Page 192 - 100 Great Business Ideas: From Leading Companies Around the World (100 Great Ideas)

82 BUILDING TRUST

Trust is an essential aspect of business, notably when leading
people, selling to customers, or building the long-term reputation
and value of an enterprise. Trust is easily taken for granted, hard to
define, and easy to undermine or destroy—but how can it be built?

The idea

Trust matters in business, underpinning issues as diverse as sales,
financial management, and leadership, as well as affecting job
satisfaction and career prospects. However, increased profitability
is not the most compelling reason to build trust. People value trust,
but what is overlooked is that its absence results not in a neutral
situation but in something worse. As businesses have discovered,
when trust is undermined, there is a high cost to pay.

The Innocent Drinks Company epitomizes many of the
characteristics of a high-trust organization. It produces high-quality
fruit drinks and smoothies with a passion, professionalism, and
good humor that invite trust. This tone is set from the top. Like
many trusted leaders, the executives at Innocent Drinks do not
spend much time focusing on trust. Instead, they simply display the
energy and skills that people (employees and customers) value—
and trust follows. This avoids the paradox of trust, where the more
it is discussed, the weaker it becomes.

In practice

In recent research, people were asked to rate the significance of
a range of attributes when deciding whether to trust someone.

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