Trust Diagnosis and Repair:
At the Organizational Level

Colleagues Building Trust with One Another
We were asked by a large multinational company to help them repair trust after there had been some major and very public ethical and trust violations. The external and internal reputation of the firm had suffered and employees had endured a great deal of embarrassment, pain and stress.

“... Not only did we teach participants about what trust is and how it is created, but we also used the trust model to conduct a robust analysis of the root cause of distrust in the organization.”

The Lead with Trust team started by conducting seminars on trust with Executive and Managing Directors with the approval of senior management. As part of the seminars not only did we teach participants about what trust is and how it is created, but we also used the trust model to conduct a robust analysis of the root cause of distrust in the organization.


The work included discussions with more than 1,000 executives over a six-month period. We then isolated the trust issues into three major areas for intervention and began a top-down process of making major changes in each to the areas that was causing distrust.

Some of the areas targeted for change included the following: 1) top management communication and transparency concerning strategy; 2) removing barriers to execution across organizational silos that were eroding confidence in the company’s ability to execute; and 3) developing a method and process to create alignment of interests across group, levels and geographic locations in this global enterprise.

“We focused trust-building efforts to specific actions and developed a phased approach to restoring trust.”

This work is still ongoing, but there is no question that trust and confidence are increasing. Importantly, we focused trust-building efforts to specific actions and developed a phased approach to restoring trust.

Once these three areas are operating more effectively, we can move to other areas to enhance trust even more. Often, trust repair efforts proceed inconsistently or hurriedly trying to encompass everything simultaneously. These approaches typically end in raised expectations and early frustration.

Since this was a global organization, the Lead with Trust team considered multi-cultural avenues towards approaching and analyzing the trust issue. Our framework was flexible enough to emphasis more relationship and benevolent trust behaviors in the East and more alignment and integrity-based approaches in the West.