Trust. Ah, hard to build. Easy to lose. Welcome to The Marketing Accelerator Podcast…featuring three insights in about three minutes. I'm Drew Dinkelacker, and today I'm speaking with Cory Scheer. He's the founder of TrustCentric Consulting and the author of Closing The Trust Gap. Cory, trust…wow, It's such a challenging word. Easy to lose, difficult to build. What do you see are the key components of building trust?

Cory Scheer: Well, we know from the research that the three building blocks of trust are competency, which means leadership competency, technical competency, time management competency, even communication competency. That's vital. The second building block is problem-solving, so not only the ability to solve problems, but even more important than that is solving the right problems in the first place. And then the third is the ability to show care for others, so this is empathy…sympathy, and also listening, which is vitally important.

Drew: So, of these three building blocks of trust, well, in your experience, which is the most challenging?

Cory: By far, it is caring for others because it requires active listening, and we as humans, just generally speaking, we're not always very good at that; we would much rather offer solutions and solve those problems as opposed to really taking in the information from other people, even work into a place of disagreement, but moving forward and collaborating together. And so, it's caring for others. And what organizations tend to do is they try to compensate for that with Pizza Party Fridays or an employee-of-the-month or cookies in the mailbox. And those things, they simply do not work.

Drew: We know that trust is important, but if you don't have it, then that's distrust. How much of an issue is distrust in organizations today?

Cory: It's a big deal and it's very, very costly, and it is at epidemic proportions. In fact, just earlier today, I saw that the theme for the World Economic Forum is rebuilding trust. So, this thing is gone literally global, but we have opportunities within our own organizations to close that trust gap, which is why I wrote the book Closing The Trust Gap. And the bigger the organization gets, of course, the harder it is to close those trust gaps. And so, I, along with a researcher named Kurt Bartolich, we conducted national research, and we identified that 31% is the gap that exists between the leaders' perception of trust and the frontline employees' perception of trust. And so, you can imagine the middle managers that are trying to hold both ends of this tug of war, basically where they've got a little bit clearer picture of what's actually happening within the workplace culture, but they may not necessarily have the tools or the data or the assessment to really do anything about it.

Drew: It's clear that trust within an organization is critical, and, as a business leader, you may not have the most accurate assessment of trust. Consider Cory's book to get a better understanding.

Drew: The Marketing Accelerator Podcast is a production of MarketingAccelerator.com, where we help business leaders gain confidence in their marketing efforts and help marketers develop into high-performing leaders. I'm Drew Dinkelacker.