Measuring trust —why you might be wasting your money
If you are an organisation who Takes Trust Seriously — the subject of my previous article, you might be thinking about measuring trust. After all, ‘what gets measured gets managed’ right?
Yes and no. As journalist Simon Caulkin is widely quoted as saying “What gets measured gets managed — even when it’s pointless to measure and manage it, and even if it harms the purpose of the organisation to do so”. Many well-meaning measures are not thought through and end up undermining the very goals they were designed for— any random Google search will show a variety of amusing, but sometimes terrible examples.
This is because of another management mantra, what you measure is what you get. Using measures and targets you are likely to get precisely what you measure and incentivise, and not the outcome which stimulated the measure in the first place. It is the reason the measures backfired in the stories above and the biggest problem with others. (Such as GDP and neoliberal capitalism — but that’s for another day!) It’s why I don’t recommend common trust measures like ‘we deliver on our promises’ because taking this seriously as a target could lead to organisations making only easy win, popular promises, not those which seek to address really big and difficult challenges the organisation faces. This is where Goodhart’s Law comes in — “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”.
Another reason to think carefully about measurement is that ‘what you measure is what you get’ doesn’t actually apply to trust. If you measure and incentivise trust, you won’t automatically get more trust, you might not even get a better understanding of what it is and how it is affecting you or, more importantly, what to do to earn trust and avoid distrust.
This is not to say don’t try to understand how trust and distrut is affecting your relationships and organisational goals, but a warning that measures skew incentives and incentives skew behaviours, so think carefully about why you want it and what to do.
Many organisations have ‘Trust’ as one of their Core Values. But it rarely clear what they actually mean by that and so what to measure. Do they mean ‘we want to be trusted’ or ‘we are going to trust people by default’, or ‘we want to be seen as trustworthy, so people know they can trust us”, or is it, as proposed by author and academic Prof Joe Moran, more about “hocus-pocus spells, bits of primitive word magic that are trying to make something true merely by incanting it.” Maybe!
Either way, the approach to understanding trust might be an indicator of how seriously it is taken. Based on their extensive research Barbara Brooks Kimmel and author Steven Covey have an amusing take on What Not To Do in organisations who say trust is important, but without knowing, or perhaps caring, what it means.
The 3 big areas of trust measurement
Trust measurement is a vast and mind-boggling academic field. It is genuinely hard to assess the relevance and usefulness of the many approaches. Here I am looking more at trust and companies and civic institutions, though drawing also on excellent work on trust and government from the OECD TrustLab (and others) which focuses on trust in governments, societal trust and the effects of interpersonal trust more generally.
For companies or other institutions there appears to be broadly three types of measurement, or is it simply research, going on:
1. The external ‘Temperature Check’ — how much do ‘they’ trust us?
Leaders like numbers, so this is often a percentage — x% of people trust this organisation alot, a little, not at all. Sometimes the score is compared with competitors or other sectors. Often it is a proxy for a measure of reputation or focused on perception of brands.
Some more high level research like the Edelman Trust Barometer may provide top line issues which may have implications for trust— “companies need to worry more about x these days if they want to earn trust’.
A type of Net Trust Score, based on the Net Promoter Score concept may also be attempted. Organisations might try to find the indicator/s which distill the complexity of trust to one or a small number of vital elements which are seen to be important for earning trust — eg doing what you say you will do, communicating clearly, being honest and open — and figuring out how they are doing.
The board will then have a stat that says the company has a Net Trust Score of say 47%, or 56% or 75% . They might use it as a comparator with competitors or others and feel good or bad. They might be tempted to use it as a target — “We must increase our Trust Score to x% within 2 years,” but the data may not give relevant information on how to do that. Goodhart’s law kicks in and the door is opened to lots of methodological and comms tricks, rather than the cultural transformation which is likely to be required. Or, because it won’t move dramatically, except for obvious disasters, no-one will care and it is mainly ignored.
‘They’ is usually the general public, rarely does the trust question (as opposed to general satisfaction etc) seem to be focused on the various individual stakeholders of an organisation, each of whom will have a different relationship and trust the organisation, or not, for different reasons. A missed opportunity.
2. The internal ‘Temperature Check’ — who trusts who
(a) Interpersonal trust — do our employees trust each other?
(b) Leadership trust — do our employees trust us, the leaders?
These can be methodologically similar — questionnaires with a scale from 1–10 — sometimes, but not always, with qualitative sub-questions, often taken from academic literature, probing rationales for the scores.
This is popular currently under the umbrella ‘building high-trust teams’ and ‘trustworthy leadership’. It’s tempting to speculate from studies like MIT’s research When it comes to culture — does your company walk the talk, which includes trust, commitments to building internal trust don’t seem to result in high-trust teams or trustworthy leaders, but I can’t find anything credible which will tell me either way.
3. Internal and external — qualitative understanding of causes of trust and distrust and perceptions of trustworthiness
Without real qualitative understanding of the causes of distrust and trust, the ability to use trust research, even measures, to guide leadership and develop a meaningful response will be limited.
Taking trust measurement seriously requires more than just a temperature check, it needs a commitment to deep understanding and to taking action in response to findings. Without it, particularly with staff, it is just another attempt at ‘trust-washing’ and will increased distrust and dissatisfaction, with the accompanying disbenefits. Less importantly, it will also be a big waste of money.
The Trust Mindset
Trust is a bit like ethics — if you are serious at being worthy of trust this commitment needs to permeate everything you do — your every decision, strategy, incentive, action matters. No wonder, like ethics, it easily becomes something to talk about, but not take seriously. It is really, really hard.
The hardest bit is a trust mindset which takes the commitment seriously. Particularly because this requires trusting first, in the hope and belief, though no guarantee, that you will be trusted back. Trusting first significantly increases the likelihood of being trusted, it also increases the prospect of the other party acting in a trustworthy way themselves. Automatically distrusting and so exhibiting more defensive, uncooperative or disrespectful behaviour yourself is, unsurprisingly, less likely to generate trust in return.
The next article in this series will be on Why and How to Measure Trust — Starting with Distrust
