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Is Recessionary Thinking Killing Off Your Green Shoots?

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I belong to a group of peers; we meet semi-monthly to discuss whatever business issues we see. Lately, we’re seeing a theme emerge.

Most businesses been operating under stressful circumstances for at least the last 12 months. For most organizations, profits were down (or non-existent), resulting in considerable price/service pressure from clients/buyers/customers.

So it’s not surprising that, as we end this difficult calendar/fiscal year, many are still painfully looking in the rear view mirror as we consider how to address the new year.

But, in doing so, we may well miss a turn — an opportunity to take advantage of the "green shoots" by thinking differently about our organizations and about how to get the most out of our people.

The Market Has Driven Focus Away from Teams

In the midst of all of the recent economic pressure, there has been a common return to focus on individual performance and a movement away from collaboration and collegiality.

Perhaps some of this shift is valid, because a tough market penalizes lingering mediocrity, but the pendulum has swung to the business equivalent of baseball’s VORP (value over replacement player).

But successful organizations are rarely built by teams of super-heroes. Most extraordinary unit performance is a function of ordinary beings banding together to strengthen each other’s weaknesses and to collectively make whole greater than the sum of the individual parts.

The cost-cutting and recession-based inward thinking which we’ve all had to endure for the past year drives us to self-absorbed, protectionist, fear-based behavior.  And just as solo behavior doesn’t drive great success, neither can you save or cost-cut your way to prosperity.

Sling-shotting Your Way Into Recovery

We have no insight into the timing of the recovery. But one thing is clear. The firms that will benefit the most, when recovery does come, will be those that have managed to think their way out of the rear-view mirror mentality. In particular, those who have managed to re-discover collaboration.

Collaboration is something that can help ‘slingshot’ us out of recessionary thinking.  Team behavior can accomplish extraordinary things with ordinary people.  Collaboration fuels innovation, and feeds souls.  All that drives financial bottom lines too.

Leaders need to manage the tension between surviving in the short term and leading towards the medium term. Leaders need to help pull/push people out of the scary place we’ve been in, focused—of necessity, to be sure—on survival.

Collaboration responds to the need to motivate people, refocus their efforts, and ignite their spirit. And you don’t have to wait for the recovery to get there. In fact, getting there probably, in its own small way, helps kick start the recovery.

Doing Collaboration from Trust Principles

Collaboration is, in fact, one of the Four Trust Principles  (the others being client focus, relationships over transactions, and transparency).
There’s no single simple tool to being collaborative, and each organization will vary in its approach. But a serious effort at being more collaborative will probably include some of the following:

  • Goal setting—done collaboratively
  • Spending time together
  • Getting to know each other
  • Speaking directly to each other
  • Speaking about more things to each other
  • Developing common language
  • Skewing incentives and rewards toward groups
  • Honest and transparent leadership
  • Clear, repetitive articulation of the philosophy of collaboration by leadership

Development is back on the table. If it’s not yet on your table, ask yourself when you think the recovery is going to happen—and how far in advance of it you need to starting consciously thinking about shifting perspectives.

Discuss it collaboratively with your team.

Trust Summit: October 23, New York City

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I want to let you know of an upcoming event you might want to attend.

Chris and Julien are co-authors of the current best-selling book Trust Agents. David is my co-author, along with Rob Galford, of The Trusted Advisor.

I first met Chris and Julien as they were writing their book. I found them very engaging, and masters of new social media.

But what has really impressed me is their ability to apply new media technology in service to greater trust in business. They are walking role models in that regard – they walk the talk.

It was Chris’s idea to have this meeting, and I enthusiastically supported it.

We’re looking forward to a great breakfast with spirited dialogue between the four of us, but most importantly between us and you, 300 of our closest friends.

CNBC and BusinessWeek.com: Teeing it Up

As long as we’re on the subject of marketing, let me offer you a couple of links,

First, my BusinessWeek.com article of earlier this week, titled Wall Street Run Amok: Why Harvard’s to Blame.

That intrigued the good folks at CNBC, who put me on October 7 with the header "Is Harvard to Blame?" Host Melissa Francis played up the Harvard angle with mock outrage, but it’s all in fun—and a pretty good (albeit fast) take on how we create business environments that nurture trust.

Both—I think—are good entrees to teeing up the broader issue of trust we’ll be discussing in New York.

Hope you can make it.

Charles Green on CNBC and BusinessWeek.com This Week

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GodzillaIt’s been an interesting week for trust.

