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Leaders have only one opportunity to establish trust from the start but a long career to maintain and protect it.
Trust is a cornerstone of business for customers, suppliers, employees, and others who have dealings with an organization. While trust means someone is reliable, this virtue can still be dynamic: A person can earn trust, lose trust, or regain trust. When lost and regained, though, trust may be diminished or tainted. The takeaway for leaders is to value trust with utmost care from the start. Timothy J. Sloan, appointed CEO of Wells Fargo, for example, is tasked with navigating through numerous probes and restoring the bank's bruised reputation after it was reported to have created more than two million unauthorized accounts for bank customers. Though this ongoing saga continues at substantial costs, Sloan has implemented many trust-building activities since taking on corrective measures at Wells Fargo. Not only did he admit that culture problems caused the sales-practices scandal, but he brought in outsiders for their diagnoses and expertise. Regulators from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York affirmed the goal: begin to uncover the culture's positive attributes and potential weaknesses so that leaders can better understand how best to foster an improved culture. Outside culture experts were brought in to help employees locate weaknesses, and on-call ethicists were engaged for more difficult questions of right and wrong. Sloan most recently conducted company-wide surveys so that company leaders and employees could gain information to better foster an ethical, inclusive, and customer-focused culture.
The Wells Fargo case illustrates that trust can often necessitate active support, or ethics renewal, by an organization's leaders. If employees have sufficient trust in their situations within the organization, they will participate in restructuring and problem-solving sessions and speak candidly as matters are resolved. Leaders should take note and think critically about their own values as they work alongside others. Then they should ensure that ongoing trustbuilding activities with deliberate, measurable actions are in place for all employees.
The Trust Crisis
In The Speed of Trust, Stephen M.R. Covey suggests that trust is the one thing common to every individual relationship, team, family, or organization-even to a nation, economy, or civilization. The possession of trust, according to Covey, indicates the presence of...