Addressing Trust Deficits

Once a business has come to the conclusion that establishing a culture of Trust is an important competitive advantage in it achieving sustained higher performance, the question then (naturally) turns to 'how do we do this'?

Some insights on the 'how' were provided by a recent CEO survey from PWC, which gathered inputs from 1,200 business leaders in 69 countries. One question asked which approaches they were adopting to address issues of Trust, and responses included Improve Sector Reputation, Proactive Dialogue with Policy Makers/Regulators, Systematic Approach to Measuring Reputation, Corporate Responsibility Programmes, Media Relations ans Advertising, Reporting and Engagement with Investor Community, Work with NGOs to Improve Practices and Executive Compensation Packages.

At first glance, this seems like a comprehensive list, but on further examination, what's clear is that it doesn't touch on the issue of developing new ways of thinking and new ways of working across the 100s, 1000s or 10000s of people that work for a business and who contribute to (or detract from) an overall culture of Trust on a daily business.

Perhaps one of the reasons that this element does not feature is that it seems hard to achieve. Our experience bears out that this is not straighforward, but it has shown us how this element of addressing day to day behaviours across an entire workforce is a necessary part of achieving a truly trust based culture and that it will distinguish those who do it well. Where FranklinCovey helps in making this seem 'less hard' is in codifying the mindsets and skill sets that create Trust at a Personal level, a Team level, and Organisational level and a Client level and then making these accessible to all employees from Executive right down to Front Line level.