BusinessWeek.com Article

First, Businessweek.com chose to print an article of mine titled Wall Street’s Run Amok: Harvard’s to Blame.  In it, I argue that the usual explanations for business malfeasance–greed, poor regulation, badly designed incentives–miss a much more fundamental cause.

For several decades now, our business schools have been teaching competition rather than collaboration, and contracted-out processes rather than partnership-based relationships.  With such beliefs at the heart of business, it’s not surprising that we find a dearth of things like trust, ethics, and generally getting along.

In fact, if you design a system based largely on self-aggrandizement (think sustainable competitive advantage, maximum shareholder value) as ends, it’s not just unsurprising–it’s downright predictable.  There’s no such thing as ethics if there is only self-involvement.

These belief systems worked well in the 1980s. Today, in a world where six degrees of separation is a vast overstatement, we can no longer afford ideas that encourage competing with our suppliers, customers, employees and partners.  We need a new belief system.

I’m not teeing off on Harvard Business School per se.  It’s just that, well, it’s the Harvard of Business Schools.  And it had more than its share of the designing of the competitive/contractual/process ideology.  If it can be as successful at teaching the new beliefs as it was at the old, it will continue to fulfill the powerful and positive role it used to.

Watch Me on CNBC Today

The good folks at CNBC apparently read BusinessWeek.com.  They were chatting about the article, and invited me in for today, Wednesday the 7th, on the Street Signs show (Erin and the boys).  The plan is for a slot at about 2:20PM.  Plans, of course, change, but plan to tune in.  And, as they say on the Bravo Channel, watch what happens.  [Later: here is the link to the video–have a look-see, it was fun!]

RainToday Article and Webinar

Also this week, RainToday publishes my article How Poor Cross Selling is Ruining Your Business in today’s issue.  Another very practical example of how the ability to manage trust–in particular, your trustworthiness–is a key driver of effective performance. 

Finally, I’m doing a webinar this week with the good folks at St. Meyer & Hubbard.  You can sign up here, and though the session is aimed at building trust in retail and commercial banking, it’s got a lot to say about other industries as well.

The Power of Shame to Fix Low Trust

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Randy Schumann Pay Your BillLongtime friend of TrustMatters Shaula, together with hubby Neil, ran across the photo you see on the right here while on the road in Montana. (Click here to see the web version if you’re reading in text).

It seems that one Randy Schumann may have an account in arrears at the local Gas Mart.  And the retailer in question has resorted to a time-honored tradition to enforce some social justice.

Ouch.

Let me suggest, in all seriousness, that we need more Tiger-Town justice, and less Sarbanes-Oxley types of solutions. 

Shame–for lack of a better word–can be good social policy.

Positive Uses of Shame in Creating Public Trustworthiness

The Tiger Town in Montana is hardly alone. 

* Think about the “perp walk,” used by cops and prosecutors quite consciously.  As Wikipedia puts it, “Perp walks are often done to politicians or businesspeople accused of white-collar crimes (whose reputations may be susceptible to damage by public spectacle).”

Rat* The use of the giant inflatable rat as a shaming device is a long-time tool of unions.  But it goes further; the rat is protected legally (I’m not kidding, see here) as a form of free speech.

* Let’s not forget about the (used to be, anyway) power of investigative journalism.  The notion of muck-raking in the US http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muckraker ; the power that the Washington Post put behind Watergate, or the New York Times behind the publication of the Pentagon Papers.

* Local TV news shows delight in consumer protection episodes that go by names like the Wall of Shame, our version of the Puritans’ placing people in the stocks in the middle of town. Cops know it’s more effective to post photos of Johns than of prostitutes (so do town governments, which is why that doesn’t often happen). 

Shame Works by Enforcing Social Standards

It may seem obvious, but let’s take a moment to see why shame works.

Most people intuitively agree with Justice Brandeis that “sunlight is the best disinfectant.”  Transparency is a valuable social vehicle for increasing trustworthiness in our institutions.  Disclosure is a bedrock of legislative regulation—in pharmaceuticals, financial services, and environmental policy.  The idea is that organizations will not put out to the public things that they would prefer not be seen by the public. 

The most powerful thing about shame is that it works by enforcing social standards.  If the behavior that is exposed runs strongly counter to public instinct, then the power of shame is large.

If you are ashamed by something, it means you fear the judgment of the public.  To be ashamed, on a very personal level, means to feel the rejection of our peers.  It is a powerful effect, and serious medicine when administered at scale.

