Taking trust seriously — a starting point for companies

For SocietyInside by Aine Cassidy, Effusion

Being trusted is usually good

Being trusted makes a big difference to what organisations can do — if people trust you they are more likely to want to work for you, fund you, buy your products or services, collaborate with you, be open to your new ideas, talk about you positively and give you the benefit of the doubt if things go wrong. If they don’t trust you, they probably won’t want to do any of those things. This is not good for business — the most trusted companies are in general the most profitable and have the most loyal employees. (Though too much trust, especially of the untrustworthy, may not be good, and blind trust can sometimes be bad for all parties, more of that in another post!)

The extent to which you are trusted, or distrusted, depends mostly on how you behave, but can also be complicated by the ‘weather’ of external factors — such as shifting context, values and preferences (See pic above). The 2022 Edelman Trust Barometer shows increasing and fast changing expectations of companies and greater scrutiny of how they uphold and express their values, which may have big implications for trust.

And to make things more complicated, different people trust you for different reasons — trust after all is a lot about expectation fulfilled. If you are a business for example, staff may trust you because you treat them well, give them autonomy, fulfilling work and good remuneration. Shareholders because you earn them good returns, politicians because you provide useful products, good jobs, pay taxes and don’t embarrass them with bad behaviours. Customers may trust you because you deliver a product or service that they like, citizens and NGOs because you uphold the values they consider important. And all those groups are more likely to distrust you if you fail to deliver against those expectations.

So, it’s pretty obvious it’s good to be trusted and bad to be distrusted. But how to get more of one and less of the other?

Here are some ideas:

1. Understand these 3 essential things about trust

1. Trust is an outcome — not a slogan, not a destination. It is bestowed upon you by others who perceive you worthy of it.
2. Perhaps like love and happiness, the more doggedly trust is pursued for its own sake, the more elusive it may become. Also like love and happiness, it is more likely to result from turning one’s attention outwards towards the needs of others, than focusing only on personal goals.
3. Trusting first, with the hope and belief, though no guarantee, that you will be trusted back, 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.

2. Take trust seriously

Companies taking trust seriously is rare. Trust is talked about incessantly; it features in many corporate mission statments and sets of ‘core values’, but as trust expert Barbara Brooks Kimmel observes: in reality ‘it is viewed as a soft intangible or ignored altogether until a crisis hits the organization. Then leaders talk about rebuilding trust when it never really existed in the first place.’

So the brown stuff hits the fan and there’s lots of headless-chickening and many, many workshops asking the question ‘How do we get them to trust us again?’ Very often better communications and public education are the favoured solutions. But you can’t communicate your way out of a behavioural problem.

So let’s say you are unusual, you really mean it about taking trust seriously.(It’s unusual because, as an MIT Sloane School report shows, the correlation between a company’s commitment to its values, including trust, and how well it lives up to them is mostly zero, or reverse correlated!). Where to start?

3. Focus on being trustworthy

Back to the iceberg again, and my favourite trust quote from guru Baroness Onora O’Neill: ‘How can we restore trust is the question on everyone’s lips — the answer is simple. First be trustworthy. Second provide evidence that you are trustworthy.” So why not start there.

Being trustworthy is the bit below the surface. The outcome of the culture and incentives of the organisation and all the many many things leaders and staff do day-in-day-out. It is the cumulative effect of these actions which can enhance or destroy trust.

Then there is the evidence of your trustworthiness, which is your behaviour and communications as experienced by the outside world.

And then there’s the ‘weather’. It’s also important that you are alert to how values and expectations are changing in response to what you and others do. (Open, inclusive, listening companies will find that easier than others.)

4. Get to grips with the 7 Qualities of Trustworthiness:

These 7 qualities are not just abstract concepts, or academic theories they are deeply rooted in our individual and collective psychology and the fundamental ways our societies work and have evolved. They are a great stepping off point for taking trust seriously.

They were the distillation of three years work on how Tech governance can earn public trust. I also used them as a framework for a commission by the IEEE and Arizona State University to explore how AI soft law can earn public trust (without paywall here) to think about how the current UK government might dig itself out of the trust hole it has dug for itself; ongoing work on Trust and Healthcare; Trust and Collaboration and considering Trust and Contact Tracing Apps and Trust and government response to Covid in the early days of the pandemic.

Getting started — more trust resources for companies:

To learn more about the 7 qualities here are 30 second and 10 minute YouTube videos about them and my report with other aspects of trust.

There is also a free online micro-course An Introduction to Trust and Trustworthiness in Practice on Mural you can access any time you like. The course will give you an introduction to the foundational concepts of trust and help you explore how to better earn trust in the eyes of your stakeholders.

Or contact me on hilary@societyinside.com for a chat.

This is the 6th in a series of 10 Articles for August I challenged myself to do — The others are below and the next will be about Measuring Trust.