The Trust Imperative

CHAPTER SUMMARY: Successful relationships depend on trust—trust between spouses, trust between parent and child, trust between enterprises and their stakeholders. This chapter focuses on the factors that build trust in organizations, as well as the forces that can diminish or destroy it and the role of enterprise communication in managing these forces. The chapter includes a discussion of the most relevant findings from the annual Edelman Trust Barometer, a bellwether of measuring trust and relationships between a company and its stakeholders. This is explored in detail through a case where General Motors dealt with a serious recall crisis translated these concepts into the reality of managing a global enterprise in a trustworthy manner.

BOOK ABSTRACT: The role of the chief communication officer (CCO) in today's enterprise has dramatically changed over the past 30 years. Once focused on getting news out to media outlets, today's CCO has become an integral part of any enterprise-company, corporation, governmental, and nongovernmental entity. Today's CCO is responsible for internal and external communication; with creating and implementing communication strategies that help mold enterprise mission, vision, value, and character; and with building enterprise reputation through stakeholder engagement. As a part of the "C-Suite," the CCO must understand not only the psychology and sociology of the business, but also the role that she has in informing the C-Suite and the CEO what internal and external stakeholders are thinking and how this may affect corporate image in terms of credibility, confidence, trust, relationship, and reputation. In short, the new CCO must understand both the science and the art of communication and apply that knowledge to advancing her enterprise's goals and objectives through a faster and ever-larger-reaching set of media.