Avoiding 'Stroke of the Pen' Responses to Building Organisational Trust

A feature within Strategy + Business from 3 years ago on 'The Good,the Bad and the Trustworthy' reminds us how trust rose to prominence as an issue with many of the corporate scandals at the time, and encourages to reflect how it is still a central consideration for all organisations today

Companies, both big and small, risk their reputation each day. No matter how good things seem to be — earnings are on the rise or a new product is a smash hit — serious threats can instantly damage a company’s reputation, sending even the most respected businesses into a tailspin from which they might not fully recover for years. Environmental accidents, manufacturing mishaps, executive misconduct, financial irregularities, product recalls, and online attacks by special interest groups, for starters, are now commonplace. Many businesspeople seem to think, watching the recent public excoriation of BP, Toyota, Goldman Sachs, and other companies, that the most appropriate way to manage reputational risk is to significantly increase spending on crisis management: Invest in lobbying, “apology advertising,” and a crackerjack public relations agency that can swoop in to make such problems go away.

However, this approach will no longer fly, because the public is growing increasingly cynical about corporate behavior. Some companies’ hapless responses to accidents and other incidents have made business seem generally out of touch and untrustworthy. At the same time, the strategic value of a good corporate reputation seems to be growing stronger. The 2010 Trust Barometer survey by the PR firm Edelman found that people believe that trust, transparency, and honest business practices influence corporate reputation more than the quality of products and services or financial performance. 

Once you have decided to become a trustworthy company, there is no turning back. Organisations that fail to develop trustworthiness completely or simply lose their way are vulnerable to significant criticism and backlash — which can result in a complete loss of credibility. The choice between neglect and building trustworthiness as a core capability may well become vital for competitive advantage in a world looking for institutions it can count on for the long term.

The comments within the article that many organisations' strategy to build trust centre around PR, lobbying and effective crisis management is telling and reflects a 'stoke of the pen' approach where senior leaders feel it is enough to resource and sign off an initiative which they can point to as evidence of their trust credentials. 

Far harder, although ultimately more productive, is the ability of a trust strategy to focus on behavioural change which reaches to all levels of an organisation. FranklinCovey's approach recognises that the reputation of a firm is based less on the daily press coverage it receives than it is on the sum of interactions with individual colleagues, customers and stakeholders. With this in mind we focus on the foundation of building mindsets and skillsets of trust at a personal & team level, which can then be complemented by establishing trust audits to check that internal systems & processes are congruent with encouraging high trust (rather than low trust) outcomes. As a measure of success we can then provide a tool which assesses all online references to an organisation, scores them in terms of high and low trust and compares them to key competitors in that space.