In this episode of The Evolving Leader podcast, hosts Jean Gomes and Scott Allender talk to Ashley Reichheld. Ashley is co-author of ‘The Four Factors of Trust’ and since 2015 has been principal at Deloitte Consulting. She is passionate about making the experiences people have with companies feel more human and believes that building trust is the single greatest opportunity to create a competitive advantage. Ashley’s work and ideas have been featured in many publications and conferences, such as HBR, Bloomberg TV, SMR, The Wall Street Journal, AdWeek, Dreamforce, CES, and Fortune's Most Powerful Women, amongst others.
Referenced during this episode:
The Four Factors of Trust (Wiley-WSJ #2 Bestseller)
“4 Questions to Measure — and Boost — Customer Trust” (HBR)
“Research: Why Women Trust Their Employers Less Than Men Do” (HBR)
“How to Build a High-Trust Workplace” (SMR)
“Trust, The Glue That Holds Digital Worlds Together, Quantified At Last” (Forbes)
Other reading from Jean Gomes and Scott Allender:
Leading In A Non-Linear World (J Gomes, 2023)
The Enneagram of Emotional Intelligence (S Allender, 2023)
Social:
Instagram @evolvingleader
LinkedIn The Evolving Leader Podcast
Twitter @Evolving_Leader
YouTube @evolvingleader
The Evolving Leader is researched, written and presented by Jean Gomes and Scott Allender with production by Phil Kerby. It is an Outside production.
In this episode of The Evolving Leader podcast, hosts Jean Gomes and Scott Allender talk to Ashley Reichheld. Ashley is co-author of ‘The Four Factors of Trust’ and since 2015 has been principal at Deloitte Consulting. She is passionate about making the experiences people have with companies feel more human and believes that building trust is the single greatest opportunity to create a competitive advantage. Ashley’s work and ideas have been featured in many publications and conferences, such as HBR, Bloomberg TV, SMR, The Wall Street Journal, AdWeek, Dreamforce, CES, and Fortune's Most Powerful Women, amongst others.
Referenced during this episode:
The Four Factors of Trust (Wiley-WSJ #2 Bestseller)
“4 Questions to Measure — and Boost — Customer Trust” (HBR)
“Research: Why Women Trust Their Employers Less Than Men Do” (HBR)
“How to Build a High-Trust Workplace” (SMR)
“Trust, The Glue That Holds Digital Worlds Together, Quantified At Last” (Forbes)
Other reading from Jean Gomes and Scott Allender:
Leading In A Non-Linear World (J Gomes, 2023)
The Enneagram of Emotional Intelligence (S Allender, 2023)
Social:
Instagram @evolvingleader
LinkedIn The Evolving Leader Podcast
Twitter @Evolving_Leader
YouTube @evolvingleader
The Evolving Leader is researched, written and presented by Jean Gomes and Scott Allender with production by Phil Kerby. It is an Outside production.
Why do we trust this is a fascinating aspect of human experience that binds us together or pushes us apart. Some of us see being trusted as a higher compliment than being loved. Neuroscience is shedding new light on what happens when we experience trust. Oxytocin, a hormone associated with our willingness to trust is produced and parts of the brain associated with pleasure activate. There's a suggestion that oestrogen is conductive to oxytocin flow and makes women more likely to trust. While toss. testerone inhibits making men less likely to trust others. Trust enables cooperative action. It reduces unhelpful resistance so clearly, it's critical for change and the agility within organisations. Research by Adam weights, a professor at Northwestern University suggests that people who trust more register an increase in productivity by 50%, they experienced less burnout by 40%. They have 29% higher life satisfaction, and 74% less stress, and 106% more energy. But trust is a complex, slippery topic. It's not easily defined by simple models of competency and character. Because much of what informs why and how we trust others and institutions happens beyond our awareness. For example, our physical and emotional state plays a huge role in our capacity to trust others, but this is rarely explored in the literature. As with most leadership challenges, the best place to start in building trust is with yourself. Do you trust yourself? Are you worthy of the trust of others? Do you honour your commitments? take accountability for your mindset, and how your emotional and physical state influences your judgement. In this show, we talked to Ashley reach out, who has made a study of trust and its impact and an organisational level. One of the findings is that trusted companies outperform their peers by 400%. So it's clearly a source of competitive advantage. In our uncertain and often difficult world, people, communities and organisations that can be trusted, will become ever more valued, and valuable.
Scott Allender:Hey, folks, welcome to development leader podcast, the show born from the belief that we need deeper, more accountable and more human leadership to confront the world's biggest challenges. I'm Scott Allender.
Jean Gomes:And I'm Jean Gomes.
Scott Allender:How are you feeling today Mr. Gomes?