Shame Should be Part of the Response to Financial Scandals

The popular press is all over Washington to do something to prevent further abuses in the financial sector.  The pressure is building, because so far very little has been done.

Part of the problem is that “what should be done” has come to rhyme with massive, heavy-handed governmental regulation.  Worse yet, most of that regulation has to do a combination of prohibition (Glass-Steagall)  and massive efforts at compliance and disclosure.

The problem with disclosure alone is it rapidly degenerates into mountains of fine-print, while accomplishing nothing in terms of felt social obligation on the part of those writing it.

The problem with structural change alone (think Sarbanes-Oxley) is that it’s expensive, and the opportunity costs are even higher than the outlays.  Just think of the massive price we pay every day in airports because we haven’t figured out a socially acceptable way to keep terrorists from planes other than forcing granny in Dubuque to dump her over-sized tube of toothpaste when she boards a plane.

I’m far from alone in this.  Read the devastating critique by famed Madoff whistle-blower Harry Markopolis.  He suggests that what we do not need is the routinized, predictable box-checking approach to compliance.  Instead, we need randomized, aggressive sampling, followed by publicity. 

Exactly. Unexpected audits, followed by the application of shame.  Bring on the judgment of the people who own the society, who are the ultimate source of the approval of whatever goes on in our society. 

Enough with laws and regs; up with enforcement and shame.

And Randy—about that account.  The Rat is next.

October Carnival of Trust is Now Being Served

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Scot Herrick, author of the delightful blog Cube Rules, is this month’s host of the Carnival of Trust. 

For those who don’t know, the Carnival of Trust is a monthly collection of the most interesting and noteworthy posts from the Kingdom of Blogs over the past month.  Each month, the Carnival is hosted by an experienced blogger–not myself.  The definition and selection of "interesting and noteworthy" is left to the host; each host infuses the selection and commentary with their own point of view.  The result is a great chunk of reading for you.

This month Scot has collected some terrific blogposts that answer the following questions:

– Would you rather fix your customer’s problem, or be right?  Think carefully now…

– Can you break promises with your employees, or not?  And if so, how many?

– What’s a great acronym for remembering the components of RESPECT?

– How can you get your parents to trust you?

– Would you rather hire a relative, be hired by one, or recommend one?

– How can you market yourself as being trustworthy?  (It’s not a trick question).

 You don’t get this much concentrated good stuff anywhere else.  Treat yourself to a choice bit of edutainment; you’ll love the way it tastes, honest!

Many thanks to Scot Herrick for hosting this month.  If you liked this month’s Carnival of Trust, you might enjoy looking at past Carnivals as well.  And if you’d like to see your blogpost up there in the lights, please do contribute your blogpost (or someone else’s you’d like to nominate) at this site. 

Again, enjoy the October Carnival of Trust.

 

 

 

Call for October Carnival of Trust Submissions

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This blog has some pretty talented people reading and commenting in its pages. I’d like to invite all of you to consider submitting one of your own blog postings to the Carnival of Trust.

The deadline for submissions to the next Carnival of Trust is this Thursday night–midnight. The Carnival will then go live in a matter of days–after our esteemed guest host, Scot Herrick, has a chance to go through them and make his selections.

Here’s what you do to get your 15 minutes of fame and enrich the world. Pick your trust-related post, and submit it here.

Then sit back and roll in the adulation.

OK, seriously, the Carnival of Trust is a fascinating, monthly compendium of blog postings related to trust in business, trust in selling, trust in society at large. It is kept interesting by the vibrant commentary of our esteemed hosts, and their discriminating selection criteria.  If you don’t get selected, it’s no dis. But if you do get selected, it’s a tribute.

So bring out your best stuff, and share it with the world. After all, how’s the world going to get better if you hide those great insights from the rest of us?

(Read more about the Carnival of Trust here).

Trust is Down: But, Like, So What?

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Trust in One Another is Down: Civic health IndexThe news is full of quotes like this, from the Edelman Trust Barometer:

“In January 2009, every one of the major industries had trust declines…but you see a trust renaissance now [midyear 2009] in a few key industries…we saw increase and stability particularly in auto and in tech….though in France, tech is the number 3…”

This kind of language feeds the perception that ‘trust’ is a unitary phenomenon, capable of being measured precisely, with meaningful small gradations.

Contrast that commercially provided data with a longer-term academic view of trust. Click here for a graph (thanks to the National Council on Citizenship) that shows a nearly uninterrupted steady decline in interpersonal trust for over 25 years. What does a half-year–or a month–mean against that backdrop?

