Translating trust into business reality
New PwC research shows that trust isn’t fuzzy. It’s tightly linked with corporate performance.
The impressions we present are early results of an ongoing initiative to better understand the nature of today’s trust challenge, the actions that business leaders can take to address that challenge, the outcomes that those actions deliver, and the relationship between personal and institutional trust.
A colleague of ours recently asked a CEO, “Who’s responsible for trust in your organization?” The CEO couldn’t answer, a common phenomenon in our experience. “It’s you,” said our colleague. “And by the way, how trusted you are is probably strongly influencing your share price.”
Though our colleague didn’t know it at the time, his assertion rests on powerful analytic evidence: a strikingly strong correlation between trust and profitability among the companies of thousands of CEOs surveyed by PwC in our 25th Annual Global CEO Survey. In this short article, we describe these results, along with supporting data from other PwC research and a view from the front lines of trust building at a few organizations.
By Kai Lakhdar and Fredrik Lindblad via PwC