Trust-Gone
Dr. Deborah Nixon (She/Her)
Executive Coach/CEO Advisor, Talent and Leadership Consultant, Executive Search, Mentor to Execs in Transition
It can happen to any organization. Millions spent on advertising and marketing. A carefully crafted message about your products and service. A huge misstep- and it's gone. All that goodwill- so fragile and easily broken. Uber and United Airlines have certainly learned this the hard way.
Those of us in the business of working with organizational leaders in building and sustaining trust have been heeding the clarion call that trust takes years to build and can be gone in a minute. We have beat the drum over and over that it doesn't matter how many culture audits you conduct, how much team training you do and how many feel good messages you put out to the market- if your product or service fails; if your systems and processes are not designed for quick response; if your people and leaders aren't operating in a culture of trust and respect; then you have wasted your money.
Too many times I have heard clients tell me that trust is the number one value to their business, but they don't need to focus on trust because after all, it's JUST one factor. As we can all see, it's the ONLY factor that matters. Because when your processes fail, when your CEO doesn't deliver the right message and your customer service isn't 100%, loss of trust is the consequence. And rebuilding trust is a lot harder and more expensive than making sure that you don't lose it in the first place.
Uber and United will eventually recover but not after losing sales, profits and share value. Customers will switch to their competitors, never to return. Reputation, the bedrock of all businesses, is shattered.
Yet, you don't have to focus on trust in your organization, because after all, it's ONLY one factor.
Anthropologist & Author at Kibbutz Gan Shmuel
7 年Although trust is decisive and foundation of effective relations, it is not "the ONLY factor that matters" since there are other decisive factors which make one trustworthy and impact decisively her/his will to trust, for instance one's know-how and pheronesis (Greek for pratical wisdom). My studies of trust between leaders (superiors) and followers (employees) untangled distrust often to be a result of ignorance concealment efforts by "jumpers", the some half of the managers who advance careers by "jumping" among firms. See my 2017 book "Mismanagement, 'Jumpers,' and Morality" (New York: Routledge) and my articles, for instance Shapira, Reuven (2015) “Prevalent Concealed Ignorance of Low-moral Careerist Managers: Contextualization by a Semi-Native Multi-Site Strathernian Ethnography.” Management Decision 53(7): 1504-1526. DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.1108/md-10-2014-0620
Licenced Professional Counselor Candidate (LPCC)
7 年Excellent article, so poignant for these times.
Business Development Consultant, Increasing FDC Pack Station Efficiency by +2X, Ask Me How!
7 年Trust is not just one factor, it's the only factor that counts. It's more like the umbrella that covers everything from introduction through the order process(es), delivery of your goods/services ending with support of what was sold. Maybe the meaning of Trust is better put this way: Trust is the tie that binds everything from person to person and business to business. You can be the smartest, most knowledgeable person or the world's best company but what does it matter if you/they there is no Trust? Sorry for using the word Trust so much Dr. Deborah Nixon but I wanted to stress how much it matters to everything in our lives... ;-)