Then throw in, “I trust my dog with my life; but not with my ham sandwich.” 

When it comes to trust, one size definitely does not fit all. It’s remarkable that one word covers so many meanings.

‘Trust’ Has Way More Than One Meaning

The truth is, ‘trust’ covers at least four distinguishable meanings—trust in the general human race (social trust), trust in institutions, trust in particular other human beings, and trust in certain processes (e.g. recommendations from previous buyers on eBay).

It is meaningless to say that I ‘trust’ Apple Computer more, or less, than my dog; or my dog more than my girlfriend; or my girlfriend more than Microsoft. It doesn’t even make sense to say I trust Apple more than Microsoft.  It depends.

It depends what I’m trusting them to do, or how to do it. I trust my dog to love me unconditionally more than Microsoft. I trust Microsoft more than my girlfriend to help me with databases, and I trust my girlfriend more than Apple to–well, you get the idea.

Worse yet, ‘trust’ is an end result, an outcome. It isn’t something that people do, it’s the state of affairs when they’re done doing. It isn’t a behavior. You can measure the outcome—but it won’t tell you what to do. 

Trust is An Outcome: There are Two Action Strategies to Get There

Trust is the result of an interaction between a Trustor and a Trustee.  One does the trusting; one is the one who is trusted.

You can increase, or decrease, trust–but not directly.  You must choose one of two strategies.

1. You can choose to be more trusting of others, which increases the odds they’ll reciprocate, but at high risk.

2. You can choose to be more trustworthy, which increases your attractiveness in their eyes, though it may take longer.

You can’t act on trust itself: but you can act on the actors. 

If ‘trust’ is down, is that because people are less trusting? Or because the one they trust is less trustworthy?

At root, was the problem with Bernie Madoff that we trusted him too much? Or was the problem with Bernie Madoff—Bernie Madoff?

These are non-trivial questions: they have to with corporate and public policy implications of that oh-so-simple-looking data that ‘trust is down.’

Roderick Kramer, publishing in Harvard Business Review,  suggests “Despite deceit, greed, and incompetence on a previously unimaginable scale, people are still trusting too much.”  Too much trust.  Trust is down?  Good; we needed a trust recession.

Kramer’s full viewpoint is much more nuanced than that, but that’s how he and HBR wrote the headline to his article.  And many people do believe that a trust decline is probably a good thing, that we all probably ought to be even less trusting of a lot of things. That’s a strategy of trusting–on the negative side.

Others, like Harry Markopolis,  the Madoff whistleblower, are inclined to blame a combination of Madoff and the regulatory institutions set up to protect us from him. Trust down? Then we need to make the SEC much more effective.  That’s a strategy of trustworthiness, via 3rd party enforcement.

Steven Covey Jr. preaches that in an increasingly interconnected world, we need more trusting, not less.  I agree, but in any case, that’s a trusting strategy.

So–what to do? If I run a technology business, and I learn that my trust level is way up, except not so much in France, over the last few months—like, what am I supposed to do with that?

What Are We to Do About All This Trust Data?

I have a few answers.

Let’s pass on social trust; it moves glacially. Pick your parents well, teach your children, vote, and give generously to charities.  That’s about it.

I’m going to focus on business and interpersonal trust.

In that realm, it is probably true that ‘the fastest way to make a man trustworthy is to trust him.’   That’s a classic trusting strategy.

But don’t hold your breath waiting for that to happen in the litigious, emotionally constipated and largely fear-driven corporate mentality of these these hunker-down recessionary times. Way too many people are way too risk averse.  Trusting, as a trust-creation strategy, appears to them to be just too risky.

The other trust-creation strategy—being trustworthy—has a somewhat longer payback, but with less business risk, and less risk of being executed badly.  For the most part, the trustworthy strategy is the one I recommend to companies.

So here’s what you can do.

1. At the individual level:

2. At the business level:

That’s my answer to ‘so what,’ at least for now.
 

They’re Just Not That Into You

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I remember an old, old Peanuts cartoon. Charlie Brown is watching Lucy and another girl from afar. He approaches them: “You girls were talking about me, weren’t you!” he says accusingly.

“No we weren’t,” the girls say with a smug expression. Charlie Brown reverts to his earlier distant position, and waits a bit. Only to return once again, and ask: “How come you girls never talk about me?

We All Act Like We’re the Center of the Universe

A basic human presumption seems to be that we are, each of us, the Center of the Universe (COTU).

I recall reading about a Brazilian native tribe largely insulated from the rest of the world. Some westerners took two tribesmen on a trip to Sao Paulo, and then New York.

