Tag Archives | Robert Porter Lynch

Latest Edelman Trust Survey Shows New Approach to Trust Needed

By on March 15, 2011 in Business, Executive Excellence, Perspectives, strategy, Trust, Values

According to Robert Edelman, www.edelmantrustbarometer.com, the old, ineffective trust fortress focused solely on profit by a framework of control information, protect the brand and stand alone as a great corporation. This top-down approach doesn’t work any more. In the new trust architecture, the trust triangle has at the base what we do (profit with purpose) and shared values. This is now buttressed by transparency (how we do what we do) and engagement – the where, i.e. who communicates for the corporation. It must be both vertical AND peer to peer interactions).

I am a BIG fan of Robert Edelman’s because he has managed to quantify a very difficult phenomenon to quantify. Trust lives in the “in between,” it isn’t my job nor is it your job to foster trust, trust is in the realm of the relationship and we are both accountable for it. I liken trust to marriage — I have a friend who jokes, “marriage is an institution, and I’m not ready for an institution yet.” Marriage is an AGREEMENT between to people that implies a lot of behaviors must align for the marriage to withhold the test of time.

Similarly, trust is created and destroyed by the actions and words that occur over time between people. By the aggregate of those actions and those words, trust is either buttressed like a fortress or torn down.

Edelman’s message here is that today’s trust buttressing involves more than it used to for corporations, and the U.S. as an aggregate corporate community has been slipping, other countries have been gaining ground.

There is much that could be inferred by this slippage of trust. Suffice it to say, as Robert Porter Lynch says, trust is the bedrock of democracy and we are hanging by a thin thread. We just don’t know when or how our Tsunami might happen, and we are precipitously close to that event, or those events.

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Architect of Trust Architecture, Robert Porter Lynch

By on June 25, 2010 in Business, Perspectives, Trust


Fear is a big saboteur of trust, one of many saboteurs.  I had the pleasure to spend the day with Robert Porter Lynch in a seminar, Trusted to Lead.  The time flew.

Dr. Lynch has studied trust in organizations so thoroughly he is writing two books on the architecture of what it takes to build trust, providing a breakthrough in generating successful relationships; one for academia, one for business leaders.

Specifically yesterday we were learning about the ladder of trust in organizations (as opposed to some quick and insufficient definition of trust) and how people climb up the ladder of trust (above the belt) or descend down the ladder of distrust (below the belt).  No platitudes or hollow concepts, this was a sturdy, application-driven workshop experience.  This video gives you a two minute moving snapshot (if you listen closely, because I was in the back of the room) of a highlight moment of the day.

One requirement essential to trust is to balance two interests; self interest (individual good) and mutual interest (greater good, noble cause).  Many folks would have their savings intact if the greedy few hadn’t tipped the scales to ignore mutual interest and gobble gobble gobble for themselves, never mind the impact on the rest of us.

Dr. Lynch’s research reveals that 80%-90% of people are capable of achieving that balance, and we all should look out for the dark side that is in the other 10-20% of the population.  Whether we like it or not, that element is indeed real in our society, and it can play a very strong hand in our experience of life.  If we don’t feel safe with one another, how can we trust?  If we don’t trust, we revert to fear.

I invite you, the reader, to be a champion for trust and to learn how to be that champion in your organizations.  At the creationship tip-top of the ladder of trust, fun and joy are present.  Are you having fun in your organization?  Are you being creatively collaborative?  You could be.  As Dr. Lynch says, “Fun is where Fear Disappears.”

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Trust and Leadership Should be Synonymous

By on November 7, 2009 in Business, Leadership Books, Social Media, strategic planning, Trust, Values

Principles of Collaborative TrustI recently had a fast-paced hour-long conversation with Robert Porter Lynch, author, teacher, speaker, champion of increasing the experience of trusting leaders.  He observed that if trust in our leaders isn’t repaired in the United States, we as a nation are threatened to our very core.   Here are the LynchPrinciples — please download the PDF file.

Robert is writing a book on trust and leadership — he is Building a System of Trust.  He spends his life on airplanes in academic and business contexts, talking about what causes trust, conversely what causes distrust, and the impacts on business and life.

I then attended a conference on social media where I learned a term, “crowd sourcing,” revolving around our need to go to our friends for advice, people, resources because authority as we have known it cannot be trusted.

Decisions are made based on assumptions, and sometimes those assumptions prove false.  Consider these recent, faulty assumptions.   Real estate values always go up.  Financial institutions hold your money safely while you don’t need it. Retirement funds are managed to out-maneuver real risks.

These  eight principles of collaborative trust from Robert’s book that is coming out in the fall of 2010 provides reminders of what is important.  We are all leaders of our own lives, and we could choose not only to embrace them, but speak about them, remind others about them — in other words, Share them!  Encourage them!


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