Thinkers50 Radar 2022: Shalene Gupta

Shalene Gupta is Research Associate at Harvard Business School, former Fortune reporter and former Fulbright scholar. Her work revolves around trust: a powerful force that companies can wield as their bedrock to success.

In this curated LinkedIn Live session, Des Dearlove and Stuart Crainer discuss The Power of Trust: How Companies Build It, Lose It, Regain It with Shalene Gupta and Sandra Sucher:

VIEW SHALENE’S RADAR BIO

Transcript

Des Dearlove:
Hello. Welcome to another Ideas With Purpose webinar, featuring Thinkers50 shortlisted thinkers. I’m Des Dearlove-

Stuart Crainer:
And I’m Stuart Crainer, and we are the founders of Thinkers50, the world’s most reliable resource for identifying, ranking, and sharing the leading management ideas of our age. Ideas that can make a real difference in the world. In November, we will be announcing the all-new Thinkers50 ranking of the world’s leading management thinkers and the recipients of the Thinkers50 Distinguished Achievement Awards. All the information about our event in November can be found at thinkers50.com. It would be fantastic if you could join us.

Des Dearlove:
… Now, last week, we announced the short list for the Thinkers50 2021 Award for Breakthrough Idea, which is dedicated to the memory of the late great C.K. Prahalad. C.K., of course, was responsible for introducing a number of breakthrough ideas, including core competencies, the fortune at the bottom of the pyramid, and co-creation.

Stuart Crainer:
And today we are delighted to welcome two of our current breakthrough ideas shortlisted thinkers, Sandra Sucher and Shalene Gupta. They’ve spent two decades researching the economic impact of trust and the science behind it. They are the authors of The Power of Trust: How Companies Build It, Lose It, Regain It.

Des Dearlove:
Sandra is a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School. She’s authored 110 business cases, technical notes, video interviews, and teaching notes, and three books. She’s on the advisory board of the Edelman Trust Institute and has collaborated with Deloitte on Trust IQ, a proprietary tool that measures key elements of trust in major corporations and public sector organizations. Before that, she was a business executive for 20 years before joining Harvard. And Sandra was a senior executive at Fidelity Investments and in fashion retailing and served as chair of the Better Business Bureau.

Stuart Crainer:
And Shalene is a research associate at Harvard Business School. She was previously an editor at MIT Horizon and a reporter at Fortune. She received a Fulbright grant to Malaysia and where she taught English to over 2000 low-income high school students. She has also worked as a financial specialist at the U.S. Department of Treasury.

Des Dearlove:
Now, we have Sandra and Shalene for 45 minutes. As always, please send in your questions during our discussion and let us know where you are joining us from today.

Stuart Crainer:
So Sandra and Shalene, let’s begin with our congratulations for being shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Breakthrough Idea Award. And now the virtual stage is yours.

Sandra Sucher:
All right. Well, thank you so much. I want to tell you both, Stuart and Des, how much it means to us to be recognized as part of the breakthrough Thinkers50 it’s kind of a dream because of the quality of the people that you include. And so just wanted to thank you for your recognition and what it means to us personally, for the work we’ve done. So thanks. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to start with hopefully no more than 20 minutes of an overview of some of the ideas, the important ideas to understand in our book, The Power of Trust. And the subtitle of this book is important. It’s How Companies Build It, Lose It and Regain It.

Sandra Sucher:
And I think the first way to think about our work on trust is that we see it as a process. So trust is a process of gaining. It can be lost, and then there’s a process for recovering. And what we’ve tried to do in this research is to make trust something practical that organizations can do and their leaders can do something about and not just some aspiration, good is it is to have one. So that’s the nature of the work that we’ve done.

Sandra Sucher:
So let me start by trying to just explain a little bit about the principles of trust as we understand them. And to do this, please think about getting your jab, getting your COVID vaccination and use that framing in your mind to understand the idea of trust. So the definition of trust that we use, is trust is a willingness to be vulnerable to the actions and intentions of others. So when you think about that moment of getting vaccinated, you are definitely vulnerable to the actions and intentions of the people who created the vaccine. And I don’t know about you, I was highly aware of that vulnerability when I had it. When I had that. And we expect that vaccine to work, we expect that we won’t have side effects from it that we haven’t been informed about. And in that sense, trust is quite specific in context dependent.

