Myth, Reality, and Trust: A Presidents' Day Lesson

In the United States, today is Presidents’ Day, a national holiday honoring the birthdays of both Abraham Lincoln and George Washington, two of the greatest American presidents ever. 

Lincoln and Washington are both revered for their selfless, ethical, and honest approach to serving the national interests of the United States of America.

In elementary school, for instance, we all learn the story of how, even as a six-year-old, George Washington confessed readily to having chopped down his father’s cherry tree. Apparently young George had a mature enough conscience that when his father asked who had chopped it down, he replied “I can't tell a lie, Pa; you know I can't tell a lie. I did cut it with my hatchet.”

The only problem with remembering George Washington in this way, however, is that the story itself is a complete fabrication, made up in its entirety by Parson Weems, an 18th Century biographer and book agent who was rather a huckster. He readily stooped to all manner of exaggeration and myth-creating hyperbole in order to sell more books. Weems made the cherry tree story up (along with the one about Washington praying at Valley Forge, as well) in order to sell more copies of his biography entitled A History of the Life and Death, Virtues and Exploits of General George Washington. He also made up compelling myths about other historic heroes, including Francis Marion, who became known as the “Swamp Fox” on the back of Weems’s praise. Fox’s guerilla tactics during the Revolutionary War have earned him a reputation as one of the fathers of the U.S. Army Rangers.

So on this holiday, while I certainly don’t want to discount the importance of honesty and ethics when it comes demonstrating true leadership, as Washington and Lincoln surely did, it’s still important for businesses to try to separate myth from truth, in order to distinguish between appearance and reality. Because for many companies, the accepted story is that they behave honestly and ethically, while the reality is anything but.

A company’s own employees, however, are quite insightful when it comes to whether companies are behaving trustably or not. Employees generally know whether customers should trust the companies they work for. As a group, they can be relied on to know the difference between reality and whatever corporate myths their companies may have created with their values statements and other vision-mission-purpose pablum.

In fact, recent research by Luigi Guiso on behalf of Trustability Metrix, a company aimed at documenting and measuring the effects of trustability in the business world (co-founded by my co-author Martha Rogers), has quantified the divergence of a company’s self-image and its actual, observed behavior. Guiso, who is the AXA Professor of Household Finance and Insurance at Italy’s Einaudi Institute for Economics and Finance, demonstrated that in reality there is no correlation whatsoever between a company’s financial performance and the “values” it espouses publicly. On the other hand, there is a strong correlation indeed between a company's financial performance and the opinions its own employees hold with respect to its trustability.

So why not celebrate this Presidents’ Day by trying to find out whether your own company would actually be honest enough to confess, if it had chopped down a customer’s cherry tree? Or are your PR folks busy trying to compose a myth that it would, in order to sell more stuff?