Trust

In this research, I aim to provide a practical orientation to trust—how to build it, how it can be damaged, how it might be repaired—grounded in my experience as an executive and in the research on organizational trust and moral philosophy. As a case researcher, I study trust qualitatively. In fact, like the person who discovered they had been speaking in prose all their life, it appears that I have been studying organizational trust for decades, both at HBS and before. I introduced this work as a “Big Idea” series for Harvard Business Review in 2019, and followed it in July 2021 with the publication of my third book, The Power of Trust: How Companies Build It, Lose It, Regain It, by Public Affairs.

This research examines the science behind trust, grounding our understanding of why we humans trust in the first place, describing how customers, employees, community members and investors decide whether an organization or a person can be trusted. It shows that creating and sustaining trust does not come from reputation-building and PR but by being the “real deal,” creating products, services, and technologies that work, having good intentions, treating people fairly, and taking responsibility for all the impacts an organization creates, whether intended or not. The research also corrects a common misperception: lost trust can, in fact, be regained, and delves into the process of how to do this, including the three steps of an effective apology.