Sandra Sucher:
So it’s not some glue that holds us up together, although that’s one way to think about it. I think a more operationally important way to think about it is that it’s something that’s limited, specific context dependent. And that means that you can actually work on trust as you would any other goal to try to improve organizational performance. The third thing to think about when you think about getting that COVID vaccination is that trust is in the eye of the holder. So I don’t know if this is as live an issue in the U.K. as it is, or elsewhere, but in the United States, there’s a remarkable debate about the efficacy of vaccines and whether or not people should be actually vaccinated to begin with. Most other parts of the world it’s we can’t get this vaccine.

Sandra Sucher:
But trust is in the eye of the holder. What people believe they trust, why they trust it. And so what it means is when you go to manage trust, you’re managing multiple people’s views of trust from the standpoint of individuals. So trust is like looking… It’s like trying to understand the people who are outside your organization, looking into it and really understand their perspective. And then to take the other view. One thing that we’ve learned from studying really 30 or 40 comp companies who do this, is that trust is built from the inside out. And so you want the people who created that vaccine to be on their game. And certainly the people who manufactured it to be well rested, to be careful because manufacturing drugs is a really complex process, very exacting.

Sandra Sucher:
And in that sense, you count on those people to feel good about the organizations they work for, to feel trusted in them. And because they actually have that degree of commitment, that’s what allows people on the outside, allows them to produce goods and services that allow people to trust the organization. So these are four principles of trust that we found through our work. And it’s probably the way to start, to think about what’s next. I’m now going to turn it over to Shalene to talk about some of the benefits of trust.

Shalene Gupta:
Thanks Sandra. So Sandra was saying we did this work in order to give trust a spine. And it’s not that just trust is an airy fairy concept, which has no tangible benefits. As the academic research shows it, in fact has a very large impact on the companies and teams that operate from a trust perspective. So to begin with, trust has a strategic advantage. In a study of 30 NCAA basketball teams for instance, researchers found that trust in a leader was more important for success than trust in one’s teammates. Teams that trusted their coaches actually won 7% more of their games than teams that didn’t. And in fact, the team with the highest amount of trust won the most amount of games, while the team with the lowest amount of trust in their coach only won 10% of their games that season. So when the researchers followed up with the teammates, one player commented, “Once we developed trust in coach, the progress we made was tremendous because we were no longer asking questions or were apprehensive. Instead we were buying in and believing that if we worked our hardest, we were going to get there.”

Shalene Gupta:
And now the strategic advantage translates into a revenue advantage. In a study of 6,500 employees at a Holiday Inn employees rated their trust in managers from one to five. Researchers found that an eighth of a point increase in trust, correlated with a 2.5% increase in revenue or $250,000 per hotel. And now when you scale this up and think about all the businesses in the economy operating on a trust business, this has a real impact on GDP. A world bank study of 29 different market economies over a decade showed that a 10% rise in trust in the population correlated with a 0.8 increase in GDP. And as the noble prize, winning economist, Kenneth Arrow once said, “Virtually every commercial transaction has within it an element of trust.” I’ll turn it over back to Sandra to talk about how we build trust.

Sandra Sucher:
Great. So, what we wanted to really think about was if trust is vulnerability to the intentions and actions of other people, on what basis do people trust? How do they make their decision to trust an organization? And what we found is that you can think about the elements of being four of them, and I’ll use Uber, the ride hailing company, as the example to illustrate these elements of trust.

Sandra Sucher:
So the first foundation on which people make this judgment about whether I trust a company is competence. And this is just simply the company’s ability to deliver a product or service. And so when you think about competence from the standpoint of Uber, they created ride hailing as we now know it, and their ability to create a technology that connected your need to get someplace with a driver who was willing to drive you in a transaction that was remarkably easy to do really was enormously impactful application of tech technology.

Sandra Sucher:
And so Uber had competence absolutely nailed. But there were still many people, in fact, at one point in the United States, 200,000 people who signed on for an app to delete the Uber app. It was a hashtag movement at delete Uber, Shalene was one of them. And so that’s because trust isn’t just based on competence. If trust and competence was all that mattered, then everyone would still be using Uber. It turns out that some other things matter and those things that matter more or less in the moral domain.

