is author of the award-winning Trust Inc., Strategies for Building Your Company’s Most Valuable Asset, Trust Inc., 52 Weeks of Activities and Inspirations for Building Workplace Trust and Trust Inc., a Guide for Boards & C-Suites. She majored in International Affairs (Lafayette College), and has an MBA (Baruch- City University of NY). Her expertise on trust has been cited in Harvard Business Review, Investor’s Business Daily, The Financial Times, Thomson Reuters, BBC Radio, The Conference Board, Global Finance Magazine, Bank Director and Forbes, among others.
One of our Trust Alliance members was assisting a leadership team in assessing why a certain division was underperforming. We worked with them to run our simple one minute AIM Trust Audit for both the leadership team and the division employees. Take a look at the results. The first chart is leadership (38 respondents) and the second is the division employees. (108 respondents).
A relatively wide gap existed between the leadership team’s perception of the behaviors undermining trust compared to the employee’s perception. These results are quite common in our assessments.
How do you think the leadership team responded when provided with this data?
What would you advise them to do next?
Barbara Brooks Kimmel is an author, speaker, product developer and global subject matter expert on trust and trustworthiness. Founder of Trust Across America-Trust Around the World she is author of the award-winning Trust Inc., Strategies for Building Your Company’s Most Valuable Asset, Trust Inc., 52 Weeks of Activities and Inspirations for Building Workplace Trust and Trust Inc., a Guide for Boards & C-Suites. She majored in International Affairs (Lafayette College), and has an MBA (Baruch- City University of NY). Her expertise on trust has been cited in Harvard Business Review, Investor’s Business Daily, Thomson Reuters, BBC Radio, The Conference Board, Global Finance Magazine, Bank Director and Forbes, among others.
The returns of the Trust 200 Index over 13+ years according to IndexOne
More than 15 years ago The Economist published a briefing paper sponsored by Cisco, called “The Role of Trust in Business Collaboration,” concluding that tens of millions of dollars had been spent evaluating corporate governance but a *definition of corporate trust continued to elude us. The 2008 financial crisis essentially destroyed investor confidence in the stock market and the ethical decision making practices of business leaders and their public companies. And so it should come as no surprise that trust in the financial markets has stagnated and even deteriorated since that time. After all, what actions, if any, have organizations taken to build investor confidence and trust? Plenty of money is spent on PR “talk” followed by little constructive action.
What if instead of using the elusive word “trust” as the barometer, companies could instead be evaluated based on their trustworthiness? In other words, the ethical business principles and leadership practices that support trust building within the organization and can then be applied to all stakeholders. This was the question we began to address over fifteen years ago. With the assistance of academic, financial, corporate and consulting professionals, Trust Across America began to construct what became the FACTS Framework.
*Trust Across America describes trust at the individual/interpersonal level as the “outcome of principled behavior” and organizational trustworthiness as the “collective outcome of principled behavior.”
Our ten+ year study published in November 2021 continues to be, by order of magnitude, the most comprehensive and data driven analysis available regarding the trustworthiness of public companies. It speaks to both the public and the financial industry’s understanding of trust, supports trust based investment decision making and enables targeted and simplified trust portfolio construction. We analyze companies quarterly and rank order by company, sector and market capitalization.
As our chart and study link above highlight, trustworthy public companies are rewarded over the long-term. They not only avoid expensive crises but also have the benefit of broader internal and external stakeholder support.
Low trust keeps investors out of the stock market and on the sidelines
It has not been valuation, liquidity, or profits that keeps many investors on the sidelines. It is a lack of trust in both the financial industry and in the ethical actions and decision making practices of public company leadership. Even after a time of dramatic returns over the past several years, vast amounts of money remain parked in low yielding money market accounts and other underperforming investments. By delivering a time tested and “beyond reproach” strategy to investors combining the key drivers of corporate trustworthiness, Trust Based Investing can serve as a viable solution that both the industry and the public has been seeking.
In conclusion
Trust Based Investing provides the following:
Companies have proven through a rigorous analysis that they are trustworthy and represent lower investment risk.
Investors can be assured that ethical business and investment decisions are being made.
Trustworthy companies have stable and strong investment returns.
A virtuous cycle is created. As investment money flows into the hands of these companies, other companies will want to follow suit and become more trustworthy.