At their first stop, a large village of several hundred, they were a little nervous, but not intimidated. Then they made it to Manaus, Sao Paulo, and so on. At each stop, they became more shut down. When they finally returned to their part of the Amazon, they were permanently shocked out of their beliefs, and were not much the better for their education.

The Chinese call their land The Middle Kingdom. World maps in the US have, guess which country at the center? Not the same country as with maps sold in, say, France.

Years ago I read a study of students and professors. The study asked students how much time they spent thinking about the professors (not much), and how much time they thought the professors spent thinking about them (a lot,the students figured).

The professors, asked the same questions, said they didn’t in fact spend much time thinking about the students, but they were sure that the students, of course, spent lots of time thinking about them. Wrong again. Center of the Universe.  COTU all over the place.

On a more cosmic scale, it was only recently in history that we could as a species countenance the idea that the universe might not revolve around planet earth. And as ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, each child grows up thinking his family, her bedroom, is probably the center of the universe.

Some of us—some a bit more than others—escape from the tyranny of self, but only just a little bit. We get angry, resentful and afraid—basically because people don’t behave the way we would like them to. After all, aren’t we the center of the universe?

We’re Not the Center of the Universe–Fortunately

Of course, we are most assuredly not. All those would-be subjects of ours aren’t paying us homage—basically they’re just not that into us.  They pay us about as much attention as we pay them (embarrassingly little, and please don’t tell anyone).

But there are two great causes for optimism in this observation. First, since most of humanity doesn’t really concern itself with us (or give a damn?), we are quite free of the bondage of others’ opinions. Our slavery is of our own creation.  We hold our own keys to freedom.

Second, once we see that others have the same uni-centric disease that we do, we can lighten up a bit and reach out over the 50-50 line for a touch of human contact.

Yul Bryner once said, “We come into this world alone, and we leave it alone; and if someone offers you kindness along the way, you don’t spit on it.” And, by and large, we don’t.

Bryner’s is the minimalist version. The maximalist version is that if you touch someone, you help to free them from their own self-obsessed bondage. By reaching outside yourself, you initially delight them; but quickly that turns to teaching by example. You show that it can be done, and you role-model the benefits of doing so.

If you live in the space that says you’re the center of the universe, people’s orbits tend to fly away from you. But if you reject that belief, then people become attracted to you; oddly, you become (directionally) the center of much more.  They trust you.

If  you think this blogpost isn’t about business, please think again. Think of what it means for sales, customer service, negotiation, contracts writing, supply chain management, marketing, advising, accounting, and customer engineering.

You are not the center of the universe. What a blessing.  Go pay attention to someone else.

Hire for Trustingness, Train for Trustworthiness

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You may know the HR saying, ‘Hire for attitude, train for skills.’ Our own Sandy Styer reminded me of that the other day.

The reminder came at an opportune time, as I was reading Eric Uslaner’s  excellent 2002 book The Moral Foundations of Trust, a book I’m embarrassed to say I haven’t read until now.

I’ve written before that trust is an asymmetrical relationship between one who trusts, and one who is trusted. (Most recently, in Why Trust is Assymmetrical, and What that Means for Trust Strategies).

Since 2000, when The Trusted Advisor came out, I have autographed my books with the simple phrase, “May you trust—and be trusted.” They are not the same thing.

Trust, Trustworthiness, and Trusting

Uslaner writes mainly about trust. Steven Covey Jr writes mainly about trusting. I have tended to write mainly about trustworthiness, and something about the interplay between the two (see The Dance of Trust.)

But I have to confess, the insight expressed in the title of this blog didn’t really come to me until I connected the HR insight and Uslaner’s work.

Uslaner eloquently makes the point that there are two kinds of trust. There is the kind you read about every day in surveys and headlines about ‘trust in Wall Street down last month,’ or ‘most trusted brands decline compared to internet,’ or ‘Obama’s trust rating down 10 points in 3 weeks.’   That kind of trust is pretty short-term, situational, and closely resembles things like reputation, brand image and customer loyalty.

There is another kind of trust: what the academics call social trust. That kind of trust is literally learned at home in our childhood. It doesn’t change rapidly or easily, is maintained in the face of specific events; it is, as Uslaner so correctly claims, in my humble opinion, a moral value. And it is that kind of trust–or its absence–that undergirds civil society. 

Hire for Trustingness, and Train for Trustworthiness

How does one become trusted as an advisor, a salesperson, and internal advisor, a consultant? The short answer is: be trustworthy. How do you do that? Read my blogs and articles for the last 2-3 years, or buy my books.

