A quick scan of a corporate website will quickly reveal a company's values. Most likely, one or more of these values will relate to trust.
For example, GSK, the global pharmaceutical giant, listsintegrity as one of its values. Meanwhile, in the financial services sector, Barclays Bank showcases its value of integrity and adds a value of respect. In the public sector, the U.K. has published the "Seven Principles of Public Life," which include integrity, openness and honesty. In the nonprofit sector, the leading U.K. charity the Royal National Lifeboat Institution features trustworthiness, and finally, the values of the United Nations include integrity and humility. These findings will not surprise you.
In the same way, when I was researching trust at Aston Business School, I interviewed over 70 CEOs and asked them if they felt that trust was important. To a person, they instantly replied that trust was critical to both their own leadership and their organization's long-term success. Given such prominence of trust among company values and in the minds of CEOs, it is shocking how few organizations measure trust. Again, I explored this topic of measurement in my CEO interviews, and many leaders talked about having proxy measures for trust, such as employee satisfaction and Net Promoter Score (NPS).
At the time of my interviews, not one organization had a specific measure for trust or the components of trust like integrity, honesty, humility and openness. In recent times, trust has become even more critical to a company's reputation and risk. This lack of measurement of trust is an issue rising up the corporate agenda. In October 2022, a survey by Deloitte found that "While the majority of polled C-suite executives say their organizations have no current trust-tracking in place (55%), nearly half of those respondents (19.6%) say plans are underway to implement trust tracking measures in the next 12 months."
This is a welcome development for all who believe trust is too important to be left to chance. The outcome of my research at Aston Business School was developing a trust measure known as the Leadership Trust Index (LTI). This measure is perhaps the only academically verified behavioral measure for leadership trustworthiness. Over the past five years, it has been used across the private, public and nonprofit sectors to measure and benchmark trust levels. As documented in my book The Trusted Executive, the average LTI score for organizations is 5.5 out of 7, and using the work of Dr. Paul Zak, we estimate that for every 0.2 increase in the LTI score, organizations can secure the following benefits:
• 15% drop in employee stress
• 3% drop in employee sick days
• 10% increase in productivity
• 15% increase in employee engagement
Another aspect of my research was to develop a behavioral model for trust known as the Nine Habits of Trust, which can be used to break down an organization's LTI score to show the performance of an organization's leadership against each trust habit. The benchmark performance against each habit is below:
Deliver: 5.6/7
Coach: 5.3/7
Be Consistent: 5.4/7
Be Honest: 6.0/7
Be Open: 5.1/7
Be Humble: 5.2/7
Evangelize: 5.6/7
Be Brave: 5.5/7
Be Kind: 5.4/7
We can see that the honesty habit scores the highest by a significant margin, which is an encouraging finding given press headlines and scandals that often highlight lapses in business ethics and honesty. Other strong habits are deliver and evangelize. The three weakest habits in the benchmark data are be open, be humble and coach. Many leaders still struggle to show vulnerability and share personal feelings in the workplace. They are not used to thinking of humility as a strength and are still telling their staff what to do, rather than coaching them through listening, asking and empowering.
Armed with this data, leadership teams can develop action plans to improve trust levels by focusing limited time and energy on those habits that make the most difference. As with all aspects of organizational life, what gets measured gets done, and it is no different when it comes to trust.
Just imagine if all those organizations hit by a trust crisis in recent years, ranging from Facebook to Oxfam to Volkswagento BP, had set tangible goals for trust and measured and benchmarked their Leadership Trust Index. This trust index could have acted as a leading indicator, providing a warning of the strategic risks building up in those businesses and prompting leaders to take proactive action.
The impact of trust failure is specific and dramatic. In what other aspects of business would we accept such lax, woolly thinking when measuring and tracking such a critical variable? If we are to treasure trust, then it is time to blow away the myth that it cannot be measured, any more than product quality, employee engagement or shareholder value cannot be measured. These high-level concepts will yield measurement if we consider them important enough and invest the time and energy to collect and track the relevant data. Anything less leaves trust to chance.