Jean Gomes:I'm feeling alive. I'm feeling full of the joys of whatever it is. Can't say spring, but I don't know what it is. I'm feeling very, very. Yeah, awake, which he was for. It's amazing for. We're not talking about my diet again. No, I am feeling particularly positive. And I always feel that's interesting when there's so much challenging stuff happening in the world right now, particularly with the you know, the UK political scene is quite interesting. Leave it there. So yeah, Scott, how are you feeling?
Scott Allender:I don't think we should compare our country's political scenes at the moment that could be a whole nother show. I'm feeling, I'm actually feeling present and centred. And I didn't start the day that way. But I was able to find some time for a little meditation and I feel grounded, I feel ready. I feel excited to be joined by our guests today because today we're talking about a critical topic of trust. And our guest is Ashley Reichheld, a principal at Deloitte Digital, who's built a tool to help companies measure, predict and build trust with their customers, workforce and partners. She's written a new book, along with Amelia Dunlop called the four factors of trust, how organisations can earn lifelong loyalty. Ashley, welcome to the evolving leader.
Ashley Reichheld:Thanks for having me.
Jean Gomes:Ashley, welcome to the show. How you feeling today?
Ashley Reichheld:I was thinking about that as you were all chatting, I'm feeling really excited and it's actually really quiet. It's gonna be the only quiet moment in my house all day long with the dogs on the walk and the twins at school. So nice and nice and restful.
Scott Allender:Nice. So, just jumping into it. You clearly believe that trust is important way for framing organisational performance. And you cite numerous statistics, for instance, that trusted companies outperform their peers by 400%. But you go further, suggesting that it's the single greatest opportunity to create competitive advantage. And you talk about your goal being to help leaders measure, predict trust and act in ways that build trust, because you believe it's the pathway to loyalty. So can you talk to us about that?
Ashley Reichheld:You know, holding price constant trust is the single biggest driver of human behaviour. That is true for customers, it's true for finding employees and partners. If you understand and are able to engender trust with those audiences, then they do the kinds of things that you want them to do. When customers trust you, they are 1.8 times more likely to purchase from you, they're 1.4 times more likely to spend more with your brand. on the employee side, employees are 50% less likely to leave, and they're 1.8 times more likely to be motivated to work. So trust drives the kinds of behaviours we're all speaking and to your point that links directly to financial results. In our research, we found that those companies with a high trust score outperformed everybody else by up to 4x. And the reason that number is so extraordinary is because the marginal benefit of trust increases as trust increases. So for example, if you were to move your trust score from say, 30 to 31, you would see roughly a 3%, expected stock return increase. But if you move it from 60 to 61, you see roughly a 6%, expected staff returning courteous. So as you earn trust, the benefits explode. I think that's really interesting. And if you kind of ground that in a relationship, that kind of exponential impact of trust, you could see, you know, like your friendship group and people in your peers and so on that how that might work you might be prepared to trust people with so I can I can feel the rightness of that idea. I'm glad you said feel because that's exactly what it is. When we talk to people. It's not that people don't think trust is important. We all intuitively know it is. So you feel it. And when we ask people how you define it, often we get the answer of oh, I don't know, I just know it when I see it. It's really the challenge of helping people to break it down so that they can actually actively build it versus just anticipate it.
Jean Gomes:Can you give us a little bit of background on you and how you've got to the point where trust has become so an important part of your work?
Ashley Reichheld:Well, I I study human behaviour. And I'm fascinated by why people do what they do, and often why we say one thing and then go off and do an entirely different thing. So as I was trying to think about how we can help our organisations to earn the loyalty of the constituents in the organisations, I really wanted to dig into the topic of trust. Fundamentally, trust is what makes things frictionless when we trust each other things just move that we want them to move. And you can picture this in a contracting process, right? How many pages of legal documentation does it take for us to create a relationship between organisations and have a dialogue, trust helps make all of that a lot easier. So from my part, I started studying it a number of years ago. And with the goal of helping leaders to break it down. I should also note that I have a bit of a traveler's background, I have the pleasure of living abroad for longer than I've lived here in the US. And that was really great, because it gave me a perspective on kind of how different cultures interact, build and do things differently. And I consider myself a little bit of a global citizen. So trying to understand trust and human behaviour and who those humans are, and how that might vary by culture.
Scott Allender:Could we get can we anchor around a definition of trust?
Ashley Reichheld:Yes, I would love to do that. So trust is built on four factors. And this is true, whether you're here or abroad, it's true. Whether you're an employee or a customer, you earn trust by making a good promise, which we describe as having humanity, treating people fairly treating them with empathy, and doing that with transparency, telling them what they need to know to make a decision sharing your motivations, those two factors make up your ability to make that good promise. And of course, you have to be able to deliver on that promise, which we define as having capability, the products or services or experiences that people are looking for, and then doing that reliably, over and over and over again. Trust is built when you make and keep good promises.
