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How to Recover from Trust Lost: Part II

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Two days ago I wrote in Part I how trust is not necessarily as slow to be gained, or as quick to be lost, as we think.  Part 2 is about how you recover lost trust.

Sometimes trust recovery is confused with reputation management; or with apologies; or with legal maneuvers. Any or of all of those may be appropriate in a given case, but only one is critical to all—acknowledgment.

At root, trust betrayal is a fundamental lie about intentions. When umpire Jim Joyce made a bad call to rob Andre Gallaraga of a perfect game, he told an “untruth,” but his act was clearly out of sync with his intentions. It is not hard to clarify intentions, if they were in fact clean all along.

By contrast, when a preacher or politician fulminates against moral turpitude and is then caught in a compromising position with a prostitute, he has lied about his intentions. In his case, the fact proves his bad intentions. 

In the first case, acknowledgement means stating exactly what happened, and taking full responsibility. Umpire Joyce saw the replay, and immediately stated he was wrong. Of the opposing players, he said, “I don’t blame them a bit, I would’ve said it myself.” He went directly to Galarraga to acknowledge and apologize. 

In Joyce’s case, an apology was clearly warranted. That’s not always the case; it may not be appropriate to apologize for something someone else did (unless in a the chain of command); it can come off as insincere, or patronizing. But what is required—always—is a full acknowledgement of precisely what happened, and a statement of accountability where that is clear.

The same rule applies in the case of an errant preacher or politician, or to BP for that matter regarding the oil spill. Leaving aside apologies and reparations, what is absolutely necessary for trust recovery is a full accounting of what happened, and to the best of one’s ability, why. 

Until our motives are re-aligned with our actions, we are stuck in a state of un-trust. Acknowledgement is what re-establishes the linkage. 

Name It and Claim It: The Language of Trust Recovery

The reason trust recovery is hard is that it requires soul-searching of our motives. We hate to admit we might have had bad motives, that  and: that we acted from bad faith. Yet that is what is required.

If you name it, you can claim it. What I mean by that simple phrase is that acknowledging the truth (“naming it”) is a necessary condition for recovering trust (“claiming it”).

There is a simple grammatical rule for successfully doing Name It and Claim It, and it looks like this:

List as many caveats as are necessary to slightly overcompensate for what you’re about to say—then say it.

Caveats, in this case, are made up the things both of you are afraid to say.

Let’s take a simple example first, then build up to the situation facing Joseph and Suzanne (see Part 1). (More examples can be found in another article, A Tool for Emotional Risk Management—Name It and Claim It.

Let’s say you are going to mention price for the first time in a sales meeting, and you’re a little nervous about it: You might say:

“I realize this is a little early to talk price, we haven’t mentioned value yet, and you haven’t asked about it, but in my experience sometimes one of us might feel embarrassed if it turned out later that our expectations were mis-aligned; so at the risk of putting something out there, I’m thinking this is a low 6-digit project. Does that feel wildly at odds with what you were thinking? Are we off by an order of magnitude?”

What you have done in such a case is to state all your inner fears (and the client’s too) out loud, in a way that recognizes each of you feel a little risky here, together. The effect, oddly, is to neutralize the risk. Because having said these words, the worst thing the client will do is say, ‘Well, that is a little embarrassing, and we didn’t ask about it, and I don’t want to tip our hand just now by talking about it, so, no thanks.” That may feel harsh, but it’s far better than not saying anything, and finding out two meetings later that one of you was thinking one million and the other 75,000. 

It’s also rare; almost always, the other person is grateful for the mention. The much more likely response is, “Well, glad you mentioned that actually, it takes a bit of pressure off. And we’re not conceding anything, but yes, I think we’re in a range where we can comfortably keep talking. Thanks for making sure.”

What Name It and Claim It does is to take a risky situation and not only defuse it, but actually create trust by doing so. Because the shared experience of taking a risk creates a track record of trust. The next risky overture will be more welcomed because of the risk taken in the first instance.