Sandra Sucher:
So the first thing of those that matter is motives. And this is the question of whose interest the company serves. So let me tell you a brief story about Uber. In 2013 an Uber driver in San Francisco ran into a family of four. He killed a six year old daughter, injured the mother and brother and when the company went to sue, which of course they did, for what it had done, Uber claimed in court that the driver was not really an Uber driver at that time. He didn’t have a passenger in his car and he hadn’t as yet accepted his next ride. And so when we think about whose interest a company serves, this is the kind of action that Uber would do, would have people conclude, guess what Uber cares about Uber, certainly doesn’t care about the poor family and throws its own employee, literally under the bus.

Sandra Sucher:
So the next thing that matters is means, which you can think of as largely how fair is the company and how it goes about doing business. And so here’s one example of the ways in which Uber had been unfair. In one year between 2013 and 2015, Uber instructed its drivers to book and then cancel 5,000 drives on its nearest competitor, a company called Lyft. And so when you think about fairness, you don’t need to be a business scholar to understand unfair competition. And this is again a kind of thing that gives people pause about what kind of company Uber has been and has them trust it less.

Sandra Sucher:
Finally, and if there’s any contribution, I think that our work is done to the literature on trust, it’s underscoring the importance of impact or the result of company’s actions. Not their intentions, which is more in the motives area, but really the actual on the ground, I can see it with my own eyes impact of what the company does and the results that it has. So if you think about in 2017, there was a reliability engineer named Susan Fowler, and she left Uber that year and wrote a blog post about sexual harassment at Uber. And she just describe some really horrible interactions that she and others had in the company.

Sandra Sucher:
And as bad as that was one of the most interesting things about the story was that when Susan Fowler started two years before female engineers were 25% of the workforce in her division, and when she left, they were 6%. So what this says is that Uber didn’t intend to set out to be a company which drives women away, but it certainly had the effect of doing that. And so this is the kind of impact that people judge the company on. It’s like, I don’t care what you say. I can see what’s going on and you are not a good place to work if you’re a woman. So what we’ve found is that this is the way that people reason their way through trusting is they look first at competence and then competence is not enough. And then they start to draw on some of these other perceptions of the organization in order to decide whether or not to trust.

Sandra Sucher:
So one of the outcomes is building on what Shalene showed before about some of the data on trust is here’s what happened to Uber’s sales and market share in particular. So Uber started out with nearly 90% of the ride hailing market in the United States. It is now down to two thirds, it’s 68% and its competitor Lyft has now got 32% of that market. And how did they get it? They got it by being a company that’s not Uber. A ride hailing company that is more trusted. And that’s the opening that being unfair, not trusted, that Uber created in its own market. So this is a story about how trust works.

Sandra Sucher:
We also wanted to share one other important insight from our work. So one of the first things that you hear, if you begin to study trust is that, you know what, trust is a fragile instrument. It’s like a glass bowl, once it’s broken, you can never put the pieces back together. And what our research has shown is that that’s not really quite true. That lost trust can in fact be recovered, and it’s important to understand that it can be recovered and how in order to really engage productively in trying to work in trust in your organization.

Sandra Sucher:
So a company that you can think of in this regard is a Japanese company, it’s called Recruit Holdings. It’s a human services technology firm. And in the late 1980s, the CEO created a shares for favor scandal in which he sold shares of an unlisted subsidiary to members of government, other people in the business elite in exchange for seats on prominent boards and other kinds of favors that he received. This was reported on in the press and it created a scandal so large in Japan that the prime minister and his entire cabinet had to resign. And that scandal is so long standing in the Japanese mindset that it’s still written about in elementary school textbooks. And in fact, if you are on the street and you stop someone in Japan and you say, Recruit, quite often, the answer back will be scandal, because this is how deeply embedded into the way the Japanese people thought about business and business responsibilities.

Sandra Sucher:
Now Recruit today is a $20 billion revenue company. It has employees, 50,000 employees around the globe. And so if Recruit can do that, the question is how did they do that? Recovering from a scandal so large that the entire government had to resign. And so what we found is just in the way that you can think about building trust is a process, regaining lost trust is also a process. And it has these three steps to it.

Sandra Sucher:
The first is you just have to acknowledge harm and apologize. So Recruit has, and still has the story of the scandal on its website, on its corporate website, because they want people to understand that they know the harm that they created and that they’re apologizing for it. And this is important if you’re trying to regain trust. You really want to understand that the person who created, who caused you to lose trust knows they did that, and that they’re sorry for the harm that they may have caused you. The second step in this process is that you have to hold some people accountable. And because businesses are hierarchies you tend to look and justly so at the top of the organization.

