Ian Sampson
AICD reported this week that the 2018 Edelman Trust Barometer “has shown the trust crisis is deepening in Australia.” (The Boardroom Report. Vol 16, Issue 02 14 February 2018).
The ETB measures trust levels in a range of political, corporate and social institutions.
The key measure of trust is INTEGRITY.
Since Integrity is what is created (or isn’t) when something is tested, trust is the resultant measure.
If I ring a bell and it dings, I trust that the bell has integrity. If I test the bell by ringing it and it clunks, I know it has no integrity and I can’t trust it to do what it was designed and built to do. The integrity of the bell only comes into existence when it is tested i.e the bell is rung. So it is that trust only occurs when the integrity of a person or thing is tested. Before the bell is rung it’s just a bell. It may look like a bell but you can’t know if it rings like a bell until it is tested i.e. rung.
The same applies in organisations and politics.
If leaders say something, often while being tested or under pressure, and it doesn’t ring true, trust evaporates.
Trust is so hard to recapture after the Integrity of a person has been called into question because the leader is demonstrating that they lack integrity.
When trust evaporates it can only be rebuilt by cleaning up the mess that has been created and demonstrating integrity going forward.
This is the reason why so much care has to be demonstrated even in the issuing of an apology (politicians please take note of this re the forthcoming apology to the victims of institutional violence): if the apology is not issued with integrity, the trust that was intended to be created is never created.
This is because integrity is binary: it is either present or not. It’s a 0 or a 1. Integrity can’t be partly present.
We humans are finely calibrated and extremely sensitive instruments for measuring integrity; after all, our ability to assess integrity in people and things and the trust which follows are sometimes vital to our very survival.
This is essential work that I do with a small group of leaders, assisting them in building and maintaining integrity in who they are and what they do; assisting them when integrity and the resultant trust are lost; rebuilding trust through the restoration of integrity. Please call me on 0419 001 179 if you would like to take this further.
