Sandra J. Sucher

Trust is the most powerful force underlying the success of every business. Yet it can be shattered in an instant, with a devastating impact on a company’s market cap and reputation. How to build and sustain trust requires fresh insight into why customers, employees, community members and investors decide whether an organization can be trusted.

Based on two decades of research and illustrated through vivid storytelling, Sandra Sucher and Shalene Gupta examine the economic impact of trust, the science behind it and conclusively prove that trust is built from the inside-out. Trust emerges from a company being the "real deal": creating products and services that work, having good intentions, treating people fairly, and taking responsibility for all the impacts an organization creates, whether intended or not.

When trust is in the room great things can happen. Sucher and Gupta’s innovative foundation for executing the elements of trust - competence, motives, means, impact – explains how trust can be woven into the day-to-day and the long term. Most importantly, even when lost, trust can be regained, as illustrated through their accounts of companies across the globe who pull themselves out of scandal and corruption by doing the right things right.

Successful leaders – at any level and in any arena – are inevitably presented with moral and ethical choices. This unique and innovative textbook is designed to encourage students and managers to confront those fundamental moral challenges, to develop skills in moral analysis and judgment, and to come to terms with their own definition of moral leadership and how it can be translated into action. Drawing on the inspiration of major literary and historical figures such as Machiavelli, Achebe, Sir Thomas More, U.S. President Harry S. Truman, and based upon an impressive array of literary sources, including novels, plays, history and biography, the book centers on four questions implicitly asked of all leaders:

• What is the nature of a moral challenge?
• How do people 'reason morally'?
• How do leaders contend with the moral choices they face?
• How is moral leadership different from leadership in general?

The Moral Leader is based upon the renowned course of the same name taught at Harvard Business School for over two decades. With an emphasis on decision-making and action, students learn to identify moral problems, to address them systematically, and to develop skills that aid them throughout their studies and their professional lives. At times challenging, insightful, and always illuminating, this book is essential reading for all serious students of leadership, management, business ethics or policy.

Visit the companion website at www.routledge.com/textbooks/9780415400640

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.  

This research encompasses layoffs, furloughs and restructuring, global practices that affect millions of employees and thousands of companies every year. In this work I aim to replace bad practice that damages trust with good (or at least better) practice through cases, notes, and articles. The most recent articles include “Layoffs can be Bad Business: 5 Strategies to Consider Before Cutting Staff,” (HBS Working Knowledge 2023) and “What Companies Still Get Wrong about Layoffs,” (HBR website 2023), which builds on “Layoffs That Don’t Break Your Company: Better Approaches to Workforce Change,” (HBR 2018) and “How to Make Furloughs More Humane,” (HBR Digital 2020). The new 2023 HBS case, “Layoffs in the Tech Industry: 2022-2023” chronicles the most recent layoff practices of tech companies, and the 2023 HBS note, “Economic Analysis: The Hidden Costs of Layoffs and Managing Staff Reductions” describes the compelling evidence that these practices may be common and if managed well, can pave a sustainable path to the future, but if not, can undermine company functioning in damaging and predictable ways. 

In this research I develop cases and articles that provide thought-provoking, real-world examples of the ways in which social identity differences emerge and are managed in the workplace, and the skills needed to constructively engage with differences to create and nurture trust. The most recent case is about Sarah Al-Suhaimi, who at 34 became the first woman to head up an investment bank in Saudi Arabia (“The NCB Capital Turnaround: Waking the Sleeping Giant”), and article “Coming Out as Trans at Work,” (HBR October 2021). Other materials include "Differences at Work," 11 mini-cases based on HBS students' own experiences of social identity challenges in the workplace, conceptual notes on the individual experience and leadership challenges of managing differences, and "Global Diversity and Inclusion at Royal Dutch Shell," a case that examines the challenges of managing differences in 100 countries around the world.

Can we get better at moral decision making? How is the capacity to exercise moral leadership developed? One answer to these questions is the notion of “moral muscle,” which is a combination of moral awareness (the ability to recognize situations that can be legitimately considered from a moral point of view), motivation for day-to-day practice, and the desire to build moral character in the long term. Moral muscle emerged from research into student experiences in “The Moral Leader,” a literature-based course on leadership I have taught for two decades at Harvard Business School (for a description, see The Moral Leader: Challenges, Tools, and Insights, a student textbook, and Teaching ‘The Moral Leader,’ an instructor manual).

This research identifies how students acquire moral muscle beginning from different starting points, and charts the paths through which moral muscle develops. The research has promise for helping managers and employees get better at making decisions with moral consequences in all the areas where trust can be built or lost.