We’ve talked a lot lately about trust and credibility and whether once lost, if they can be rebuilt. The answer from my perspective is a resounding yes, and no.  The reason I’m so wishy washy on this topic is that the business of building trust and losing trust, and then rebuilding it again is in itself a slippery slope.

Can it be rebuilt once lost?  Yes, but if you’re the type of person or company that gets into trouble in the first place, are you the type of person or company with the ability to make the kinds of changes that will enable you to rebuild trust?

These kinds of changes are fundamental, values-based and don’t happen over night.  You can’t buy your way back into trust. Nor can you talk your way back in.  It happens slowly as a result of authentic demonstrations of trusted behavior.

Imagine that you have a “trust fund.”  When you demonstrate trustworthy behavior, you add to that fund.  When you breach trust you take away from it.  A trust fund is generally built slowly over time, but can be depleted quickly by catastrophic breaches, like BP’s disaster in the Gulf.

So the best thing you can do, whether you’re a company or an individual, is to make sure you are continually adding to your  trust fund so that when something negative occurs, you have some padding or trust in reserve. In the event that you essentially wipe out the entire account, as BP has, you have to get busy putting trust back in.  How do you do that?

Start with putting real people in real people-to-people situations.  Give the community (both large and small) an opportunity to get to know the real people of BP, and to see how they are actively working to solve the problem and rebuild the communities damaged by the spill.

CEO Tony Hayward has said on several occasions that “BP takes full responsibility….. and will do whatever it takes to…..”  but these are simply words. Words do not by themselves rebuild trust. We need to see actions.  Give us examples of what taking responsibility actually looks like.

Rebuilding trust is not an easy task, but it can be done and it must be done in order for a company to survive. We’ll talk next time about the effect of trust or lack of trust on the bottom line, and how we can use this motivator to change behavior.

-Pam Holloway

Check out  Roger Steare’s Moral Character Profile at: http://www.ethicabilitytest.org

It measures 10 moral values as well as 3 moral philosophies and is backed by The Times (UK Times) and PwC (PriceWaterhouseCoopers). You get a 4 page PDF report and The Times will promote it world-wide in the next couple of weeks.

Love Roger’s title: Corporate Philosopher in Residence and Professor of Organisational Ethics.  That sounds like a job for me!

I’ve had several conversations this week about what it means to have a meaningful dialogue with your customers.   It seems many companies mistakenly believe marketing is a meaningful dialogue. NOT!  “But we have blogs, they say, and we tweet!”  To which I respond – “And your blogging and tweeting is the same kind of one-way “push” message you’ve been using for years.”  It is not a two-way conversation and certainly not a rich dialogue.

Lest you think adding a blog, in an of itself, helps “connect you” or build trust, guess again.  According to studies by Forrester Research company blogs are one of the least trusted sources of information about a company.  Not only do blogs rank below newspapers and portals in the Forrester study, they rank below wikis, direct mail, company email, and message board posts. Only 16% of online consumers who read corporate blogs say they trust them. If you’re a corporate blogger or somebody who advises companies, you might want to pay attention.

And why don’t people trust company blogs?  My guess is because they quickly recognize the lack of authenticity and real dialogue.  We expect a brochure or a website or an ad to be marketing, but we secretly hope a blog isn’t.  If it “feels” like another marketing ploy, then our hackles go up immediately and any trust that might have been established is lost.

My advice to clients is if you can’t do blogs right, don’t do them at all.  And by “right” I mean a genuine conversation with real human beings responding to real customers.

There is a great article by Virginia Heffernan in last Sunday’s NY Times Sunday Magazine . In (Trust Busting) she talks about how a company “wears it’s anxiety on it’s face – i.e. it’s website.”  Heffernan looks at the sites of several recently troubled companies, including Toyota, hoping to find sincere apologies and focused efforts to rebuild damaged trust.  No such luck. It was as though nothing ever happened.

Even worse, take a look at the website of Maclaren, the British company that recalled millions of umbrella strollers in November amid reports from American consumer groups that the hinges occasionally severed children’s fingertips. This from Heffernan’s article:

Its Web site tries so aggressively to represent the company as a kind of family that it ends up implying that to stop buying its strollers would be to betray kin.

The Maclaren home page is dominated by a wide shot of adults, evidently employees of the company, in country-casual clothes posing on a green knoll before three knotty climbing trees. Not a stroller in sight. Mouse over the image and you get a blurb on each person. Dylan, in a country-squire jacket, is, cryptically, “raised on a Maclaren and always committed.” Graham, in shirtsleeves, is, just as cryptically, “the Father of the modern Travel System.” Pauline, entirely in black, is “Bob’s wife.” (Bob?) Over the heads of these “family members” — as the employees are known in the blurbs — are rotating banners that comprise a weird, Churchillian incantation. “For all those who trust us, we say we are grateful,” it starts, sensibly enough. But then the weirdness sets in:

“For all those who believe we saved a life, we say that is our ultimate reward.

“For all those who believe we have caused them pain, we say we are sorry.

“For all those who shun us, we say look around, check the facts, be objective.

“For everyone else we say, we strive for excellence and we all stand together to achieve it.”

Then the kicker, in italics: “And . . . for all those who copy us, we are delighted that our past inspires your future.”

