I was at Edelman’s London offices last Tuesday morning (Jan 26) for the breakfast launch of their 10th annual trust and credibility survey – “Trust Barometer”. The findings against a back-drop of the past decade’s trust abuse – economic, social and environmental – by both business and government. Richard Edelman, President and CEO, opened the morning with frank words: “You are not a great company if you are profitable. It’s not enough”. Can’t argue with that; he’s bloody right. Who in their right mind would trust someone based solely on how much money they had in their bank? Actually, you would probably use that as a very last indicator, and may even be swayed otherwise if that was being used to influence your trust barometer.
(By the way, I liked the straight talking from Edelman himself on opening the morning. I also liked the sharp-witted humour coming from the panelist he then introduced. These things coupled with how apparently nice Edelman people are and their very open and buzzy office has given me a good feeling about the company. Trust indicators?)*.
The Trust Barometer report shows that this year trust and transparency are as important to corporate reputation as the quality of products and services served to us. To quote the report – “In the US and in much of Western Europe, these two attributes rank higher than product quality – and far outreach financial returns, which sits near or at the bottom of 10 criteria in all regions.”
No wonder trust is asking us to go deeper than the allure of product obsession or service quality because, if you think about it, you/we don’t build trust with friends, doctors or electricians on how well they cook, their depth or knowledge or their screwdriver collection alone. Trust experiences go deeper and wider to incorporate things like human interaction, sharing, participation, fair treatment of others, transparency, bias (or ability to be apolitical), actions, ongoing relationships, attention, peer-recommendation and history/evidence. Financials come into it this much wider mix.
As I write, I am mid watching a docudrama about Mo Mowlam, the one time Northern Ireland Secretary who eventually lost her life to a brain tumour. It was her reputation for plain speaking and her fight again cancer that led her to be perceived by many as the most popular “New Labour” politician in the UK. The country ‘trusted’ her because she was transparent and honest… Honest to a degree that was helpful to the country (not to her health, hiding the fact she was fighting a deathly cancerous tumour for 9 years).
Think about the trust values assigned to machinery like an iPod/Pad or a Toyota car. A machine or inanimate object alone doe not embody deep trust. (A well-made machine will take you to a roughly a neutral trust measure and a badly made machine will start going into trust deficit). What builds trust is the reputation behind the businesses/their brand – the producer and distributor of these machines. The trust recipe here is to do with the people (inside the business and stakeholders on the outside), processes, behaviours, legacy and leadership, of which opinions are formed through interaction, participation, action etc. etc. as I listed above.
Now is the era of organisations as animate, living systems, not inanimate, mechanical machines. We judge organisations and their reputation on the way their whole system behaves and interacts with the world and its systems.
Stefan Stern, of the FT, on the Edelman panel told us that there is a strong correlation between employee happiness (treating employees well, with respect, and engaging them in the workings of the organisation) and external reputation. He suggests that ‘conversations with employees’ is your media/reputation plan. In other words, build a deep and engaging relationship with your employees and treat them well and they will become ambassadors of your business reputation, innovation and success. This that he describes is a democracy made up of living beings participating in the systems success, not a production machine focused solely on the number of units sold and net profit. I would add external stakeholders to these conversations too.
Stern then said, “Trust is a now a line of business – the top driver of corporate reputation” and that organisations should have a ‘Chief Trust Officer‘ to manage this key driver. I’m wondering what a Trust Bottom Line looks like and what the measure of value is because it’s certainly different to the mechanistic version of business practice, which measures productivity and economic bottom line only. But he’s absolutely right; if trust and transparency are a key driver of corporate and governmental success then Director Trust needs to be on the board and in at the core of the strategic plan. This is a GREAT THING. It forces the organisation to engage with and put value on many of the things it historically externalised (in a mechanistic world) – where they didn’t matter – like treatment of people or ecosystems services it depends on.
Amid a challenging context for business and social prosperity – peak oil, peak resources, runaway climate change, economic failures, and increasing social divide and population growth – the ability to engage with and tackle issues that were once externalised, openly, is demanded. As is the ability to engage with (already) trusted stakeholders such as NGOs to co-create solutions and begin to solve issues.
Now is the era of collaboration and open innovation (read problem-solving) platforms; many of the smart leading organisations, such as Nike and Best Buy in the US, are recognising this. Mark Parker of Nike launching the Green XChange open innovation platform at Davos 2010 has said:
“We go out of our way to protect our IP, but it’s important to look at that protectionism; it may actually be preventing us from pulling our collective knowledge and power of innovation and ability to leverage the best ideas we have to achieve greatest success” .
That is a trust behaviour.
Damien Green on the panel talked about the need to be apolitical in order to build trust, which is somewhat easier to imagine in a political context versus an apolitical business. It is the social democracies, such as Sweden and Denmark that command the highest trust reputation. He talked of handing over the power to the people and ‘holding an election’ as a way to build trust. In other words, let the people decide.
Can a business be apolitical? Yes, letting the people decide is wholly possible.
Finally, Damien suggested that the more people know about your family the more people trust you. I agree. And it plays to the point of an organisation as a living system versus mechanical machine.
Dinner with the CEO and family?
*Declaration of transparency: Jules Peck, my business partner, also works with Edelman so I knew a bit more about them before the Trust breakfast.
** Declaration of inadequacy: there is a load more to right on the intersection between Trust as a business driver and addressing externalities. These are simply notes.