Jean Gomes:Before we dive into that framework, you started to explain that and it's in your book. Can we get a sense of your take on the challenges of building trust in given the broader tensions to society polarisation being at the top of what seemingly automatically alienates people from each other before they've even had a chance to build trust? What are you seeing there?
Ashley Reichheld:No matter where you sit in the world today, there's incredible conflict tension, whether that's because we're at war or whether that's because we sit in a country with incredibly divisive politics. There are organisations who have been measuring trust for the last 4050 years and what you'll find is that trust has been on the decline the entire time. It's been studied So we are at the lowest point of trust in since we started measuring it. That is true for trust in government. It's true trust in religion in organised institutions and big business. So we are in a state of low trust. And my guess is you probably feel that too.
Scott Allender:I feel it deeply. In fact, I'm listening to you. And I'm, it's, it seems like we're at a time where, especially in the sort of political landscape where people don't even necessarily have to be honest or held to account. It's almost, it's almost like, there's a sense of permission to say whatever you want to say, even if you don't back it up with facts, which then I think, you know, in my perception, I want to get your take on this that kind of further erodes and polarises people pointing at the other side saying see this. There's all this deception and deception. And it's feeling you mentioned feeling I feel deeply this sort of fear around, you know, how do we is there a hope? How do we build trusts? Right? So maybe we can answer that at the sort of macro level, but I'm particularly interested in organisations as well, like, how do they build trust? And where does it go wrong for them?
Ashley Reichheld:For my part, I think it needs to be a measurable goal, organisations tend to do what they can measure. And if they're not measuring trust, they probably don't have a good understanding of what their trust is, and why it is the way it is. So we always tell organisations to start first by understanding where you are, and do that with all the key relationships in your organisation. It's not just customers you have to care about, it's also your employees, it's also your regulators with all the other stakeholders that are part of your organisation. When you understand where you sit across the four factors, then you can lean in to build trust more specifically. And what we're finding is that really is human it's individual trust is human, it's an emotion. And so you have to think about it. Not at necessarily just the macro level, but how you're engaged with individuals and what they need from you. We did some work with a global airline last summer. And what we would do is take passengers with the same loyalty score, so their likelihood to recommend, and then we would look at their test score right underneath it. And it was fascinating, because when you took identical people with identical loyalty, one might have low humanity. And the action for her is to waive the seat foetal let her sit by her kid, which I would argue is a benefit for the whole plane, not just mom. And on the other hand, that you have somebody with the same loyalty score, but who's low and reliability. And while you can and should treat him like a human, what's going to move the needle for him, is making up for that three hour delay he had last week, whether that's miles or a drink voucher, making him feel whole again, after that Miss treatment, and then telling him why you're going to be on time next time, you have to lean into this specific problem for this specific person, rather than treated at a meta level.
Jean Gomes:So can we break down the content of the book and these four factors that you believe help leaders to build trust, and maybe bring to each to life a little bit with some of the kind of positive influences behaviours that you can pull out?
Ashley Reichheld:Sure. Well, I can give you an example from our own organisation, actually, Deloitte, we like to say that we drink our own champagne. So we take our own medicine do we measure trust for practitioners, and we are well above average on most, but we found that we were pretty low on transparency. So for us, that could take a number of forms. One of the common challenges across practitioners. So whether you're senior, whether your junior was paid transparency, why am I being paid what I'm paid? How does that? How is that relative to everybody else, we were finding that our practitioners could potentially find more information on Glassdoor than they could find at Deloitte. That is a big transparency challenge. So the organisation put a big push in for consulting to be able to pull out for the year end, here's where you sit, here's the quartile you're in. Here's how many people are in it. Here's how many people are the other quartiles? Here's how that's associated with your ratings. And here's the direct link to how you're compensated both in terms of your bonus and your salary. So just a tangible way to help take something that was previously blackbox and break it down for people so that it was transparent. And doing that without sharing confidential information, like how much Joe over there is paid.
Jean Gomes:And so how how humanity transparency capability and reliability linked how do they form an ecosystem.
Ashley Reichheld:So if you look at the logo on our book, you'll see that we draw the four factors as an infinite loop. And the reason we do that is because they tend to move together. It's really difficult to treat somebody with a lot of humanity but then not be at all transparent with them. That has an impact on each other. So the factors do tend to move together and they have increasingly started to influence to one another. So for example, our recent studies have been trying to understand how trust varies by generation. And Gen Z has been utterly fascinating to me, it is a low trust generation fact they trust less than most other generations. And the way they earn trust is different. They are more, they put more emphasis on the intent side of the equation. So humanity and transparency, but what was particularly interesting to me is that their intent scores actually influenced their capability scores. If an organisation doesn't have a positive intent, as they see it, then they rate them as less capable, which means that those organisations aren't part of the consideration set anymore. capability and reliability are table stakes, you don't go to a restaurant where you're going to get food poisoning, you're not going to get in a plane that you think is going to follow this guy. Those are basic requirements for doing business. So the relationship between the four factors is quite strong.
