Overview

Trust is the foundation of every meaningful relationship—personal and professional. We see this play out dramatically in business: from Bud Light’s influencer controversy to Boeing’s horrific crashes and endless travails, trust breaches cost companies millions in lost revenues, spur dramatic declines in investor confidence and shareholder value, upend customer reliance, and unnerve employees. Yet the notion of trust is surprisingly hard to define in a business context. More is obviously better, but how as a business do you get to be trusted in the first place—and then after that? What can you do to recover when trust is lost? And what can individuals do, whether they are leaders of established firms, deal makers, early- or late-stage entrepreneurs, managers and project members, or soon-to-be-returned to the workplace MBAs to build trust in themselves?

Building Trusted Organizations is designed to answer these questions. You will learn about trust as a business asset. You will learn how to operationalize trust—how to turn it from a fuzzy, nice-to-have aspiration into a deep understanding of the actions that are required to build trust, recover it when lost, and use it as a hallmark for how you personally operate in business.

Career Focus

The course is meant to be useful now, in the near-term, and as graduates have pointed out, over the span of your entire career.

Educational Objectives

The course is designed to provide a practical, hands-on understanding of trust through cases, exercises, guests, and your written work, and to build a community of people who want to help each other understand trust and how it can be used in organizations and by individuals. We use role plays and simulations to make trust building real and focus on skills you can get better at.

The course is underpinned by a research-based, pragmatic framework that describes the bases on which people trust organizations and individuals: Competence, Motives, Means, and Impact. Competence in doing what they are supposed to do. Motives, meaning whose interests they take into account when they make decisions. Means in how they go about accomplishing their goals. And finally impact – the real impact that they have on people’s lives, whether they intended to have those impacts or not. The framework is described in my book, The Power of Trust: How Companies Build It, Lose It, Regain it; chapter assignments provide insights into the research behind trust building and trust recovery, which are actively discussed in class.

This is a course for people who want to continue to broaden their understanding of how different businesses succeed through the lens of a very particular asset—trust. The cases we study, most of which come from my own research, cover a lot of ground and a lot of functions, from investing and asset management to tech and AI innovation, to the media and publishing, to manufacturing, to consumer marketing and hospitality, to managing sustainability, to tabletop role playing. The case are domestic and global (half are from outside the US), and they feature a number of truly enviable leaders whose actions provide insights into what leading with trust looks like when it is practiced as a high art by people who know what they are doing.

Course Content and Organization

• 14, 80-minute in-class sessions, over 7 weeks.
• Module structure: Building Trust, Recovering Lost Trust, Leading with Trust
• Building Trust provides the foundation for why trust building matters. It introduces the trust framework used throughout the course and explores trust building in different contexts from building trust into daily operations and decisions, to building trust through innovation, when managing sustainability, and when exiting markets.
• Recovering Lost Trust focuses on the terrain of lost trust, delving into why and how companies lose trust, and how companies can respond to restore it. It examines the two ways that research finds that companies lose trust: through breaches of competence—when stakeholders lose faith in an organization’s ability to deliver products and services they can trust, or through breaches of integrity—when questions of motives, personal ethics, and a commitment to others’ wellbeing come into play. It explores losing and restoring trust in contexts ranging from manufacturing to AI and technology platform businesses, when restructuring, and in managing business ecosystems.
• Leading with Trust dives into personal trust building as a leader, from the skills necessary to build trust in individual interactions to how leaders build trust in their leadership of a business. It explores leading with trust in a turnaround, through generative AI and industry disruption, when navigating controversial issues, and during the Great Financial Crisis of 2008-2009. The module encourages looking inward to skills that can be developed intentionally, and outward to how they can be deployed.

Grading/Course Administration

• 50% class participation and engagement
• 15% on a 3-5 page personal trust case study to analyze a situation where earning the trust of others was critical to your success
• 35% on an 8-10 page course paper analyzing organizational trust in a situation where trust was built or lost (roughly three-quarters of the paper), and describing your own approach to building trust in yourself and your actions (roughly one quarter of the paper)

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