At the Corporate Affairs Summit towards the end of last year, I heard Dr Steve Van Riel (Head of insight and innovation at Teneo) talk about what trust means to an organisation.
He talked about the difference between trust as a lofty concept, and as a specific goal. He asked us to consider how our organisations can be trusted by one person, for one thing.
Van Riel asked the question: how will trust drive forward your organisation? This makes the goal of trust specific, and, importantly, measurable against things that really matter to the business.
Get specific about trust
When we run crisis exercises, participants often talk about retaining trust as a key objective for the crisis. But they rarely make it specific.
Shortly after the conference, I flew to Germany to run a workshop for a client. When you fly, you put your life in the hands of the airline. Trust is really, really important. But when I thought about what that trust meant in specific terms, it wasn’t the brand I trusted per se. It was the pilot, the air crew, air traffic control, the aircraft and engine manufacturers, the flight safety record of the airline.
Trust in the brand comes from trust in all those smaller, more specific things. Organisations should work out what those smaller specific areas of trust would be for them, bringing the objective of building trust back down from the lofty ideal to the specific, actionable goal.
Trusting with your heart vs trusting with your head
We trust both with our heads – cognitive trust – and with our hearts – affective trust. Our heads need data, information and experience. We trust the airline with the best safety record, the colleague who delivers on time, the doctor whose diagnosis is proven to be correct.
This is traditionally where organisations focus in a crisis. Data, information, facts. They tend to neglect affective trust – the heart stuff. We also trust based on empathy, human connection, a feeling of safety, compassion and honesty.
We trust the leader who shows vulnerability, the friend who apologises unreservedly for a mistake, the organisation that gives us a safe space to be heard.
After all, we talk about winning hearts and minds, not just minds. And yet so many crisis statements are purely focused on facts – building cognitive trust only.
How can organisations build meaningful trust?
The Trust Equation is a model of trust developed by Charles Green, the founder of Trusted Advisor and co-author of a book by the same name. The model looks at four variables that build trust: credibility, reliability, intimacy and self-orientation.
- Credibility, fairly obviously, is whether a person or organisation can be believed.
- Reliability is whether it meets expectations (does this shampoo actually work?).
- Intimacy is about human connection and understanding – can we trust someone or something not to let us down?
- Self-orientation is, I think, the most interesting (and the most neglected) in the context of crisis. This is about where we focus – on ourselves, or on someone else. If you focus on yourself all the time, you are less trusted.
I talk about the principle of putting others first a lot in crisis communications training workshops. The ability to focus on another person – in a crisis, the person most directly impacted by the crisis – comes down to empathy.
If your response is entirely self-focused, what does that say about how you’re treating those affected by the crisis?
And yet we so often hear statements that put the organisation at the centre of it in order to protect themselves first: “We comply with all the relevant regulation.” “We regret this event, but we are not responsible because…”
Imagine another organisation reframing that to focus on the immediate needs of those affected: “We will do everything in our power to keep you safe, whatever it takes.” “This is what we’re doing to sort the situation out. We can work out who’s responsible for what later.”
Which one would you trust to help you in a crisis?
