Trust Is Built Before You Need It
Trust. It’s the hotword that never goes cold. Whether it’s mentioned amongst friendship circles, or the defining factor of a romantic relationship. It’s hidden in where you do your food shop and it lurks around hospital corners. Everything we do, every way we think and all that we believe is built on trust.
Would Covid still be seen as a hoax if trust in the government had been higher? It’s a question I ask myself often, around a range of political issues.
One of the things I have come to appreciate about communications is that the most important work often takes place long before anybody realises it matters.When people think about communications, they tend to picture moments of visibility. A media interview. A public statement. A crisis. An announcement. The moments when organisations find themselves under scrutiny and suddenly become acutely aware of the need to explain themselves. Yet the longer I spend working in communications, the more convinced I become that those moments are rarely where reputations are won or lost. They are simply the moments when existing reputations are revealed.
Every organisation eventually encounters a period of uncertainty, it is inevitable. It may be a crisis, a controversial decision, a change in leadership, a financial challenge or a public disagreement. Whichever form it takes, there comes a point when confidence is tested and people begin asking questions. It is at that moment that leaders often turn towards communications, looking for reassurance that the right words can steady the situation. Sometimes they can. Clear communication matters enormously. But words are rarely carrying the full weight of the situation.
The full weight lays is trust.
Trust is a curious thing because it is remarkably difficult to measure and yet impossible to ignore. It rarely appears on organisational dashboards. It cannot easily be quantified in annual reports. Yet it influences almost every interaction an organisation has with the people it serves. It shapes whether staff believe what leaders tell them, if stakeholders are willing to give organisations the benefit of the doubt and it determines whether difficult decisions are viewed as genuine attempts to solve complex problems or suspicions of something more cynical. Long before people assess the quality of a message, they are often making a judgement about the credibility of the messenger.
What makes trust particularly challenging is that it cannot be created on demand. There is no switch that can be flipped when circumstances become difficult. By the time an organisation needs trust most, it is usually drawing upon reserves that have been accumulated over a considerable period of time.
I sometimes think organisations misunderstand this. There is a tendency to view trust as something that can be repaired through communications activity alone. When confidence begins to decline, the instinct is often to improve messaging, launch engagement exercises, refresh branding or increase visibility. While those things may have value, they can only ever be part of the answer. Trust is not primarily a communications issue. It is a behavioural one. People do not trust organisations because they have read a well-written statement. They trust organisations because their experience has taught them that those statements are likely to be true.
That experience is built gradually and often invisibly. Trust is built when leaders explain difficult decisions honestly rather than retreating behind carefully constructed language. When organisations acknowledge mistakes instead of denying them. It is built when people feel listened to, even when they do not get the outcome they wanted. It is built through consistency, transparency and the simple act of doing what was promised. None of these moments feel particularly significant in isolation. Most pass without comment. Yet collectively they create something extraordinarily valuable: confidence that an organisation will act with integrity when circumstances become more challenging.
This is why trust has such a profound impact during periods of crisis. When trust already exists, people are often willing to extend grace. They may not agree with every decision, but they are prepared to listen. An audience will assume good intentions unless there is compelling evidence to think otherwise. They recognise that mistakes happen and understand that complex organisations must sometimes make difficult choices. Trust creates space for conversations that would otherwise be impossible.
The Absence of Trust
The absence of trust has the opposite effect. Every delay becomes suspicious, every inconsistency attracts attention. Every mistake reinforces existing doubts. The same set of facts can produce entirely different reactions depending on whether trust was present beforehand. This is one of the reasons some organisations seem capable of weathering significant storms while others find themselves overwhelmed by comparatively minor challenges. The difference is not always the quality of the crisis response. Often it is the level of trust that existed before the crisis began.
Over time, I have become less interested in the communications that take place during moments of intense scrutiny and more interested in everything that happens beforehand. The routine conversations. The internal meetings. The difficult discussions that never make headlines. The decisions about culture, transparency and leadership. Often, these moments rarely attract attention, yet they are where reputations are formed. They are where people decide whether an organisation is worthy of their confidence.
Perhaps that is why trust remains one of the most valuable assets any organisation possesses. You see, trust cannot be purchased, outsourced or manufactured through a campaign. It must be earned slowly through countless interactions, many of which seem entirely unremarkable at the time. Yet when uncertainty arrives, as it inevitably does, those interactions suddenly matter. They determine how messages are received, how decisions are interpreted and whether people are willing to believe what they are being told.
The longer I work in communications, the more convinced I become that trust is not something organisations build during a crisis. A crisis merely reveals whether the work has already been done. Trust is built in the ordinary moments, accumulated gradually through behaviour and tested only when circumstances demand it.