Barbara Brooks Kimmel is an author, speaker, product developer and global subject matter expert on trust and trustworthiness. Founder of Trust Across America-Trust Around the World she is author of the award-winning Trust Inc., Strategies for Building Your Company’s Most Valuable Asset, Trust Inc., 52 Weeks of Activities and Inspirations for Building Workplace Trust and Trust Inc., a Guide for Boards & C-Suites. She majored in International Affairs (Lafayette College), and has an MBA (Baruch- City University of NY). Her expertise on trust has been cited in Harvard Business Review, Investor’s Business Daily, Thomson Reuters, BBC Radio, The Conference Board, Global Finance Magazine, Bank Director and Forbes, among others.
Trust Across America-Trust Around the World (TAA-TAW) whose mission is to help enhance trustworthy behavior in organizations, announces its 2024 Top Thought Leaders in Trust. The awards program, now in its 13th year, celebrates professionals who are transforming the way organizations do business.
While a growing number of global “top” lists and awards are published, no others specifically address trust. Celebrating its 16th anniversary this year, TAA-TAW has been working with a growing team of global cross-functional professionals to research the “practice” of trust and build tools to support leaders, teams and organizations who choose to build, elevate or repair trust.
According to Barbara Kimmel, CEO, ”The release of our 2024 honors brings the focus to global champions of trust. Beginning this year we will be recognizing ten professionals who inspire organizations to look more closely at their higher purpose…to create greater value for, and trust from all of their stakeholders, and understand trust is a “hard currency” with real returns.All of our honorees have made a significant contribution to the field of trust over the past 12 months. Their expertise ranges from journalism to financial services.”
The honorees can be accessed via the Winter 2024 issue of TRUST! Magazine, available at no cost at this link, including complete details on our methodology, award winners, and additional trust resources.
Nominate now for our 2025 Top Thought Leaders at this link.
Trust Across America-Trust Around the World™ is a program of Next Decade, Inc., an award-winning communications firm that has been unraveling and simplifying complex subjects for over 20 years. TAA-TAW helps organizations build trust through an abundance of resources and ever-expanding tools. It also provides several frameworks for organizations to improve trustworthy practices, and showcases individuals and organizations exhibiting high levels of trust and trustworthiness.
Tracking and addressing the behaviors that build or weaken trust in teams and organizations has the following benefits:
Elevating employee engagement & retention
Reducing workplace stress
Enhancing decision making
Increasing innovation
Improving communication
Reducing costs and increasing profitability
Is progress being made?
The growing interest in our Tap Into Trust campaign has brought almost 180,000 people to our universal principles, available in 16 languages. We are also running the largest global (one minute/one question) anonymous survey on workplace trust, with the goal of determining which of our 12 principles of trust are the WEAKEST in teams and organizations and whether they change over time. The anonymous survey can be taken here and the results of hundreds of respondents viewed upon completion.
Building a trust based team or organization is not one size fits all. It happens in 3 stages. We use AIM as the acronym.
ACKNOWLEDGING that trust (the outcome of principled behavior) is a tangible asset
IDENTIFYING the behaviors that are weakening and strengthening trust
MENDING the behaviors and tracking them over time
We call this AIM Towards Trust, and the framework is being adopted by enlightened leaders in organizations of all sizes and across industries, providing a path forward to high trust.
Elevating trust in teams and organizations requires specific personal and interpersonal principles and skills.
There is no “one size fits all” or check the box fix.
Barbara Brooks Kimmel is an author, speaker, product developer and global subject matter expert on trust and trustworthiness. Founder of Trust Across America-Trust Around the World she is author of the award-winning Trust Inc., Strategies for Building Your Company’s Most Valuable Asset, Trust Inc., 52 Weeks of Activities and Inspirations for Building Workplace Trust and Trust Inc., a Guide for Boards & C-Suites. She majored in International Affairs (Lafayette College), and has an MBA (Baruch- City University of NY). Her expertise on trust has been cited in Harvard Business Review, Investor’s Business Daily, Thomson Reuters, BBC Radio, The Conference Board, Global Finance Magazine, Bank Director and Forbes, among others.
I remember speaking with Greg Link when he and Stephen M.R. Covey were writing their book Smart Trust.
