The Worth of Trust - The Opportunity for Communications

The cost to a business of losing trust is illustrated by a litany of famous and public catastrophes. But if losing trust places a company at a commercial disadvantage, earning trust does precisely the opposite. Trust earned is competitive advantage gained. 

This year, I published a study, The Worth of Trust (sign-in required), which drew on interviews with fourteen chairs and Senior Partners at significant UK and European multi-nationals. In it, I outlined the true value of trust and how a business might earn it. 

Perhaps my most important point was that trust is indeed earnt. To focus only on trust is therefore wrongheaded. In a distinction eloquently made by the philosopher Baroness Onora O’Neill, being trustworthy is more important than being trusted. Those who are not trustworthy will eventually lose the trust they were unworthy of. Those who are trustworthy will never lose it. Trust is the symptom, not the cause.

When writing the paper, the business leaders I met had little doubt that trust mattered, but they tended to believe that it was already being handled implicitly at their organisations. By this they meant that rather than discussing trust per se, they were trustworthy simply because they did business the right and responsible way. 

An explicit approach

I believe that it is nowhere near enough to earn the potential competitive advantages that trust can provide. The study sets out a practical four-part approach that focuses explicitly on earning trust: 

First, a business should determine whose trust it needs. The days when businesses believed that their only responsibility was to their shareholders, to paraphrase Milton Friedman, are happily long gone. Today, businesses are far more aware of the wide network of stakeholders who they depend upon. A business that is going to benefit from the true worth of trust must first understand precisely whose trusting relationships it needs to gain an advantage, be that employees, customers, suppliers, legislators, regulators, or any other stakeholder. 

Second, a business should put a value on the specific trust it needs. Businesses respond to business cases. For trust to matter to a business, it must have a value. This value should capture both the upside of earning trust and the downside of losing it. This value must also look into the future, weighing and reconciling short, medium and long-term benefits against each other. There will be trade-offs to be made between revenues, margins, costs and valuable trust.

In doing this, leaders and managers need help from those within their business – often working at the proverbial coalface - who can best determine: 

• The value of trust and trustworthiness to their part of the business
• The gaps between the trust they currently have and the trust they would like to have, including the areas where trust is in fact breaking down and what cost that is already causing
• The actions and behaviour required to close the gap between the ideal trust and today’s reality, those who have the power to bridge that gap, and the costs associated with doing so. 

Third, a business should prioritise the sources of trust. There will always be conflicts: earning the trust of one party might harm the trust of another. Lowering prices might earn the trust of your customers, for instance, but it could harm the trust of your suppliers. When you focus explicitly on trust, you are forced to prioritise.

Finally, a business must earn trust. There are any number of explanations of how trust is earnt. The simplest, and best, I take from the behavioural scientist Robert Cialdini. He talks of the importance of “reciprocity.” By acting in the interests of another, we earn a reciprocal gesture from them. Trust is best earnt in this way: by acting in another’s best interests, especially when it is shown to be against the immediate interests of yourself.  The emerging dedication to stakeholder capitalism is a manifestation of this principle - that the greater the degree to which enterprises act in ways that honor or benefit the interests of their various stakeholders, the deeper and more durable their trust in that enterprise becomes.

The opportunity for Communications

In all this, the Communications function, which I have spent my career focusing on, has a critical role to play. In the past ten years, Communications has begun to transform. Once briefed only after a strategic decision was made, today the role is becoming more deeply embedded in the development of strategy. And rightly so: communications professionals are able to anticipate and respond to the need to provide boards and leaders with the insight, challenge, and warnings that traditional decision-making processes miss or underplay.

Communications professionals have an opportunity to provide alternative views, peripheral vision, foresight, and advice in fast changing and unpredictable contexts and situations. If they can bring the context and stakeholder perspectives into decision-making processes, they can help executives to understand: 

• How sensitive their business is to trust
• Which stakeholders’ trust they require, what they think today, and how they might think tomorrow
• The gap between the ideal level of trust and the current level of trust 
• What their business can do to bridge that gap 
• The likelihood of that increase in trust being achieved
• The trade-offs that might be required to do so
• The short-term pressures that might risk this endeavour

In the months and years to come, the most trustworthy businesses will be the best ones, both for themselves and for society at large. The Page Society has a noble purpose: “to unite the world’s best communicators to transform businesses for the better.”  If my paper achieves anything, I hope it is to inspire a new generation of CCOs that they can transform their businesses for the better by focusing on the worth of trust.