Scott Allender:I love these four factors. And I love what you're saying about the differences in terms of what people give weight to some, as I'm listening to you explain that. What are some ways that leaders can look at their organisation or even maybe a smaller team that they might run and kind of be able to best ascertain which of the factors matter most to the people on their team and what they need to focus on?
Ashley Reichheld:Well, so let's talk about that team structure for a second, because arguably trust is core to a highly functioning team. When you trust one another, you're able to engage in constructive conflict. Think about it this way, if you don't feel safe in your team structure, you're probably not going to raise your hand and say, Oh, I don't know about what you're saying, actually, it doesn't sound quite right, where we think the data is wrong. So you don't have that constructive conflict that you need. And when you don't have that conflict, it's really difficult to generate commitment, and accountability. So high functioning teams has trust have trust as a baseline, it's what allows us to engage in ways that we can kick around the problem and make it better and all get committed to the solution that we align on. So trust is incredibly important lever. And the four factors apply individually to teams just as much as they do to big organisations. Trust is human. And in all of our research, it doesn't matter if you're in China or in the US, it doesn't Holland, it doesn't matter if you're an employee or you're a supply chain partner, the way you build trust is the is simply the way you build trust. These are the four factors. So with my teams, for example, what I do when I kick off a project is to use something I call the the project placemat. It's a really simple tool, actually, it just lets people write down the things that they care about. So we talk about things like when do you like to work? What motivates you? What are the kinds of things that you'd like to do at work? Do you have any things that we should be aware of? Like, do you do yoga on Thursday nights? Is that just an off night for you. And what I find is that that gives people permission, it starts to tell them, what's important to you is important to me, it also tells them that we're a little bit of like, I have some things that I'm not good at, you have some things that you're not good at. And leaders who are able to demonstrate vulnerability are making it okay for their teams to demonstrate vulnerability to and individually trust is built in moments of vulnerability. Now, you asked how you measure it, I want to talk about that, because it's really important. I encourage companies to actually ask the question, and if you go onto the website or read the book, you'll see that we framed out each of the questions for each of the factors. We study those every which way from Sunday, to check to make sure that they are, in fact scientifically driving trust. And you can download those, we encourage all organisations to use them. By measuring trust across the four factors, you not just understand your total trust score, you also understand where you might be falling down. You might be pretty good on humanity, but maybe you're not as reliable as you'd like to be. And it might be something unusual that's causing that, for example, leaders often show up to meetings a couple minutes late. And you got to think about what does that tell your team in terms of how important your time is versus their time? How does that make people feel about your level of reliability?
Jean Gomes:Where across all the experiences that you've got? Are you finding that trust is hardest to build today?
Ashley Reichheld:You know, that's a good question. I don't I don't actually think it's necessarily about hard or not hard. If I had to say where it's hard it really when it's low. Trust is harder to build coming from a point of low trust versus high trust. And you see that in performance right. As you get more trust, those results tend to be exponential. So low trust is definitely harder and it's slower progress versus high trust. But we aren't seeing industries, for example, that are harder to build in others. There are certainly capabilities that make it easier or harder. For example, we have found higher trust scores amongst b2b relationships. versus b2c, which makes sense to me b2b is kind of one to few, whereas b2c is one to many, and you're able to engender trust more in those close relationships than you might be when it's a farther away relationship.
Jean Gomes:Yeah that makes sense. But when you've betrayed trust, what have you learned about rebuilding it quickly?
Ashley Reichheld:Oh, it takes time. Trust is something that needs to be intentional, it is not something that you can put in the bank and rely on to continue to earn interest. Trust goes away if you don't maintain it. So it takes intentional focus and ongoing care to make sure that you are still achieving trust with the people that you're trying to achieve it with.
Jean Gomes:So you from from this framework, you've created a way to measure Trust, which you started talking about, which is called well, that you talk about that, can we can we explore how you use that, and what leaders can do with it?