Oh, come on. The classic insincere apology (“Those who believe we have caused them pain”) and the nonsense heroics about lifesaving and then the jab at competitors! Petulance and paranoia: only someone way too emotionally involved with Maclaren’s reputation — and not a corporate P.R. firm — could have made such a hash of damage control.

Well then.

Heffernan also mentions the John Edwards website, which still looks exactly like it did in 2008, again as though nothing has happened. If Edwards hopes for any sort of future, why would he not begin to rebuild trust by coming clean about what happened.  Own it, take responsibility and move on.  If you can’t do that, then for God’s sake, take down the site. It’s embarrassing.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/magazine/28FOB-medium-t.html?emc=eta1

We (co-author Michael Lovas and I) have written quite a lot about first impressions. In particular the series of subconscious assessments that go on when we first meet someone. We know that the first thing that goes on is the “am I in danger?” assessment.

Every time a stranger looks at you, he or she makes a split-second determination as to whether you are friend or foe. Also among those split second assessments is an analysis of your attractiveness, likeability and credibility.

According to Princeton researcher and professor Alex Todorov, we are “hard wired” to quickly draw these inferences.

“The link between facial features and character may be tenuous at best, but that doesn’t stop our minds from sizing other people up at a glance. We decide very quickly whether a person possesses many of the traits we feel are important, such as likeability and competence, even though we have not exchanged a single word with them. It appears that we are hard-wired to draw these inferences in a fast, unreflective way.”

For more on first impressions, and in particular what people are “reading” to make these assessments, check out our book Axis of Influence – How Credibility and Likeability Intersect to Drive Success.

For more on Alex Todorov, check out All Things Considered, June 9, 2005 – Scientists Search for Winning Look. Forget political polls. Scientists usually can tell whether political candidates will win or lose by testing voters’ reactions to the contestants’ faces. A study in the journal Science shows that voters chose the face that looks more “competent.”

Professor Todorov’s Princeton Website

Pam’s favorite researcher Alex Todorov, along with fellow Princeton researcher Nikolaas Osterhof developed a computer program that allows scientists to analyze what it is about certain human faces that makes them look either trustworthy or fearsome. In doing so, they have also found that the program allows them to construct computer-generated faces that display the most trustworthy or dominant faces possible.  Take a look at http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S21/79/44O45/index.xml?section=topstories

“Humans seem to be wired to look to faces to understand the person’s intentions,” said Todorov, who has spent years studying the subtleties of the simple plane containing the eyes, nose and mouth. “People are always asking themselves, ‘Does this person have good or bad intentions?’”

To conduct the study, the scientists showed unfamiliar faces to test subjects and asked them to describe traits they could gauge from the faces. The scientists boiled down the list of traits to about a dozen of the most commonly cited characteristics, including aggressiveness, unkemptness and various emotional states. The researchers showed the faces to another group and asked them to rate each face for the degree to which it possessed one of the dozen listed traits.

Using a commercial software program that generates composites of human faces (based on laser scans of real subjects), the scientists asked another group of test subjects to look at 300 faces and rate them for trustworthiness, dominance and threat.

Common features of both trustworthiness and dominance emerged. A trustworthy face, at its most extreme, has a U-shaped mouth and eyes that form an almost surprised look. An untrustworthy face, at its most extreme, is an angry one with the edges of the mouth curled down and eyebrows pointing down at the center. The least dominant face possible is one resembling a baby’s with a larger distance between the eyes and the eyebrows than other faces. A threatening face can be obtained by averaging an untrustworthy and a dominant face.

Princeton researcher and Professor Alexander Todorov discovered that when we see a new face, our brains make split-second judgments on whether or not that person is trustworthy, attractive and competent.

Todorov says, “The link between facial features and character may be tenuous at best, but that doesn’t stop our minds from sizing other people up at a glance. We decide very quickly whether a person possesses many of the traits we feel are important, such as Likeability and competence, even though we have not exchanged a single word with them. It appears that we are hard-wired to draw these inferences in a fast, unreflective way.” 

Kevin Hogan, author of The Science of Influence, explains it this way:  “When you first meet someone, millions of neurons in the brain are activated.  The unconscious mind goes immediately to work, makes all kinds of judgments and evaluations, and essentially pegs the person a winner or loser in approximately four seconds.”

So knowing that people make these split-second decisions, what can you do to ensure thier first impressions of you are positive?

Let’s begin with Trust since this is the first thing the brain registers.  What can you do to help people trust you? 

First step, make yourself safe.  Ever see any of the Discovery Channel shows about animals fighting?  They puff up and try to look as large and intimidating as possible.  That’s what you’d do to if you were going to do battle.  Trust is the opposite of that, and it includes these elements: 

• Smile in your eyes
• Look – directly at the person, around the eyes but not into the eyes (no glaring)
• Open trusting posture – open palms
• Sideways tilt of your head
• Nod – encourage the conversation by saying, “Uh huh…OK…I see”

Why are those postures important?  For two reasons:  1) They are the main tools we use to communicate friendliness and trustworthiness and  2)  Nonverbal cues carry much more information than verbal ones.

This segment is drawn from our new book Axis of Influence – How Credibility and Likeability Intersect to Drive Success.  Stay tuned for more on Making a Favorable First Impression.