Now showing items tagged trust

American author, speaker and pastor John Maxwell practices what he preaches when it comes to leadership. Over the years, he has been a strong proponent of the critical importance of credibility for individuals and organizations.

“Credibility is a leader’s currency…” he suggests, “With it, he or she is solvent; without it, he or she is bankrupt.”

In my work with leaders across a range of industries, I have found that there are three characteristics that typically add up to make a credible leader or organisation. 

Columbia University economics professor Joseph Stiglitz once said, “It is trust, more than money, that makes the world go around.”[1] While this has, perhaps, always been true, it will truer than ever in the coming decade.

Whether in our personal relationships or our interactions with big brands and institutions, trust is the foundation of loyalty, engagement and affinity - and this foundation has taken a pounding in recent years, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.

In this environment, building trust is more difficult than ever – but it’s also more important. According to the recent Trends in Customer Trust report released by Salesforce Research, 95% of customers are more likely to be loyal to a company they trust while 92% are more likely to purchase additional products and services from trusted businesses.[2]

The annuls of history make it very clear that power has generally belonged to organizations – from religious institutions to government bureaucracies and corporate behemoths. There have certainly been various ‘Davids’ who have stood up to their respective Goliaths and managed to temporarily upset the status quo and gain an upper hand. But these cases were exceptional in every sense of the word – most of the time, the individual lacked the power.

Today, the opposite is true. Recent years have seen the balance of power shift rapidly away from organizations and to the individual. There are 3 tools of empowerment that cannot be underestimated by leaders and organizations aiming to build trust in the years ahead.

Earlier this year, a cereal brand faked a whole set of endorsements and got away with it. The reason? They explicitly stated so, right beneath the pretend endorsement. UK cereal brand Surreal’s campaign featured a whole series of ads which all read along the lines of:

“Serena Williams* eats our cereal.

*She is a student from London and we paid her to eat it but the point still stands.”

Each statement came with an asterisk, leading the eye to the ‘fine print’ beneath the endorsement which acknowledged that it wasn’t actually the celebrity who gave the endorsement, but a random individual with the same name that they had paid for the glowing report. [1] The campaign went viral across social media, with the public appreciating the ironic humour and sarcastic self-deprecation.

In an era increasingly defined by scandal, hypocrisy and betrayals of public trust, customers are increasingly holding corporations to high standards of integrity. Businesses and brands can no longer afford to cut ethical corners, fall short of marketing promises or fail to practise what they preach. In an age of skepticism and transparency, what customers are craving from their companies is congruence.

In order to build the trust and rapport with customers that has been so often compromised, businesses and brands need clear sets of values that they are committed to upholding. Without clear values to guide conduct and culture, it’s easy to lose our way, lose sight of the things that really count and subsequently lose the trust of those who matter most.

A couple of years ago, I caught a typo in the Wall Street Journal. It was in one of the regular email newsletters that I had signed up for, called The Future of Everything. Written by staff at the WSJ, the newsletter always has a warm and conversational tone while keeping the polish and elegance of a publication of such prestige.

A few years ago, I was running a strategy workshop with the leadership team of a global medical device firm. As we explored the disruptions that were impacting their business most, one came up that I hadn't previously considered.

An audience member shared that while increased competition and demographic changes were having a significant impact, a new trend that was proving enormously disruptive to their business was how increasingly aware their customers were of price variations across different markets. “In the past,” he said, “a customer in Spain was unlikely or unable to compare the price they were paying for a medical device with that of a patient in New Zealand. That’s all changed now. Our customers do compare and it is doing significant damage to our brand’s perceived trustworthiness.”

This challenge is far from unique. Across the board, consumers are demanding more and more information regarding the products they use on a daily basis.

Trust is a non-negotiable in today’s economy. For obvious reasons, businesses that are trusted are more lucrative and more loved than their competitors. However, time has told that trusted brands also outlast their competition. Trust consistently emerges as the common denominator between the world’s longest lasting companies, proving to keep them afloat through every new fad, wave and trend.

Neuroscientist and author of The Trust Factor, Paul Zak, has spent years studying what builds trust between individuals. His findings are remarkable and yet surprisingly simple. According to Zak, the most important factor at play in gaining trust is our ‘humanness’. When we are real, vulnerable and even fallible, oxytocin is released in the brains of others – a neuro-mechanism humans have used for centuries to determine who we can trust.[1]

This is an important revelation for every leader, professional or brand. For years we have worked hard to project sanitized and corporatized versions of ourselves. Spin doctors and corporate communications departments have tended to carefully craft every message in an effort to ensure communication is predictable, reliable and on-brand.

This approach has well and truly seen its day. In an era of post-truth paradigms, endless marketing, pervasive non-human tech and eroded trust, polished professionalism and corporate spin simply does not stand up to scrutiny.  In place of the impersonal corporate giants of yesterday, consumers today are looking for brands that have an organic personality and act with authenticity.

If we have learned anything in the last year, it is that the only certain thing is uncertainty. Businesses have felt this too, with lockdowns, virus variants and financial instability sending consumer confidence plummeting. This is in line with trends that were already at play as a series of scandals, ethical missteps and moral failures in public organisations drove home the undeniable message that businesses and institutions cannot be trusted.

For this reason, building trust should be one of the central priorities for all companies in today’s world. Especially post-pandemic, much of this trust needs to be built through consistency. For all the pivoting we have done during COVID, there is much to be said for the value of consistency in the face of uncertainty.