Ashley Reichheld:Sure. So we created something called the trust ID. It's hard to name things. But this one, we've tried to be funny about our you trust ID and get it trust ID, it really is just a combination of those four factors. We take the scores for humanity and transparency, capability and reliability. And we average them together, taking the people who don't trust and subtracting them from the people who do trust to get a net trust score. And that is how we help organisations break down where they have trust. And we encourage organisations to think about that across level. So you don't want to look just at your total trust score. It's a great way to understand how well you're doing overall. But really break it down. How are you doing with employees? How does that vary by level of seniority? For example, do you see differences in gender that you should be caring about. And actually on the topic of gender, one of the things that fascinated me in our research was i We didn't see a lot of differences by demographics. They exist, but they're not actually the biggest drivers of trust. The biggest drivers of trust are, are driven by life experience. And let me try to illustrate that for you. My partner and I lived in Holland for a long time. And we came back about eight years ago and decided to have kids. We had kids here in Massachusetts, and they are now six year old twins. One was diagnosed with type one BD diabetes when she was just 16 months old, and our son just this summer. So for us, we always have health top of mind. Now we're going to go visit my parents in Ohio for Thanksgiving, we learned that Ohio doesn't recognise my partner, as a parent, even though she's on the birth certificate in Massachusetts, in Ohio, she's not a parent, which means that if we have a problem and end up in the hospital, she has no decision rights over the care for the kids. To safely be able to visit my parents, we had to adopt our own kids, which is crazy to think about. And the reason I call that out is because it's not that being gay makes you trust more or less, but how you're treated or how you experience it really does influence your trust. So when organisations try to understand what is driving trust, we encourage them to break it down by what the experiences might be. And some of those stand out. We find, for example, that there is a correlation between seniority and trust. The more senior you are in an organisation, the more you trust, it is quite a one to one relationship. And that means a couple of things. So for starters, people who are more senior in organisation have more agency and control over outcomes. We control budgets, we set objectives, arguably, that's a lot more control than the person who walks in the door and is given a laptop and is getting heads down to work. And then of course you also are you learn to set expectations differently, you've been around the block and you know what to expect. And those two things really drive trust. But we encourage organisations to look at is the gap between the two. If your senior leaders trust you way up here this much and your junior leaders trust you way down here, there's a pretty significant gap between the people who are making decisions and the people who those decisions are made for.
Scott Allender:So stay with demographics for a moment. I hope I have this right. But believe you wrote about a data point that that people trust women brands less than men brands. Is that do I have that right? And if so, what's going on there?
Ashley Reichheld:Not quite? What we found is that women trust less than men as employees. Oh, so there isn't a particular difference in gender by industry, with a few exceptions, one of my favourite of which is the auto industry, women trust less than men on average for auto. But if you think about it, that makes a little bit of sense. I don't know if there are any women who are listening and have gone to get repairs recently or perhaps you tried to buy a car. And it's amazing that the sales rep will tell you about the colour of the car but perhaps not the horsepower of the car. Another really good example is up until very recently, we use test dummies that are an average 510 180 pound male test dummy and that means that women are 74% more likely to be severely injured or die in a car accident than men. So with all of these factors, it's not surprising that women perhaps trust less than men and auto. But as employees, women and men actually start up trusting almost the exact same. In fact, it's just a point off, we don't start trusting less than men until we've had some experience in the organisation. Right around the time you move into lower management, we start to see a break in trust, with men continuing to build trust, and women building trust at a much slower rate. In fact, it doesn't actually ever catch up. Even in the most senior levels of an organisation, men tend to trust more than women. And again, going back to life experience, that probably makes sense. Women on the whole are still paid 20 to 30% less than men, and we pay taxes, there's a pink tax on things like feminine products I am, I never forget going to hotels as a junior consultant, he might be gone for a while. And so you have to send a shirt to dry cleaning. And I would always check the box for a men's shirt versus a female blouse, because the cost difference was extraordinarily different. One was twice the other. Wow.
Jean Gomes:That's very interesting. I never thought that.
Ashley Reichheld:Crazy, right? Especially because honestly guys wears their more fabric.
Jean Gomes:Exactly. Yeah. Although men probably don't care how it's washed.
Ashley Reichheld:Perhaps you're not washing it at all right?
Jean Gomes:Oh, no, no, no, definitely, definitely, definitely. Hygiene is very important to. So if we think about how your framework can help individuals and leaders, how do you use that framework to intentionally because you've got some great diagnostics there? How do you would you recommend somebody who's a leader, trying to build more trust in their organisation could use that framework to go about more intentionally building trust.
Ashley Reichheld:So each of those four factors has a set of attributes that live underneath it. And what we did was tried to understand we read a whole bunch of regressions, to understand what things are actually driving your transparency, what things are driving your humanity? And if you think about workers, humanity is driven by feeling cared about, does my employer take care of my well being? Do they value me and treat me with respect? Do they treat people fairly? Do I feel engaged by the culture of my employer. So when you measure trust, you can also look at the attributes driving that and that is your map to figure out how to intervene. So for example, if you're low on humanity, one of the things that could be driving that as well being and investing in wellbeing programmes can help to boost how your employees feel about you. Or, for example, let's say you find yourself low on capability. And a lot of our work, we find that it's often linked to technology, perhaps you don't have the tools, technology and resources that you need to do your job. If you have to work around solutions all the time to get technology to work, that will erode capability.