Name It and Claim It and Trust Recovery

What would it sound like for Joseph and Suzanne to use Name It and Claim It to recover trust in their respective situations (see beginning of case)?

Joseph can set up a conversation with a key client individual in his client organization; probably off-line, one-on-one, after-hours, over drinks or a meal. Not too far into the conversation, Joseph might say something like this:

Look, Bob, I appreciate your coming to dinner tonight; you might have guessed I had something specific to talk about. I feel a little risky raising a delicate issue with you, an issue that has some history, and I suspect it’s not all comfortable for you either.

I want talk about what happened between my predecessor Bill and your organization. I don’t fully know what happened, and if you wouldn’t mind, I’d really like to. I have no axe to grind, no horse in this race; I have no requests, hopes or expectations; I look for no promises. I simply want to fully understand where you are coming from, from your perspective alone. 

I fear that if I don’t understand that, then we’ll never have a basis for working together again. I apologize in advance for any discomfort this causes you, and hope you will see my intent simply to learn. Maybe we can’t put this behind this, but maybe we can; I would feel remiss if I didn’t try.   

Suzanne’s is a different case; in her situation, mistakes were made, and made by her organization and by her. She might say:

Melinda, thanks for taking this meeting. I realize it’s the first time in 18 months, and our last interactions weren’t happy. I’m not sure if you had resistance to even having this meeting, or whether you even felt comfortable telling people we were meeting.

I want to acknowledge the difficulty in our relationship 18 months ago, and my role in it. In retrospect, I was focused on assessing blame, rather than on focusing your needs as my client. The more time passes, the more I realize what a fundamental error in perspective that was. 

It may not be easy for you to talk about without emotion—I’m not sure I could do so easily—but I would respectfully like to ask you to do so. I cannot fully say that I have understood your situation until I hear it from you. And I know that I can’t move along myself unless I feel I’ve understood things.

I’m not looking for re-admission here; that’s up to you. What I need to do regardless is to fully understand what things looked like from your perspective 18 months ago. Would you be willing to take some time with me now to fully understand our history?  

Sometimes Trust Recovery is Beyond Language

A firm like BP that has incurred numerous safety violations is not going to recover trust until it convinces others that it has changed its ways. That means processes, procedures, standards, incentives, vocabulary and culture. Yet the role of acknowledgement still stands at center. Employees will not believe their own leadership if leadership does not stand and speak the new truth to the public. 

Some companies fear that if they change, but don’t advertise the fact, then they will lose “credit” in the public’s mind. Thinking this way re-invites the same risky behavior that got them in trouble in the first place.   The risk of being seen as good while doing not-so-good is far greater than the risk of doing good and being seeing as doing not-so-good. Time will take care of the second strategy, but events will undermine the first. 

And twice-fallen, trust recovery is far more than twice as hard.

How To Recover from Trust Lost: Part I

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Joseph says:

“When I took this account over 10 months ago, I didn’t understand why the client seemed so distant. We had been cut back 2 years ago and never really recovered; I figured I could turn it around.

“Come to find out, the reason was bad blood between my predecessor and the client organization. No one really talked about it; but there it was. So now what? How can I recover trust lost?”

Suzanne says:

“We made some mistakes. They weren’t critical, but we were partly at fault. We tried to show the client had a lot to do with it too—refusing to take accountability for changes in specs, delayed decisions, contradictory information—but it just made things worse. When the renewal finally came up, we didn’t get it. Surprise. That was 18 months ago. I don’t know when we can go back.”

If you recognize a little of your situation in Joe’s or Suzanne’s, then you’ve wondered about trust recovery.

If trust is lost, can you ever get it back? Or are you doomed to just slink away in defeat?

In this first part, I’ll describe how trust gets lost.  In the second part, two days from now, I’ll describe the key to getting it back.

Trust: a Long Time to Build, a Moment to Destroy? NOT

You’ve heard the usual platitude: trust takes a long time to establish, but only a moment to destroy. In truth, that’s a mis-statement; two mis-statements, actually.

First, trust does not necessarily take a long time to create.  We form strong impressions of trustworthiness of others in nano-seconds, based on all kinds of information and biases.