That was 10 years ago
What has changed? In essence accountable leaders who have assumed responsibility for trust continue to reap the rewards. But sadly, over the past decade not many have chosen this route. Instead, the majority of businesses are simply checking boxes and little more. Why? These activities are relatively fast, easy and can be delegated. Put the “trust” label on the program and check the box. Now the communications team has some great talking points. Brand trust, purpose trust, AI trust, digital trust, ESG trust, etc. The list is endless. Who benefits from this approach? Consultants, speakers, academics, media and NGOs who have all joined forces in monetizing “perception of trust.” Who loses? Boards, business leaders, employees, customers and most other stakeholders.
In Smart Trust Covey and Link discuss 5 actions
Choose to believe in trust. …
Start with self. …
Declare your intent and assume positive intent in others. …
Do what you say you’re going to do. …
Lead out in extending trust to others.
These actions are a great starting point for business leaders, and there are many time tested strategies that will result in smart trust. Paradoxically, while trust is more important than ever, the majority of those who have the power to elevate it are choosing all the wrong approaches. I call that a dangerous win/lose proposition.
In the words of Covey and Link There is a direct connection between trust and prosperity because trust always affects two key inputs to prosperity: speed and cost. In low-trust situations, speed goes down and costs go up because of the many extra steps that suspicions generate in a relationship, whereas two parties that trust each other accomplish things much quicker and, consequently, cheaper. The authors call high trust a “performance multiplier.” High trust creates a dividend, while low trust creates a wasted tax.
Whether you choose to be part of the trust problem or part of the solution, here are a few indisputable facts:
Trust takes time and it is built in incremental steps.
Trust building is an inside out, not an outside in activity.
Trust ALWAYS starts with leadership.
As Bill George said in his testimonial for Smart Trust… Nothing is more important than building trust in relationships and in organizations. Trust is the glue that binds us together. Everywhere I go I see a remarkable loss of trust in leaders, and once lost, trust is very hard to regain. I feel this loss is tearing at the fabric of society, as so many people love to blame others for their misfortunes but fail to look in the mirror at themselves.
Barbara Brooks Kimmel is an author, speaker, product developer and global subject matter expert on trust and trustworthiness. Founder of Trust Across America-Trust Around the World she is author of the award-winning Trust Inc., Strategies for Building Your Company’s Most Valuable Asset, Trust Inc., 52 Weeks of Activities and Inspirations for Building Workplace Trust and Trust Inc., a Guide for Boards & C-Suites. She majored in International Affairs (Lafayette College), and has an MBA (Baruch- City University of NY). Her expertise on trust has been cited in Harvard Business Review, Investor’s Business Daily, Thomson Reuters, BBC Radio, The Conference Board, Global Finance Magazine, Bank Director and Forbes, among others.
“A recent study by McKinsey found that those companies listed in Standard & Poor’s 500 was 61 years in 1958. Today, it is less than 18 years. McKinsey believes that in 2027, 75% of the companies currently quoted on the S&P 500 will have disappeared.” While some might question this conclusion or argue that disruptive technology is primarily to blame, maybe lack of trustworthiness is the real culprit.
Every year Trust Across America-Trust Around the World creates a “Top 10” Most Trustworthy Public Company list. The 2022 list can be found here. Four of the companies were founded in the 1800s and all but one has been in business for more than 18 years. The average life span of the ten companies is 77 years. Could it be that the most trustworthy companies are not only great innovators, but also tend to stay in business because they are well governed?
Some of warning signs of poor governance and low trustworthiness may surprise you.
Trust is taken for granted and viewed as a soft skill. Either leadership never discusses it, or worse yet attempts to delegate it.
There is a new chief in town who holds the title of Chief Trust Officer but it is not the CEO (see #1 above) as it should be, and the job description is similar if not identical to the Chief Risk Officer. Trust building and risk mitigation skillsets are not one and the same and trust always starts at the top.
The skillset of the “leadership” team needs a serious reset. For example, layoffs are a first line of defense.
Employee turnover is high but no one is asking why.
The company website contains lots of Kumbaya “words” that do not translate into action. Just ask the employees.
Strategies for elevating organizational trust and trustworthiness have never been discussed let alone described, shared or agreed upon.