Jean Gomes:So often, it's the C suite where relationships cause big issues right down the organisation trust isn't great often. And they're sending out contradictory messages down the organisation, what have you learned about helping C suite to build trust there and role model it through the organisation?
Ashley Reichheld:Trust in general is related. So what I mean by that is, it's not it's not typical to have low trust with customers and high sorry, low trust with employees and high trust with customers, for example, they are related. When your workers trust you, they build trust with customers. In fact, in our research, we found that those really good places to work, received 23% higher customer trust than everybody else. And that is true of leadership, too. We find that trust is typically built at your point of interaction. So it's really your manager and your everyday leader that is impacting your trust more than anybody else. But remember, this trickles down, your manager has a manager, he or she has a manager, he or she has a manager laying up to the CEO. So the mission and purpose of the company, how our leaders talk about it, how our leaders share information, all of that impacts managers beneath it, and that does trickle down. But arguably, trust is really built at that point of interaction.
Jean Gomes:If you're enjoying the show, you might also appreciate Scott's new book, The Enneagram of emotional intelligence, which provides simple, powerful tools to help us better understand ourselves and others available online at all major retailers.
Scott Allender:Can we come back to something I think you've touched on earlier, which is the dimensions of competence and intent. As I listened to you talk about this, I'm thinking of, of leaders who are probably really well intentioned and therefore don't think they need to look at this stuff. With a with, you know, a level of scrutiny. How do How does I guess I have a two part question how does a leader open up their their mindset evolved their mindset get a little vulnerable little honest to look beyond what they intend to do and see what they're actually doing? How do they had to get honest about that so they can make some changes and talk to us about competence and intent?
Ashley Reichheld:Well, so the reason we frame up competence and intent is because trust is built, when you meet expectations, if you set an expectation and don't meet it, of course, I'm going to erode trust. So if I, if I have the right intent, but I don't have the competence to deliver on that intent, I won't earn your trust. And I find that often there's a disconnect between what leaders talk about and what actually happens in an organisation. Our intention might be one thing, but unless that's delivered throughout the organisation, all that's going to do is erode trust. As a leader, it's really difficult to get that balance right? For a couple of reasons. For starters, people don't like companies to be vulnerable, Wall Street doesn't like companies to be vulnerable. And organisations, I describe organisational vulnerability personally as transparency, the more transparent you are, the more the more that is the equivalent of being vulnerable as an organisation. And our leaders have to be able to make themselves vulnerable, to be able to allow people to connect with them, see them as humans, in order to be truly great leaders. And that involves high degree of transparency. But remember, the transparency you're providing and providing has to be, you have to be held accountable for it. You can't go out and say one thing, and then have your organisation do another thing, and earn trust.
Scott Allender:Did your research find that that happens maybe on micro scale with companies who you know, put their seven cherished values in the break room of the things that they really care about, but they just become measuring sticks for all the ways people say, but you're not doing that you're not doing that.
Ashley Reichheld:We haven't quantified that in my research. But personally, I can tell you, I feel that and I can tell you, when I go into a client's office, I often feel that when you work with healthcare companies, for example, one of the things I hear a lot about is you say you're here to improve the health of the world. But you're pricing your drugs so that many, many people can't afford them. How do you square the circle on those things? The way we tend to think about that is in an organization's purpose. An organisation has to be really clear about their purpose, what is it they're trying to achieve outside of just really good profits and money? What's my motivation to come? And do it? Is it because we want the world to be a healthier place? Is it because we want to anticipate or help people have great vacations? What is it that we're trying to do? And then how do we make sure we live that at every level of the organisation, purpose is only effective when it's believed and executed on by employees. And a lot of that has to do with how leadership designs it, but also what they're doing to make sure that that's cascaded throughout the organisation. So for example, if you put your seven principles on the wall, but then your policies aren't consistent with that, or in the worst case, let's say your policies are driving behaviours that purposely aren't consistent with that, that's going to be a problem. And what I mean by that, that's a tough concept. So just really, really quickly, sales organisations, it's a really good example, I will set an individual sales target, and then I will tell you, I want you to collaborate, but you can't share sales. What do you do? So I need to be my target. But how am I going to help him? How am I going to collaborate if I can't share sales as an example. Another really good example, in retail organisations often use something called an attendance based points system. You earn points anytime you're late to work or have to take a day off, and not the good kinds of points. Nobody's going to be flying to vacation with these these points lead to disciplinary actions. Now think about what that's telling your employees, you had to take your kid to the doctor, that's just not as important as showing up to work.
