The Importance of Leaders Establishing Trust

As the business landscape becomes increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA), finely tuned communication skills can help foster collaboration, improve problem-solving, and impact decision-making. The Communicating for Influence and Impact online short course from the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL) offers insights into how communication can be used to create efficiencies and accelerate change for the benefit of society. 

Transcript

For the first time ever, business is now the most trusted institution alongside NGOs, far ahead of government and media.

We have always believed that trust is really the most important currency that any institution earns and develops with its stakeholders, whether it be government or media, or businesses or NGOs. And it really gives you the permission to operate, permission to lead, permission to succeed.

If you lose trust, you’ve lost credibility, and it particularly gives you the ability to rebound when things go wrong, and inevitably things will go wrong for every organisation at some point.

For business in particular, it’s hugely important – if you have maintained long-lasting trust, then it gives you the best defence against market disruption, against consumer apathy, against changes in regulation. So it’s hugely important to all institutions, but especially business.

In the VUCA world, we have seen, as people are dealing with a huge amount of change, as they’re feeling like many of the pillars of society, and the things that were previously known, are shifting, they are turning away from the institutions that they have previously trusted. Now that is across the board. We’re seeing trust much, much lower, particularly in government and media.

It also means that amongst that change there’s one unifying fact, which is there is also a real desire for change from people as they see the world changing around them. Worryingly, last year we saw only one in five people across the world believe the system, in all its broader sense, was working for them, which is a really startling fact, that four out of five felt the system was broken.

Now the good news is that there’s hope, because 70 per cent of those people then wanted to see change happen, and 76 per cent believe that they can make the world better; we could improve things. So it’s not a hopeless situation. What’s interesting then in the VUCA situation is who they’re turning to to drive that change. And they are turning to people who are things and institutions that are closest to them, things they feel they can control, things that they can influence more regularly than once every four years of a political cycle. So that is often the employer, their employer. It’s also the things they buy and the brands they support on an everyday basis. So it means, it’s clearer then, why businesses step forward and with a more direct and important role for business to own.

We know that consumers expect business to do lots more than sell them things; they expect them to step forward on societal issues. We know that employees expect their employer to step forward on societal issues. There’s a new leadership role for the private sector there that they should take on and relish as an opportunity, but do it with sincerity and with sensitivity to the scale of the issues they’re trying to work in towards solving.