Sandra Sucher:
In the case of the Recruit scandal, they were in a funny way lucky, because the CEO, you could cap this off and say, this was the CEO who was the wrongdoer. He went to jail. And to that extent they didn’t… He was held accountable and people understood that there were consequences for having done what they did. And then the third part of this process, recovering loss trust is to fix the problem that it created, the problem in the first place. So the CEO is gone and it turns out that customers were actually very loyal to the company. They loved his products and services. The group that was not at all happy and was quite demoralized were employees. So there were many stories of employees children being bullied in school playgrounds and at schools, because now the affiliation with Recruit meant that you were associated with this scandal ridden organization.

Sandra Sucher:
So Recruit ended up deciding that it had to really reinforce a culture in which people would be glad to be part once again, of who they were. There were in Japan and at this time you had to guarantee people lifetime employment. It’s financials were such that they knew they couldn’t do that. And so what they did instead was to create a model of engaging with employees, which you can think of as being a good place to be from.

Sandra Sucher:
And so Recruit to this day manages itself in a way that allows people to come in, get very… Really increase their skills and employability, and then actually get even financial support to leave. And what they see is that they actually are able to attract and retain the people who want to stay in the organization. And the many people who come to do a great job, do that for a while, work on projects that benefit them and society and then they leave. And so in this sense, this is the third part of this process. You acknowledge harm and apologize. You hold people accountable, and then you actually have to address the problem that you’re left with as a result of the scandal or the lost trust to begin with.

Sandra Sucher:
So let me just quickly sort of summarize three main points to help ground the discussion that we’re going to have now. The first is just that trust is our willingness to be vulnerable to other people’s actions and intentions. Second, that it’s built using four elements, competence, but competence isn’t enough, and then motives and means, and then the impact that you have. And finally this important insight that lost trust can be recovered if you learn how to do the things that need to be done in order to make that happen. So that’s what we had hoped to present at least as a way to ground the discussion that we’re going to have now about the ideas in the book and what it is that we’ve been looking at for the last numbers of years.

Stuart Crainer:
Thank you Sandra and Shalene. Thank you very much for everybody joining us. We’ve got people from Poland, Sri Lanka, the U.K., U.S., Spain, Romania, Ireland, [inaudible 00:21:13], India, and Anne Marie from Lenox as well. I think the last point you got to, Sandra relates to a question from the Louise Ward in Dublin, Ireland about cultural differences. How strong are they when it comes to trust?

Sandra Sucher:
So I’ll start and then Shalene, if you have things you want to add, please do. So what we found and we purposely in the book researched global companies, companies in different parts of the world. And so, we’ve done research in Kazakhstan, we’ve done research in Japan, we’ve done research in China and we did in Finland. So we wanted to make sure that we were finding general patterns that held, and then to begin to understand how they differ depending on where you are. And what we found is that this process of trusting, of building trust and then losing and then recovering trust that process pretty much works the same no matter where you are.

Sandra Sucher:
What’s different is the way that people work with that calculus on the basis on which they trust. So if you think about the issue of competence, motives, means an impact, many of those concepts, particularly motives, certainly what’s regarded is fair, and even what impacts matters, those will be different depending on the culture and the country that you’re in. So we would say that the general patterns, the process holds, but it definitely will look different depending on the context to cultural and organizational economic context than it’s in.

Shalene Gupta:
To add to Sandra’s point, as you mentioned, trust is very context dependent. And so in particular, that element of competence, how important it is, is going to vary depending on where you are and sort of what infrastructure is there. So a company will get by with a lot more if it’s able to provide something which the government is not providing, or which doesn’t already exist in society. And it’ll be sort of a less of pressure on the motives and the means necessarily.

Des Dearlove:
Interesting. Can we just go back a step and the vulnerability point that you were making, does that mean that in the absence of vulnerability, we don’t trust? It’s not real trust. Is that a necessary requirement in order for there to be a relationship of trust? Because I could potentially not be vulnerable to the actions or intentions of another, but still, can I still trust them in that situation, that circumstance?

Sandra Sucher:
Let me try to answer your question. We’ll see how close I get. And, and so the people who study trust make a distinction between trust and reliability, for example. And so what they say is reliability, did Sandra do the slides that she needed to do for today’s podcast? Can you count on me to do that? You’ll be disappointed if those slides are lousy or if they don’t show up, but you don’t feel betrayed. And so trust has this element of power relationships. And so it really shows up in areas where other people have power over us, and it has to be a fairly substantial power in areas that matter to us. Now, that can be quite honestly as mundane as getting me from one place to the next. But nonetheless, there is this notion that because you have power over me that’s why it’s a moral relationship and not just a transactional relationship. I’m not sure if that helps.