Jean Gomes:So how do leaders embed trust into their ecosystem so that they can it's not just a kind of intentional communications leadership challenge, but it actually becomes a source of competitive advantage of an organisation. So you turn this abstract idea into something more concrete.
Ashley Reichheld:Trust should be the backbone of an organisation. And it starts with measurement. So it starts with understanding where you're doing well and where you're not doing well. And it is something that you should continue to hold yourselves accountable for at a leadership level as well as throughout the organisation. We like to understand trust in a whole bunch of different ways. So we want to understand how much our customers trust us. We want to understand how much our employees trust us. We want to understand that to what extent our b2b partners trust us. Each of those relationships can be measured and not to, not to sound scientific about it, but dissected to it understand where we're doing well and where we're not. And just like any other organisational objective, once it's measured, you can start to understand what the gaps are and start to go back and fill them in. It needs to be an active and intentional component of any organisation. It is my hope that in a decade's time when we're talking about trust, again, trust will be something that organisations actually report out on their annual financial statement, arguably, given the competitive advantage that we can quantify it to be, it's a fiduciary responsibility. And the more organisations consider it to be a core part of how we work, the more they will earn, and the more they will succeed.
Scott Allender:So speaking of a decade out, I'm interested to hear your thoughts on how the challenge of building trust will evolve as AI becomes more of a norm.
Ashley Reichheld:It's a great question AI and Gen AI in particular, is on the tip of everybody's tongue today. And we know that it will soon be taking over the wrong word, but it'll be everywhere, we'll be interacting with AI and chatbots. Instead of service representatives, marketing, current content might be created by a bot versus a human being. So we know it's going to be there, what we've been encouraging our organisations to think about is you can't just have really good technology for AI, you also have to make sure that your humans trust your AI, your technology may be amazing. But if your employees don't trust it, they're not going to use it. So design your AI with trust in mind, give real thought to how do you take the four factors lens and apply it to build AI so that it is transparent, so that it is delivering on humanity so that it is consistent and reliable. When you're designing your AI with human trust in mind, then what you're going to see is a significant uptake and adoption that you might otherwise miss. Again, if people don't trust it, they won't use it.
Jean Gomes:And I'm really interested in your perspective on trust and diversity. Because, you know, when you think about core needs of people to feel valued in an environment, either as customers or as, as employees, how does trust and and that sort of issues interact with each other.
Ashley Reichheld:That is a core component of trust in humanity. One of the things that drives humanity is feeling like my employer treats me with respect and values me that suggests that we value everybody, regardless of identity, backgrounds, beliefs, it is a core driver of intent. And organisations are kind of held accountable for how they're demonstrating that intent, both with their words, but also in their actions. And I think as their organisations become increasingly diverse, we'll start to see different patterns emerging. In customers, we don't actually see significant differences by ethnicity, for example, as customers, in organisations we have seen, we've seen that go back and forth. When we started measuring trust. In the pandemic, we saw significant differences by ethnicity, the more other you were not heterosexual, not white, the less you trusted. Now as the pandemic evened out, and we started to have fewer rice riots and fewer things that were top of mind for people, we saw those trust scores come back and even out again, trust is not stagnant, it changes and it will be influenced by the environment that we're in. So if our environment is truly that culture of respect, then you won't see changes by ethnicity. If it's not, that might indicate that you do have a humanity problem.
Jean Gomes:So in a way, what you're describing there as a kind of barometer for leaders to be able to tap into the situational needs of leadership.
Ashley Reichheld:Absolutely. And this is why I keep going back to measurement is really difficult to take action against something if you don't know what the problem is. So making sure you understand where you're falling down by group is really, really important. And it's often not going to be the same. In the work that we do with organisations. What I have found even is that most organisations are doing the right things. I'm gonna go off track here for a second, but I remember the first year of college I was reading for showed us intro to philosophy Thomas Hobbes the Leviathan. And in this book, he says life is nasty, brutish, and short. And the only reason people behave is because we're watching you. We're in society with laws and so if you weren't being watched by society, you do terrible things. At the same time, I was rereading Diary of Anne Frank, and at the end of it after everything she's been through, she says, I still believe that people are truly good inside. And of those two spectrums. I am on the Anne Frank side, I really do think that people and organisations have the best of intentions, and scientifically, research shows that 75% or so of people would do something for somebody else, even at a cost of themselves. So if we take the fact are we believe that organisations are trying to do the right things, it's actually more about how they do them and who they do them for than it is being right or wrong. So when we go to help organisations build trust, we find there lots of great things going on, but they might not be targeted to the right people. And this is particularly true on the customer side, think about all the messages you get all day long, the spam emails, the pop ups, the you're, you're just bombarded with information. And so if we aren't getting you the right message at the right time, you're very likely going to miss it, that's not going to do much for helping you to see what it is we're trying to help you with.