Leadership focuses on survival and short-term profitability. In fact in many cases, compensation is directly tied to quarterly earnings.
Board diversity in gender and race are present but sorely lacking is diversity of thought or opinions.
A well defined/aligned hiring strategy has not been implemented resulting in cultural confusion and non engaged employees.
Expensive Short-term “perception of trust” programs/workarounds are abundant. (Hint: Think about whether the program can easily tick a box.)
Take a look at this infographic for some additional insights.
Elevating trust and trustworthiness does not require complex formulas. Most of these warning signs can be easily addressed given the right tools and resources, and a willingness to fix what is broken. Want to learn more about building organizational trust and trustworthiness? Our website provides an endless number of tools and resources.
Barbara Brooks Kimmel is an author, speaker, product developer and global subject matter expert on trust and trustworthiness. Founder of Trust Across America-Trust Around the World she is author of the award-winning Trust Inc., Strategies for Building Your Company’s Most Valuable Asset, Trust Inc., 52 Weeks of Activities and Inspirations for Building Workplace Trust and Trust Inc., a Guide for Boards & C-Suites. She majored in International Affairs (Lafayette College), and has an MBA (Baruch- City University of NY). Her expertise on trust has been cited in Harvard Business Review, Investor’s Business Daily, Thomson Reuters, BBC Radio, The Conference Board, Global Finance Magazine, Bank Director and Forbes, among others.
Many models of (un)ethical decision making assume that people decide rationally and are, in principle, able to evaluate their decisions from a moral point of view. However, people might behave unethically without being aware of it. They are ethically blind.
As organizations are comprised of individuals, Ethical Blindness naturally extends into the workplace. Some business sectors appear to be more ethically blind than others, and this creates enormous enterprise risk.
Ethical blindness can be corrected, but only if leaders choose to be “tuned in” to the warning signs described below:
The Board of Directors has not established policies or procedures to elevate ethical and trustworthy behavior within their own team, nor with their internal and external stakeholders.
Leaders, unless they are ethically “aware” by nature, are not proactive about elevating trust or ethics as there is no mandate to do so. When a crisis occurs, the “fix” follows a common “external facing” script involving a costly and unnecessary PR campaign. A few years ago Wells Fargo ran a “building trust” television commercial providing a timely example of bad PR. Meanwhile internally, it was (and continues to be) “business as usual.”
Discussions of short term gains and cost cutting dominate most group meetings. The pressure to perform is intense and the language used is very strong.
The Legal and Compliance departments are large and growing faster than any other function.
The organizational culture is a mystery. No clear “ownership” of ethical or trustworthy business practices or decision-making exist. Nobody, including leadership, wants to take ownership for fear of finding out.
Discussions/training on ethics and trust rarely occur and when they do, they are lead by either the compliance or legal department and focus on rules and risk minimization, not ethics and trust.
Ethical considerations/testing are not part of the hiring process and fear is widespread among employees.
Is Ethical Blindness at the organizational level fixable? Absolutely. But the first order of business requires leadership acknowledgement and commitment to elevating organizational trust and ethics.
These 12 Principles called TAP, were developed over the course of a year by a group of ethics and trust experts who comprise our Trust Alliance. They should serve as a great starting point for not only a discussion but a clear roadmap to eradicating Ethical Blindness. As a recent TAP commenter said:
“An environment /culture that operates within this ethos sounds like an awesome place to me, I would work there tomorrow if I knew where to look for it.”
Barbara Brooks Kimmel is an author, speaker, product developer and global subject matter expert on trust and trustworthiness. Founder of Trust Across America-Trust Around the World she is author of the award-winning Trust Inc., Strategies for Building Your Company’s Most Valuable Asset, Trust Inc., 52 Weeks of Activities and Inspirations for Building Workplace Trust and Trust Inc., a Guide for Boards & C-Suites. She majored in International Affairs (Lafayette College), and has an MBA (Baruch- City University of NY). Her expertise on trust has been cited in Harvard Business Review, Investor’s Business Daily, Thomson Reuters, BBC Radio, The Conference Board, Global Finance Magazine, Bank Director and Forbes, among others. For more information contact barbara@trustacrossamerica.com
Building a trust based organization begins with tracking trust in teams and addressing trust weaknesses. Doing so results in the following:
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