Des Dearlove:
Well, let me just while I’m here, it’s too good an opportunity to miss, but presumably if I’m the CEO of an organization, I might have a power position over my employees. Do I trust them to represent the organization to do a good job? That sort of downwards trust. That still counts as trust I take it.

Sandra Sucher:
Oh, absolutely. And in fact, if you’ve ever been a senior executive and know how little you do compared to the thousands of other people who actually do the work of the company, you actually experience that vulnerability in a very live way. Yep.

Des Dearlove:
Yeah. Okay. No, that’s good.

Stuart Crainer:
It always strikes me that hiding scandal and not owning up to things is actually a very strong human instinct. And so you’re working against human nature in many ways.

Sandra Sucher:
Absolutely you are, and in fact, there is a bias. Shalene, do you want to talk a little bit about what we know about the bias that shows up when there is an emergency or something that’s happened?

Shalene Gupta:
Sure. So there’s the normalcy bias, which is our desire to pretend that things are perfectly all right. If there’s a crisis or an emergency happening to really look for signs to confirm that it’s not happening, which is why we tend to see leaders freezing up and hiding scandals, because research shows, it takes us up to four different sources to really confirm that something is happening and that we’ve got to react. I would say though, that there is also a human instinct to share. I mean, you’ve got confession in religions, right? So I would argue that it depends on the person and it also depends on the system that they’re in, and more so that I think we’ve made it really, really hard for people to own up and to confess when things have gone horribly awry, because they are going to get slaughtered.

Sandra Sucher:
Right, right. Yeah. There’s also the role that lawyers play in interfering with people’s human instincts to say, I did something wrong, I feel really badly about it. And I want to talk about what… We’re going, explain why we did what we did and try to figure out what we’re going to do going forward. And there, I think the issue is sort of what are you as a leader in an organization trying to do, if you’re trying to limit your legal liability, you take sort of one stance, but if you really want to restore trust, it does require a different kind of an openness, which Stuart, I agree does actually fight nature.

Des Dearlove:
What about, I mean, we’re talking about when it’s all gone wrong. But I mean, it’s a good question here from Todd Cherches who says, “What can leaders do to build, to really create a culture of trust?” Because presumably if you’ve got a strong culture that can kind of inoculate, can vaccinate you possibly against some of these more toxic things that happen with when it does go wrong.

Sandra Sucher:
So, let me use one example of, so many people, at least in the United States will have heard of a Tylenol problem that happened in the 1980s where there was a poisoning. Some poison cyanide had been injected it into some Tylenol pain relieving capsules, and five people died. So James Burke, who was the CEO at the time said that their ability to recover as quickly as they did was because Johnson & Johnson had a culture that reinforced taking responsibility for what was going on and being able to ask people hard questions while they did things. And he cited an example several years before of a pet project of the CEO, which ended up causing a skin irritation.

Sandra Sucher:
And this, everyone was afraid that the CEO was going to say, “Oh my gosh, we have to keep moving forward.” And he said, “Throw it into the river.” And so that attitude at Johnson & Johnson saying, “If it’s going to be a public health problem, we actually feel like we need to do something about it and treat it that way.” That built an on ramp for the organization to recover. And so I definitely agree with the person who asked the question, you’re building a culture of trust all the time, and when things go wrong, then you’re taking advantage of whatever it is that you’ve built up until that point in time.

Des Dearlove:
And of course, Johnson & Johnson famously had its credo, its set of values, which was almost like a constitution for the organization, which almost goes back another level and puts a structural piece in place that they had something, people had something to appeal to and they had some principle to live up.

Sandra Sucher:
Yeah. That’s true and that credo, it starts with their obligation to their patients. And the last part of it, it says, and if we do all of these things, we’ll make a decent profit. And so that notion that we have obligations and engage well on behalf of our patients, the doctors, the employees, the communities where we do business, all of that is what’s in the credo. And then the bottom line is, yes, and if we do those things, then we’ll make some money and it’ll be decent.

Stuart Crainer:
There’s a few interesting points from Mukesh Gupta, no relation, presumably, who knows.

