Course Overview

Building Trusted Organizations focuses on methods that managers and executives can use to build strong and successful companies. Whether you’re an entrepreneur hoping to lead the next unicorn or aspire to be a C-level executive at an established corporation, knowing how to maintain the trust of multiple stakeholders will improve your ability to lead effectively. We often associate trust with ethical decisions but trust also directly translates into profit, growth, and the overall success of a business. BTO provides helpful frameworks and practical tips needed to cultivate trust with different audiences, including investors, board members, employees, customers, and government officials.

Course Objectives

Students will learn tactics for dealing with difficult situations, like deciding how to handle a safety or data breach, or apologizing for a well-publicized mistake. BTO supplements case studies and discussions with simulations and role-plays that place students in challenging situations. Students may be forced to choose only one option in situations where multiple stakeholders that are essential to the company have conflicting needs. Hands-on exercises will provide a sense of the pressures and difficult decisions leaders regularly face and learn how applying principles of trust within an organization can help leaders fairly manage multiple stakeholders with divergent needs.

1. Learn about the mechanics of building trust through direct engagement. Hands-on exercises will enable students to experience the power dynamics of trust and how to handle a breach of integrity. For example, students could be asked to act as CEO faced with the decision of how to manage an unexpected financial crisis, such as the sudden failure of an established bank.

2. Apply trust to common problems and scenarios. What are the individual competencies and institutional structures we need to develop to build lasting trust as an organization? We will incorporate case studies and discussions with class guests that explore how trust in a company affects customers, managers, leaders, investors, and citizens, individually and collectively. The class discussions will center on case studies that examine choices that are being made by CEOs today.

3. Explore the implications of what happens when leaders don’t cultivate trust. What happens if a trust breach occurs—what if your company fails to deliver on a promise or something out of your control goes wrong? What organizational expectations and actions can leaders take to rebuild trust? Under what conditions should you apologize? How do you apologize in a way that builds trust without undermining confidence in your ability to lead?

4. Learn how companies can measure and monitor their level of trust across multiple platforms and audiences. We will explore new technologies used to measure trust, and learn how boards and investors assess and act on company trust data and scores.

Learning objectives include:

1. Discover how to build and maintain the trust of stakeholders with different needs
2. Develop practical skills that help business leaders build trust within and beyond their organizations
3. Understand how businesses can measure its trust levels among constituents and track the impact of trust
4. Learn and apply techniques for recovering trust when necessary
5. Identify when it’s appropriate to apologize and how to craft an effective apology

Expectation

Grades are based on the final paper deliverable and class participation.

Outcomes

By the end of the course, students should have a deeper understanding of why trust uniquely matters to business and how leaders can build, maintain, and recover trust.

By actively participating in exercises and reflecting on personal results, students can begin to develop a blueprint for building trust among different constituents.

Copyright © 2023 President & Fellows of Harvard College. All Rights Reserved.