Scott Allender:On a couple of our most recent episodes, we've been talking about the importance of well being in an organisation and the need to build well being in into everything as a source of competitive advantage, right, and you're talking about trust as a source of competitive advantage. So I'm actually curious to hear your thoughts on the relationship between trust and personal wellbeing.
Ashley Reichheld:Personal well being is a huge driver of humanity. If I don't value your health, and help take care of you than I am not demonstrating that I value as a human. And we like to talk about it as you're not, you don't just show up and our employee, all of a sudden, you're the same person, whether you're an employee today and a mom at home. And if we're not thinking about you holistically as a human, then we're probably not doing our jobs. If at home, you're worried about being able to put food on the table, or having a kid that sick. And if I can't help you deal with those things, then you're going to show up as kind of part of yourself at work and not your whole self. So trust and wellbeing are deeply related.
Jean Gomes:Ashley, what else should we be talking about?
Ashley Reichheld:I'm trying to think what messages I would encourage people to land with AI, if you're not measuring trust today, I hope you start all of everything that I've been talking about, you can actually go download, we feel so passionately about trust being the right answer that we've made this all open source, you can go download the customer survey, you can go download the employee survey, and we hope you do and we hope you start using them. The reason I'm so excited about trust is not just because it's a competitive advantage, it also creates the kinds of places that we want to work. So how many double Whammies do we have like that, where if I invest in it, I know I'm gonna get a competitive advantage. But I'm also going to create an organisation, I really want to be a part of.
Jean Gomes:What's next for you then in your work,
Ashley Reichheld:ideally, helping more and more companies to go build trust. And then I'd also really like to start doing some more international work, we have started measuring trust ID and a handful of maybe a dozen or so countries. And I can say that the four factors, the four factors, that is simply how we build trust as humans. But how those four factors are developed really are different. So for example, I lived in Holland for quite some time. And the Dutch are highly transparent. So much so that they are often considered to be the rude Europeans, if you will, they even have a word for it, right. But Sprake behind it means whatever can be talked about should be talked about. So transparency, and Dutch basically means I'm going to tell you what I'm thinking right now. Now, fly to Japan, have a meeting. And you're going to find that transparency takes an entirely different flavour. I spent some time in Japan and like the good little American kid, I'd show off my agenda, we'd go through it, we'd take everything off, everybody be naughty, and we'd walk on the moon and things success, we did it, and then nothing would happen. What I learned is that those head nods were not consent. It didn't mean yes, it just meant I'm listening. It turns out, it's actually really impolite to disagree with somebody in public. So what I should have been listening for were those coughs and sneezes. Those are indications that what I'm saying isn't exactly kosher. I should go back to those people afterwards, find out what's not sitting well, and then we'll come back and make some choices again later. And moreover, probably should never have just gone straight into a meeting really Nemo washy. So getting to know people having a personal relationship is really important before you can make choices. So think about that. And transparency. Transparency is still incredibly important. But the path to transparency is really different.
Jean Gomes:A final question for me, who's the you know, you don't need to say the name of the person but can you think of a leader that's really inspired you with their capacity to create trust in their organisations?
Ashley Reichheld:Well, one of the ones we read about in the book is Arne Sorenson. Arnie was the CEO of Marriott, Marriott Hotels during the pandemic and at the same time he was also suffering from and later died from pancreatic cancer. When the pandemic hit his top team had encouraged him not to take a video he was adamant that he wanted to come out and share messages with his colleagues and with his workers so that they understood what we were trying to do. And his top team said no RNA This is not a good idea. You look like a cancer patient. In fact, you are a cancer patient. And he did it anyway. And it was such a heart warming touching message. He clearly made himself vulnerable. He was clear about what he knew and what he didn't know and what they were going to do about it. And it just engendered such loyalty and support from his employees. I really think that being able to be vulnerable and have as a leader is inspiring, and I think it's awesome. So the secret sauce that we tend to forget, as we grow up through organisations, we are rewarded based on our capability and our reliability, not necessarily our humanity and transparency. And when times get tough when crisis hits, we fall back on our capability and reliability and forget that it's important to be human to. So as leaders, when you can demonstrate your vulnerability you are you are really demonstrating a new and stronger level of leadership.
Scott Allender:I love that. Thank you for this conversation. Thank you for the work you've done. We'll put links to all your resources in the show notes. And folks, make sure you order your copy of the four factors of trust today. And until next time, remember the world is evolving. Are you?