Second, trust isn’t necessarily destroyed in an instant; it took nearly a decade to destroy trust in Bernie Madoff–and he was a mega-crook!

The better formulation is this: shallow trust can be destroyed quickly; deep trust takes a long time to die.  Basically, what determines the time it takes to destroy trust is a function of quality–not of time itself.

How Trust Gets Lost

There are two ways in which trust gets lost.  The first is an illusion.

Suppose your ‘trust’ consists simply of the absence of mistrust.  Perhaps it even consists of untrustworthy practices garbed in clever PR, good advertising and an aggressive marketing campaign that provides the appearance of trust.. If suddenly the curtain is drawn back and the public sees the ugly reality behind the machine, it may appear trust was lost. But all that was really lost was the fig-leaf of appearance.

This was what happened to BP, whose safety record was obscured by a green advertising campaign until its comparative record was revealed by a horrible accident. This was Eliot Spitzer’s story too, when he lost the governorship of New York by using public money to secure prostitutes, while proselytizing against them. He didn’t lose trust–he lost plausible deniability.  The trust was gone long ago.

To recover from this kind of trust is possible, but it amounts to undergoing a conversion. The untrustworthy party cannot insist it was an accident—because it was the exact opposite of an accident. This kind of trust ‘loss’ is as good as planned.  Trust recovery here requires massive underlying change.

The second case is easier. Consider umpire Jim Joyce, who egregiously blew a call that cost a young pitcher the ultimate rare honor of a perfect game.

“It was the biggest call of my career, and I kicked the [stuff] out of it,” Joyce said, looking and sounding distraught as he paced in the umpires’ locker room. “I just cost that kid a perfect game.”

Did he recover trust? Before the very next day, Joyce had recovered the trust of the fans, the opposing team’s manager, and even pitcher Andre Galarraga. Note the error was egregious; and the recovery of trust took less than 24 hours.

These examples point out a few myths that need addressing:

1.    Trust recovery doesn’t necessarily take time

2.    Trust recovery is not (solely) a communications job

 

Read Part II: the How To part of trust recovery–acknowledgment.

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Trust and Reputation: the Virtuous Link

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I awoke at home on a sunny (!) morning in London last week to the dulcet tones of Bill Clinton’s erstwhile Labor Secretary, Robert Reich, talking about BP on the BBC:

“To start with, it actually helped that they were British. We listen to the accent and think that they are just more intelligent than us! But their reputation has badly suffered. They have lost a great deal of public trust. After all, this is not the first time that BP has had serious safety and environmental problems in North America.”

As a Brit who loves America, I recognize the piece about Americans going all mushy (you would say ‘gaga,’ yes?) about the old British accent!  But this is not to diminish the seriousness of the situation in the Gulf of Mexico and the horrific consequences for the environment, the livelihood of many thousands of people, and the future of the oil industry. The thick clouds of the Gulf disaster will need to carry a very strong silver lining in terms of improved environmental consciousness to mitigate such negative consequences. And no doubt the British accent is now beginning to grate.

The Labor Secretary struck a chord in linking the notions of trust and reputation. I’ve seen both arising in recent discussions with organisations, and it raises a Big Question:

Are trust and reputation the same things? Does one drive the other? And if not, just what is the relationship between the two?

Trust and Reputation

We know that reputations are hard won. They are valuable assets for organisations and individuals. Good will is a major component of corporate balance sheets. And reputations are built for certain characteristics: Helen Mirren for brilliant acting (and a classy British accent!);Tesco for execution; 3M for innovation; Obama for rhetoric, and so forth.

Sometimes those reputations are for being trustworthy, but they are generally for a whole range of characteristics other than trust. We would argue that the role of trust is in the nurturing and sustaining of a strong reputation; this nurturance is essentially a trust-building process.

Observe when reputations suffer and are lost, a painful process caught by Shakespeare in the words of Othello:

“The purest treasure mortal times afford is spotless reputation; that away, men are gilded roam or potted clay.”