Sandra Sucher:
We’re all over the place. We were an empire once.

Stuart Crainer:
It talks about building and maintaining trust is an ongoing activity, which I think we could probably all accept that. How do you monitor it and how do you measure it on an ongoing basis?

Sandra Sucher:
So, I will say that if there’s a next frontier in trust research, it is in the question of measurement, and how it is that organizations can actually get five measures that help them do stuff. So we have a great example of the case that we’re writing now on a company and Kazakhstan done, which is using net promoter scores as a way to see how close they’re getting to the customer and whether they’re trusted. And what they do is they ask one question of about 40,000 people because millions of people use their app. And the question is, would you recommend our company and why?

Sandra Sucher:
And then they do, they listen the recordings of people’s conversations of what it is that they are hearing about why it is that they either would or wouldn’t trust. And then on the basis of that, departments start to dig into what are the most frequently mentioned things that we need to work on. And then the senior leadership says, what are the big opportunities for us? So that’s a great example of a really well known tool that people have. They call it a microservice approach where they really dig in and then really work that process so that they can get something meaningful out of it rather than just a score of 9.8, which is impossible to interpret and to understand.

Des Dearlove:
I noticed a couple of people have referenced the political domain. I mean, we’re in an interesting space now, how… Somebody else in another question referenced #MeToo revelations. “Trust is so quickly eroded,” says Louise, “Think of the #MeToo revelations.” Which is true, but there’s another question there, which is about when should we trust our organizations to step into that space? When should we expect organize… Because this is, I think this is very current at the moment in terms of activism and whether the organization can simply sit on the fence with political and social issues or whether in fact… Let me put this question to you, Shalene, or whether we should trust our organizations. What do we look to in organizations in terms of getting involved in those sorts of social issues?

Shalene Gupta:
It’s a tricky question, but I would say at least here in America, we are looking for organizations to step in. And what organizations should be taking into consideration is who are their stakeholders? What do they stand for and what do their stakeholders expect from them? So I was actually doing a piece on stop Asian-American hate, and I was surveying different employees and the employees who were the most upset about their organizations not taking a stance on stop Asian-American hate were the ones where the companies were working to stop inequality or working with people across the spectrum. So mainly healthcare, where there’s just, how can you not take a stance and not care about this in society if your customers represent this issue and are dealing with it every day?

Des Dearlove:
Does that mean though that if you are a technology company, you can just say, well, that’s not, we’re not involved? We’re not involved in social issues. We’re a tech company or we’re an engineering company.

Shalene Gupta:
I was so hoping you wouldn’t ask me that question guys.

Sandra Sucher:
Yeah, sure. Let me start that one, Shalene. So if you go back, Stuart to something you mentioned before the Edelman trust barometer. So Edelman is a U.S. based PR firm. Annually they put out research and more frequently than that on trust. And due diligence comment, I’m an advisor to them on their Edelman Trust Institute. And they have tracked over the last, at least five years, a growing and increasing expectation that businesses will step into this political realm. And that doesn’t mean just people who are in related businesses, all businesses are expected to say, what impacts do I have? What influence can I have? And so I don’t believe that… I think this will vary around the world. And this is a place where context really will matter as to how live an issue that is. But I think for the places where it’s live, it’s actually becoming quite pronounced as an expectation for businesses and their leaders.

Shalene Gupta:
And to add to Sandra’s point, it’s not really that you can afford to sit back and do nothing it’s in what areas do you have to be a leader? And in what areas can you sort of afford to take a little more time to figure out your stance? And that’s not to say that you give up entirely and don’t do anything.

Stuart Crainer:
Is there a sense that it’s actually quite healthy, that we are questioning how much we trust organizations? The debate about it. Because I think the assumption in the debate is often that in the past we actually trusted organizations, corporations in implicitly. I actually, I don’t think we did. I think people were just as cynical and skeptical about the motivations of corporations. But I think there’s a more open debate perhaps about it now, or perhaps I’m just being incurably optimistic.

Des Dearlove:
That’s it.

Sandra Sucher:
Yeah.

Stuart Crainer:
I’m a bit of a character.

Sandra Sucher:
I do think that, so one consulting firm, Deloitte, tried to map the number of domains in which trust shows up in a company and they found 17 different places in an organization. And they ranged from cyber to financial reporting to culture and purpose to product quality customer experience. And so if you actually map the different parts of an organization where trust concerns show up, it turns out that it’s a very robust thing, but I’m not sure, and I agree with you, Stuart, this was not something certainly when I entered into management in the 1970s. No one was actually thinking in this particular way I think around the question of trust.

