I am proud to have made it in the Top 100 Thought Leaders in Trustworthy business for 2014. This list is generated by an organization called Trust Across America-Trust Around the World, and they’ve been compiling the list for several years now. Apparently this year they cut the nominations off at 250 and actually paid a panel of judges to decide who made the top 100 and who didn’t. Bottom line: I’m happy to be on any list that also includes Tony Hsieh, Jim Kouzes, Barry Posner, Stephen M.R. Covey, Howard Schulz, and Simon Sinek–all leaders and authors who have inspired me.
And trust, quite frankly, is a big deal to me. If you’ve read Humanize, then you know that Maddie and I devoted an entire chapter of the book to helping organizations to be Trustworthy. And you may not know that the first article I ever had published, nearly (gulp) twenty years ago in 1995, was an “Occasional Paper” put out by the Institute for Multi-Track Diplomacy (where I worked at the time), titled “Trust and Conflict Transformation.” It was a good paper. I wrote about the work we were doing on the island of Cyprus and how we worked hard to build trust between the two sides in that conflict.
And trust continues to be a critical issue in organizations. I assume Edelman will release their new numbers soon, but here’s my recap a year ago. The numbers aren’t good. In the U.S., only 15% of the respondents trust their leaders (in business) to tell the truth. Not cool. So we’ve got work to do. On my part, I’m going to continue helping organizations build cultures that are more trustworthy (which includes some transparency and some truth-telling). What are you doing to address this trust crisis?