But how do you create an organization that lives on trust? How do you create a trustworthy people-creating organization? How do you lead and manage a business that runs itself on trust principles? 

There are a number of answers, but it may be that number one in that list is: hire people who learned that deeper attitudinal moral value of trust at the age of 3 or 4. Hire trusting people. Hire people who know how to trust, and are not afraid to do so.

Hire people who treat trustingness as a moral value. Because that is hard to teach.

Get an organization full of high-trusting people, and you have amazing potential. Such people can quickly ‘get’ the skills of trustworthiness. By being surrounded by others they trust and who trust them, they get a lot done.

By contrast, high-trusting people may not be changed by low-trust organizations—but they’ll leave.  And low-trust people likewise may not be changed by high-trust organizations; but they’ll be a drag on things.

I’ll be writing much more on this. For now, the catch-phrase is:

Hire for trustingness, train for trustworthiness.
 

Four Principles of Organizational Trust: How to Make Your Company Trustworthy

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I am on vacation this week, and will be going back to the vault for some ‘oldies but goodies’ posts. I hope you enjoy them: I’ll be back in a week or so with new material.

Trust, in case you hadn’t noticed, has gotten “hot” lately. But much of it sounds very vague—soft, fluffy, nice-to-have, the buzzword du jour.

I’d like to do my part to make it real.

To me, that means breaking it down and making it sound; tapping into the strategy and mysticism, but also staying grounded in the tactical and the practical.

So let’s review some context; then talk about four specific operating principles a business can hone in on to improve its trustworthiness.

Putting Trust into a Workable Context

I’ve suggested elsewhere that “trust” is too vague a term to work with. To do something practical, we need first to identify the trust realm: are we talking about personal trust, or business/organizational trust, or social/institutional trust?

The next question is about the trust role: are we working on being more trusting? Or more trustworthy? They are not the same thing. And “trust” is the result of them both interacting.

Building a Trustworthy Business

In the realm “personal” and the role “trustworthy,” we can point to personal beliefs and behaviors as indicated in the Trust Quotient. But in business, trustworthiness is built through a set of daily operating principles. Trustworthiness is built from habitually behaving in accordance with a set of commonly shared beliefs about how to do business.

I suggest they can be boiled down to four.

The Four Trust Principles

1. A focus on the Other (client, customer, internal co-worker, boss, partner, subordinate) for the Other’s sake, not just as a means to one’s own ends. We often hear “client-focus,” or “customer-centric.” But these are terms all-too-often framed in terms of economic benefit to the person trying to be trusted.

2. A collaborative approach to relationships. Collaboration here means a willingness to work together, creating both joint goals and joint approaches to getting there.

3. A medium to long term relationship perspective, not a short-term transactional focus. Focus on relationships nurtures transactions; but focus on transactions chokes off relationships. The most profitable relationships for both parties are those where multiple transactions over time are assumed in the approach to each transaction.

4. A habit of being transparent in all one’s dealings. Transparency has the great virtue of helping recall who said what to whom. It also increases credibility, and lowers self-orientation, by its willingness to keep no secrets.

Executing on the Trust Principles

What are the tools an organization has at its disposal to make itself more trustworthy? Any good change management consultant can rattle off the usual suspects, but for trustworthiness, the emphasis has to shift somewhat.

The usual change mantra includes a heavy dose of behaviors, metrics and incentives. Some of that works here, but only to a point.

For example, Principle 1, focus on the Other, is contradicted by too much extrinsic incentive aimed at leveraging self-interest–it undercuts focus on the Other. And Principle 3, relationship over transaction, forces metrics and rewards to a far longer timeframe than most change efforts employ.

Another great shibboleth of change is that it must be led from the CEO’s office. But with trust, it ain’t necessarily so. Trustworthiness is a great candidate for infectious disease change strategies; guerrilla trust strategies can work at the individual level, and individual players can lead. Behavior in accord with these principles cannot be coerced; the flipside is, it can be unilaterally engaged in.

The most powerful tools to create a trustworthy organization are things like language, recognition, story-telling, simply paying attention to the arenas where the principles apply—and the will to apply them. Role-modeling helps; some skill-building helps. But most of all, it is the willingness to notice the pervasive opportunities to work in accordance with this simple set of four principles.

Trustworthiness breeds trusting (the reverse is true too); the combination is what leads to trust. Which, by the way, is quite measurable in its impact on the bottom line.