Shalene Gupta:
And to add to that, I think we’re in this unique moment where our problems are more intense and more global than before. I mean, look at we’re in the midst of a pandemic, we’re in the middle of a climate crisis and it’s affecting all of us. It’s no longer a country by country. What affects one of us impacts all of us and the people who have the most power are big organizations working together to get us a vaccine, to get us masks. And if you look at who’s doing the, what is it, it’s about 80% of the pollution, is created by 100 companies. We do need companies.

Des Dearlove:
It’s interesting. I remember at the last Thinkers50 event, the last time we had the gala, which was two years ago, somebody from the platform, somebody from the stage asked the audience, there were probably about 500 people, who in this room trusts Facebook. And not a single hand went up, which it says quite a lot about the relationship. Perhaps it was a more discerning audience. I don’t know, but nobody put their hand up. It’s interesting. But you mentioned the competence thing, is there something strange or something different going on in terms of, because the vaccination point, we’ve got no reason really to doubt the competence of the research scientists, and yet there is this, obviously the echo chambers and the social media effect. It’s almost become unfashionable. It’s become fashionable to doubt experts. It’s like we question and we challenge experts at this moment in history. For some reason, experts are definitely sort of gone out of gone out of vogue. Is there something going on there with trust or is it just a social media phenomenon?

Sandra Sucher:
So I think that there, people are questioning the motives of the people and saying, Well, there’s something in it for you to do what it is that you’re doing.” And I think that, that breeds the skepticism and this question of experts. And so I think it’s like, “Oh yeah, you say that you know all this stuff, but how do I know that? How do I know to believe you?” And so I think they’re honestly questioning whose interest does that person serve and can they count on them to serve their interest as well.

Shalene Gupta:
And to add to that. So first of all, I want to make it very clear, I am very pro vaccine. I do not in any way advocate not getting it, but I think it is reasonable to be questioning the confidence of experts. Particularly here in America communities of color have suffered at the hands of experts. So there’s a certain amount of question, as Sandra, whose motives do they serve. But then in terms of competence, what have we done in terms of priority assessment? What have we done to rush the vaccine out? And again, I am pro-vaccine, but you can see where people are having a debate and that’s what makes it so tricky.

Des Dearlove:
It’s tricky.

Stuart Crainer:
So where does your research go next?

Sandra Sucher:
I would say that the big strands are toward measurement and implementation. So we think that we understand a little bit about how trust works in organizations and the levers that you have to work with. We now want to go into the practical terrain of, okay, let’s pretend you wanted to get better at this. How would you actually measure it? It’s why we love that NPS story and examples of ways that companies can actually get their arms around how the different stakeholders are viewing them. And then we’re deeply interested in what happens if a company says, I want to improve how trusted I am by various stakeholders, and we want to understand much more what actions they take and what seems to work. What seems not to work, in the same way that we went after the question of, so what causes people to trust in the first place?

Sandra Sucher:
So those are the big domains. There’s a smaller strand of the research around the role of corporate boards in trust, and what people are finding for the reasons that Shalene said, because we’re now looking at pandemic and issues related to climate change. We need corporate boards to actually give permission to management, who they hire to pursue these larger topics. And so the role of corporate boards in creating this culture of trust, we think is actually going to be quite important as well. So those are our early thoughts about where we’re going next.

Des Dearlove:
Is there a, I mean, this may sound like a nonsense, but is there a role for a sort of chief trust officer? I mean, whose responsibility, is it, whether or not an organization is trusted?

Sandra Sucher:
So I was a chief quality officer for many years. And so I have direct experience of what it’s like to be in one of these kind of roles. And so there’s always two forks in the road. One is, do you make one person in charge of it? At which point everybody else says, oh good, Sandra’s on the [inaudible 00:41:15]. The other is, do you say, we’re going to count on everybody else to do it? And then you need a coordinating mechanism to make sure that people actually are doing those things. So I’ve seen pluses and minuses from both. I wouldn’t be in a hurry to create a chief. We now have chief experience officers. We have different parts of this who I think really could lend a hand. And at the moment I would say, it’s more a question of saying, let’s get a coordinating mechanism in the organization that says, we want try to get better at this trust thing. Where would we want start to focus the work?

