The trust challenge articulated in the previous chapter is massive and complex. Aspects such as polarization and misinformation are well beyond the ability of any individual organization to solve and will likely require collaborative approaches involving policymakers, regulators and industry. Focus instead on what directly impacts your organization and what you can influence or change. For most, this means influencing the trust your key stakeholders — customers, employees and investors — have in your institution, brands and technologies.
Next, identify the attributes that will lead these stakeholders to view your organization as trustworthy. Across multiple studies, three common themes appear repeatedly, which form the pillars of trust:
- Competence: People trust organizations and leaders based on their ability to effectively perform their roles and their tendency to do what they say.
- Integrity: People trust organizations and individuals that appear honest and fair in their actions.
- Benevolence: People trust entities that demonstrate they care about others’ well-being, not just their own self-interest.
The relative weight of these pillars can vary across companies and sectors. Consumers might place higher importance on an airline’s competence while giving its benevolence less weight. Conversely, with an educational institution, trust may be driven more by benevolence — knowing schools and teachers are motivated by students’ welfare rather than by financial gain.
A commonly used construct, the trust equation, brings these elements to life: Trust = (Credibility + Reliability + Intimacy) / Self-Orientation. By strengthening credibility and reliability, organizations demonstrate competence and integrity. By fostering intimacy and reducing self-orientation, they signal benevolence and stakeholder focus.
To strengthen these pillars, companies and leaders will act across four dimensions: people and psychology, policies and processes, profit mechanisms and protocols and platforms.
People and psychology: the human quotient
“Our preferred state as a species is one of reciprocal trust,” says Social Psychologist Heidi Grant, Director of Behavioral Science & Insights at Ernst & Young LLP, in the US. “We want to be trusted and trust others. We want to be helped and help others.”
Indeed, evidence from multiple disciplines — including neuroscience16, behavioral science and evolutionary psychology17 — suggest the propensity to trust is hardwired in us, conferring an evolutionary advantage through human history.
Since trust is so fundamentally human, impersonal policies and protocols can only go so far. The most important part of building trust is the human component. Organizations can learn from disciplines such as behavioral science to understand the psychology of trust.
Several behaviors can build trust by demonstrating competence, integrity and benevolence:
- Transparency. In trust, perception is everything. “Human behavior is ambiguous by nature,” says Grant. “It is open to multiple interpretations. Unfortunately, our brains are wired to interpret something that’s ambiguous in a negative way and assume the worst. So, it’s important to not just be trustworthy, but to be seen as trustworthy. This means being transparent, which can help signal qualities like integrity and benevolence.”
- Vulnerability and intimacy. For companies — and particularly leaders — a key component is vulnerability. Doctors who admit they’ve made a mistake are less likely to be sued for medical malpractice, because vulnerability builds trust, but corporate lawyers are reluctant to allow this.18
Business leaders are conditioned to display confidence and to always appear to have all the answers. They may shy away from being fully candid because they don’t want to make their employees anxious, or their instinct is to wait until they have everything perfectly figured out before saying anything in public.
Yet, leaders may find reassurance in behavioral science insights about how we respond to adverse information and outcomes. “We often think human beings can’t tolerate negative outcomes,” says Grant. “But research on what behavioral scientists call ‘procedural justice’ shows that people may tolerate a negative outcome, but not an outcome that was arrived at in an unfair way. So, don’t worry about your stakeholders disliking a decision; instead, be transparent about how decisions were made and demonstrate they were made in a just way.”
- Inclusivity. One often overlooked way to create transparency is by bringing consumers into the tent. “When many companies think about using technology to engage with customers, they default to social media platforms and influencers,” says Zuckerman. “But a more useful technological approach is open-source software. Linux and Wikipedia demonstrate people love projects they can be a part of. How could companies and brands create truly participatory projects and harness them to build inclusivity and trust?”
- Accountability. “After a trust breach, it can be critical to immediately apologize and assume ownership,” says Peter Kim, Professor of Management and Organization at the University of Southern California and author of How Trust Works: The Science of How Relationships Are Built, Broken and Repaired. “However, my research finds a second dimension: whether people perceive the incident as a failure of competence or integrity. People are generally forgiving of competence breaches. But if a company apologizes for what consumers see as a matter of integrity, the apology can backfire. People interpret the apology as an admission that you are dishonest, which is not as readily forgiven.
“The key insight for companies: If a competence failure might be misinterpreted as a lack of integrity, it is essential to correct that misapprehension,” Kim says. “Assessments by independent third parties — such as investigators, regulators, auditors or licensing boards — may help do that.”