As reputations wane, so does trust. As Robert Reich stated above, a loss of public trust in BP comes with their tarnished reputation for safety and environmental protection. The UK has recently seen reduced trust in politicians as their reputation for probity has suffered in the recent expenses scandal. Candidates for the leadership of the UK Labour Party are now saying that the Iraq decision led to an unraveling of trust as the Labour Party’s reputation for principled decision-making suffered.

(We could even go back to the writings of Edmund Burke who, in the early 1770’s, argued that the growing abuse of power in the American colonies by King George and his ministers was leading to a collapse of trust!)

In other words: organisations and individuals earn and retain our trust in their reputations.  Without this trust, those reputations fall away. As child is father to the man, trust begets reputation; and the loss of trust drags the latter down with it as well.

A Principled Approach to Trust and Reputation

For me, it is to the Four Trust Principles that we should turn to guide the process for building and sustaining trust in a reputation:

1.    Focus first on the customer.

Last winter, I had problems in a cold snap with my car brakes. I booked the car into a local garage and set out on a snowy, icy morning, only to slither to a helpless halt on the first corner. Most other drivers ignored me. Some hooted, others shouted out unintelligible advice, while I sat there immobile.

A large van stopped.  A group of young men who spoke no English and an older guy who spoke some all jumped out, took a look, and dove under the car with hammers to free up my frozen brakes. In minutes, the car was fixed.

I looked on incredulous. “We used to see this every winter morning in Poland,” the man said. I asked where they were working and went to have a chat with them later in the day. I found they were builders. I inquired about them; all reports were of outstanding care and attention, so it was easy for me to put them on the tender list recently for some big building work at our house. They won the competition hands down, and we are delighted with the service they are giving us.

Every single encounter we have with them—beginning with the first, when they had no idea we might be possible customers–reinforces our trust and confidence in their reputation for outstanding domestic building work. They sold by doing, demonstrating both reliability and a focus on the customer as a principled part of their behavior.

2.     Transparency.

When working for a large consultancy a few years ago, we hit a critical moment in negotiating the potential terms for a significant deal for a global client. This would involve a very different pricing model for us. Very radically for us, we opened our books to the client (this took quite some persuasion of our leadership team!) and established a shared understanding that led to a mutually beneficial deal.

Our striking transparency strengthened our growing reputation for straight talking, client-centered consulting.

3.     Long term perspective.

A colleague of mine has been working for a global organisation for some time. A couple of years ago he was asked to do something that he could have done but not quite to the quality his client was used to. He also knew others who could do the job better than he. So he introduced them in his place. He has since carried out a number of other assignments for the same client.

By taking a long-term perspective, his client trusted even more his hard won reputation for doing, above all, what was in the right interests of the client. By taking what appeared to be a short-term risk, he actually reduced risk by focusing on the longer term.

4.    Collaboration.

One conclusion about the recent financial services crisis is that some of the banks became too focused on the interests of a narrow group of stakeholders in their pursuit of profit, losing sight of their previous client-based model of which collaboration with a wide range of stakeholders was a key ingredient. They thereby lost our trust in their espoused reputation for looking after the interests of all their customers, many of whom will suffer for a number of years from Governments’ fiscal adjustments.

This need for intense collaboration – with regulators, customers, suppliers, politicians, environmentalists, shareholders and local people – also defines the trust-building process that BP need to mount now to salvage their reputation. As Peter Firestein elegantly argues, it is aggressive, proactive engagement that is needed after a reputational slip.

“There is a short list of companies who have come out of disasters with stronger reputations than they had before. In all cases, they did so because they were able to identify with those who were angry with them. They actively participated in the aftermath to the disaster.”

Reputation and Trust: The Linkage

Reputation and trust are close relatives–but are not one and the same. Organisations and individuals have reputations for a whole range of characteristics other than trust.

The role of trust lies in the process by which organisations and individuals build and sustain confidence in those reputations. By focusing on the Four Trust Principles of putting the customer first, transparency, a long-term perspective and collaboration, reputation-building becomes a practicable endeavor.

With all good wishes for your reputation enhancing work!