Stuart Crainer:
Isn’t that the CEO’s job?

Des Dearlove:
I mean-

Stuart Crainer:
Isn’t it the CEO’s job?

Sandra Sucher:
Well, I think the CEO needs to sort of say, this is now on the agenda. And so that’s what we’re seeing in places like Deloitte and places like PricewaterhouseCooper, where they’re basically saying we are going to work on trust. In their case, it’s work on trust in our organization and on behalf of our clients. And so it’s very much a top of the house kind of thing. But I think, Stuart, what Des and I were talking about is, and then what. Once the CEO says this is important, then how do you organize the organization to actually start to do some work on it? So that’s what I was trying to respond to.

Des Dearlove:
… Yeah. And I think the other thing is, as you say, the fork in the road is what… I mean, we know that Google in trying to sort of appoint people to be involved with AI integrity, when those people then leave the organization, you’re creating a [inaudible 00:42:46] in that really. If you are drawing attention to it, and if those people then leave, it’s like the canary singing or the canary down the mine, it’s like it’s potentially dangerous also.

Sandra Sucher:
Right. Although I think in that particular case, I think it really did say that Google hasn’t created an environment, which those people have a strong enough voice. At least that was the conclusion as a layperson, not connected to the organization that I drew to.

Des Dearlove:
Exactly. I don’t know either, but yeah, I would, I would read it the same way you’re reading it. Yeah. I mean, presumably, as we move into some of these moral dimensions, particularly with artificial intelligence and some of the technologies, we can expect to see more of these sorts of issues arising –

Sandra Sucher:
You’re correct.

Stuart Crainer:
And are you both optimistic that things are moving in the right direction and there’s a willingness to engage with this issue?

Sandra Sucher:
So I am thrilled with how many people want to talk about trust? It’s someone who’s, with Shalene, we co-authored a book, so that matters, but it’s more to the point that people are starting to get curious about this and to try to say, well, what role does this idea play in all the issues that we’re trying to manage? And so I think the appetite to address this is actually at least from what we’ve seen in response to the book, been very large. And I find that quite encouraging. It’s not like, I feel like we’re pushing a boulder up a hill and no one cares. There are lots of people behind us trying to push that boulder up the hill. And so I think it just, it’s something that makes me feel quite optimistic.

Shalene Gupta:
I’m cautiously optimistic. On one hand, the attention and the interest has been fantastic, but there’s a second hand that needs to happen, which is implementation-

Shalene Gupta:
… and applying the ideas. And that’s a different way of thinking than has been done traditionally.

Sandra Sucher:
Right.

Des Dearlove:
Yeah. Finally, we’ve got time for just one more question and I’m going to ask it. So the whole Zoom thing, the whole virtual thing, what’s that done for trust? I mean, are we more trusting now, do you think, because we can see into each other’s homes and we sort of, we feel like we are talking directly to each other rather than through the window of the organization? Or is it actually much harder to establish trust when we don’t have the in effect in person experience?

Sandra Sucher:
So this is not an area that I study. I’ve got colleagues like Tsedal Neeley who did great work in this area. But as someone involved, I would say that we’re better than I thought we would be at making connections this way. So if someone asked me two years ago, could you actually have a meaningful conversation like this? I would’ve said no way we have to be in the same room, all that sort of stuff. And so I think that’s been quite happily surprising. I will say, based on my experience of getting back into the classroom at Harvard Business School is that there really is something quite special about being in person and together in terms of the magic that happens when you actually get people who respond quickly and without sort of protocols involved in the same way. So I think we’re learning to do better at the first thing and it still, to me reinforces the importance of the other part.

Des Dearlove:
Okay.

Stuart Crainer:
Thank you, Shalene and thank you, Sandra. We’re out of time. I think Mohammed Nassar has just put a comment up, “Trust is simple and complicated.” And I think that –

Sandra Sucher:
I love that.

Stuart Crainer:
… But thank you. Sandra and Shalene’s book is called The Power of Trust. We recommend it strongly to you, and thank you, Sandra. Thank you Shalene for joining us today. Next week, we’ll be joined by Rahaf Harfoush who’s going to be talking about out innovation. So thank you everyone for joining us. And thank you, Sandra and Shalene. Thank you.

Sandra Sucher:
Great. Thanks so much.

Shalene Gupta:
Thank you.

Sandra Sucher:
Thanks.