Our new episode of the TrustTalk podcast: an interview with David Horsager. He is a global expert on trust and CEO of Trust Edge Leadership Institute where the mission is to develop trusted leaders and organizations. Trust is a fundamental, bottom-line issue. Without it, leaders lose teams, salespeople lose sales, and organizations lose reputation, retention, and revenue. But high-trust teams and organizations bring out the best in their people and get the greatest results. Through David’s industry-leading research The Trust Outlook and firsthand experience working with the world’s highest-performing organizations, David reveals the 8 Pillar Framework for driving business results and becoming the most trusted in your industry.
About “humanization”
(…) as far as building trust, I think there was definitely a move toward humanism, the humanization of people, where we need leaders. First of all, let me say this. This was a finding, the number one reason people want to work for an organization, ahead of being paid more last year, ahead of a more fun work environment, ahead of more autonomy, was trusted leadership. So it’s a big finding. We have to deal with this trust issue. It’s never a leadership issue. The reason I follow a leader or not is trust. It’s not a sales issue. The reason I buy or not has something to do with trust, not a marketing issue. The way to amplify marketing is increased trust. So in this, if I was going to take a look specifically at the pandemic time frames, we saw several things. One, the leaders that made it well, led the conversation with empathy as an example. They took clarity to a new level. One of the pillars of trust is clarity. We trust the clear. We mistrust or distrust, ambiguous. But they took clarity to a new level like people used, we used to say if you have more than three priorities, you don’t have any
2021 Trust Outlook of The Trust Edge Institute
Safety became very significant in a pandemic in people’s minds and in their physicality. Like, are you going to you know, are you going to take precautions to keep me safe physically and also even psychologically, by the way, there’s a lot plenty of mental health issues. They wanted to know that the CEO actually could put their feet in the shoes of my situation. So many senior leaders might have a big home and a beautiful place. And they wanted to know you’d understand. I’m living in an apartment, my husband has Covid and my three kids are running around the same kitchen, little kitchen table in my apartment or flat that are doing their education while I’m trying to get something done for you. They wanted to know you could put your feet in their shoes. That was another finding. They wanted to know this is challenging, but they wanted to be given some more autonomy and flexibility.
About the influence of trust in stakeholder relationships
The governance, the environment, our impact, people more than ever want to be aligned with your overall values and both social values and, you know, it can be hard values, it could be religious values. It could be. But it’s kind of our not just our business values. In fact, for the first time ever, last year, our big roundtable in the US, which only allows the CEO of Wal-Mart, the CEO of Toyota, the CEO, I mean, the biggest CEOs came out and said for the first time since Adam Smith, basically we’re not just about making money for our stakeholders, we are really about something entirely different, the good for all. And that was a kind of massive shift in people seeing the importance of that. So it’s going to continue, by the way, be more important that people are going to give to they’re going to buy-in. They’re going to refer people they align with, you know, that care also about the social and societal impact
About the “8 pillars of trust”
(…) a whole lot of research that you can solve every organizational and leadership issue against these eight. It’s always one of these eight. It’s not an engagement issue. The only way to increase engagement is to apply one of these. The only way it’s not a net promoter score or referral issue, it’s not even a communication issue. People all got a communication. You never have a communication issue. It’s the type, clear, the first pillar, clear communications trusted, unclear communication isn’t. Compassionate communication is and hateful communication isn’t consistent, is inconsistent, isn’t high character is low character. And so clarity is trusted that next one compassion. I trust those that care beyond themselves, that next pillar character, it matters because if I do what’s right over what’s easy, you know, I might trust you to take my kids the ball game because of your character, but not give me a root canal because you don’t have the fourth pillar, which is competency.
The book “Trusted Leader: 8 Pillars That Drive Results” by David Horsager can be ordered here:
Here is de PDF of the full transcript of the interview with David Horsager:
