Introduction

Learning to ride a bicycle is an act of trust. We trust that pumping on the pedals will create enough momentum to carry our weight forward. We trust that whoever is encouraging us will hold on to the back of our seat just long enough for us to gain confidence. We transform ourselves into a person-who-knows-how-to-ride-a-bicycle from a person-who-does-not by trusting the people around us, trusting the two-wheeled machine, and trusting our own ability. And then we feel the sweet thrill of accomplishment just long enough to ride our brand-new red bicycle into the rosebush, whose thorns break our fall. Our lives are full of moments where trust is easily given, even more easily lost, and then painstakingly rebuilt, sometimes at great cost.

As leaders, we have seen this cycle play out too often in organizations where trust is quickly given and quickly lost. It turns out that humans are effortlessly good at losing trust and really bad at rebuilding it. We know this from personal experience, but more on that later.

This is a book about building trust. We are passionate about the topic of trust because it creates the types of relationships we want to build, the type of organizations we want to belong to, and the type of world we want to live in.

We are passionate about the topic of trust because it creates the types of relationships we want to build, the type of organizations we want to belong to, and the type of world we want to live in.

We aren't going to try to prove to you that trust matters. We trust that you get that already from your own personal and professional experiences where you have gained and lost trust-where you have fallen off and gotten back on your own red bicycle. Instead, we want to offer something different. We want to offer clarity about what you can actually do to build trust as a leader for your organization, and the impact that can have on other stakeholders in society.

Our goal is to help leaders measure trust, predict trust, and act in ways that build trust because we believe that trust is the path to loyalty.

There are as many ways to measure trust, benchmark it, score it, and put it on an index as there are definitions of what trust actually is. There are measures of social trust, customer trust sentiment, and trust that makes for good public relations campaigns, to name a few. Pew, Edelman, and Gallup are all noteworthy institutions that have studied and written about the loss of trust. We'll share some of their conclusions too. However, much of what has been written previously looks through a rearview mirror to help explain why trust broke down after the fact, after the bicycle rider landed in the rosebush. Our aim is to help organizations to move forward.

We wanted a measure that was both meaningful and actionable in approaching how trust impacts human behavior-something that would help leaders of organizations not just to understand trust, but to build it leading to positive outcomes. We couldn't find that measure, so we created our own.

Whether you are reading this because you are curious about the topic of trust, you are a leader in an organization wrestling with how to grow trust with your customers or workforce, or you are an academic deeply committed to the field of trust, we hope that you walk away with an understanding of the following:

• The components of trust, what we call the Four Factors, are correlated with measures of loyalty, including Net Promoter Score (NPS), and are the path to building loyalty. You can-and should-measure trust with customers as well as workers.
• Trust leads to meaningful financial outcomes for organizations.
• We can both predict trust based on actual behaviors and predict those behaviors based on trust scores.
• Using these predictions, we can take concrete steps towards building the trust we so badly need in our organizations and society at large.

In the fall of 2018, we were both part of a leadership team that set an aspiration to Elevate the Human Experience (EHX or HX for short). At the time we thought the aspiration was lofty and undefined, but worth striving for. Now we believe that we elevate someone's experience when we acknowledge their intrinsic worth as a human and do everything in our power to help make their experience just a little bit better. We knew from the very beginning that you can't elevate anything if people don't trust you. If we could understand what builds trust, we could create individual experiences for customers, workers, and partners that increase trust and create better, elevated experiences over time.

We have spent hundreds of hours and millions of dollars with our research team studying one question:

How do you build trust?

We conducted almost two dozen in-depth interviews with trust experts. We have collected over 200,000 survey responses with customers and workers across nearly 500 brands. We conducted in-depth focus groups with fifty workers-with a particular emphasis on female workers and hourly/gig workers. We have spoken with organizational leaders who have excelled at building trust. We have worked with organizations directly to help them on their journeys to build trust. And we have studied famous and not-so-famous stories when trust was won or lost. We wanted to know: Why do customers trust a brand and become loyal to it? What actions make trust endure through difficult times? How do we build a culture of trust from the inside out, starting with our own workforce? What are the tangible long-term benefits of that trust? But first, before we get to these questions, let's define what we mean by trust.

What Is Trust?

Most people fall back on the "I know it when I see/feel/hear it," definition of trust. Or people cite a specific moment when they felt trusting. Even if you can't "see" trust, its presence or absence drives so much of the difference between a good experience with an individual or an organization and a bad one.

Here is how we have come to define trust: Trust is the promise of a meaningful, mutually beneficial relationship between two or more people. At a fundamental level, trust is what happens, or doesn't, between people and between organizations made up of people. And, critically, trust is the essential bond an organization has with all its humans-customers, workforce, and partners.

Trust is the promise of a meaningful, mutually beneficial relationship between two or more people.

Trust is built in moments of vulnerability. Sandra Sucher, a Harvard Business School professor who has published widely on the topic of trust, describes trust as the "willingness to make yourself vulnerable to the intentions and actions of others."1 Most organizations and leaders seek to replace vulnerability with contracts, detailed terms and conditions, and other processes and legal vehicles for ensuring target outcomes are met. The less we trust, the less we are willing to make ourselves vulnerable, the more legal replacements we need and the more complicated our lives become. Customers and workers are subject to these contracts, and the balance of power sits with the organization, rather than with the individual. This makes trust for the individual even more important.

In business, trust means people engage an organization with a sense that their interests are being honored alongside the organization's interests. For example, customers believe the software they download from a trusted organization will be safe; when they download software, they are making themselves vulnerable (to malware, hacking, or unwanted apps) but trust-driven by previous experience-makes this choice more straightforward. Workers trust that their relationship with their organization means they'll be respected and appreciated in addition to being paid. Thus, they make themselves vulnerable psychologically and financially because they trust the organization to act in their interests as well as its own.

Trust always comes down to a relationship, no matter how fleeting. Some relationships are transactional. Others endure. It can be the relationship we have with ourselves (as in, I trust my future self to make good decisions). It can be the relationship we have with a single person, such as a colleague at work. And it can be about the relationship we have to entire groups of people in an organization.

Because people bring their messy human selves to work, lack of trust in one relationship affects trust in another. In this way, trust in our relationships impacts our general outlook on life. We see this in the effect intimacy has on trust. For example, the data from our research show that workforce participants overall trust "my employer" more than "business in general."2 It's easier to understand something, and create a positive relationship with it, when you are close to it.

We trust a friend to consider our interests, treat us fairly, and offer respect-behaviors that honor our humanity. We trust an organization can deliver its promised products or services-we call this capability. We trust someone at work to be straightforward and honest, which means valuing transparency. And we trust the brakes on our bicycle will work as well today as they did yesterday, a...