The Trust Curve Assessment: A Practical Guide to Building a More Open and Innovative Organization

 By Gina Soleil, Founder of Reframe

Freedom turns ideas and vision into reality. A business can only have an operating model based on freedom if the business is high on everyone’s trust curve. There’s no other way. If people don’t trust the business or their leader, then people will have no motivation to accomplish anything beyond the minimum requirement. The goal of the business should always be optimal placement on everyone’s trust curve, because then and only then are people expressing their ideas freely, openly, and without hesitation. Then and only then, the internal brand is thriving with a positive attitude and innovation is an attainable destination for the business. Trust is the only way people will emotionally connect to anything the business wants to accomplish.

The first step in establishing business-wide trust is to find out where the business is on the collective trust curve. To do that, you need to administer a trust curve assessment to everyone in the business. The assessment comprises 12 statements, each of which receives a percentage (0-100 percent) as a response. The response percentages are then averaged, and the average percentage is where your business is on the trust curve. The assessment needs to be delivered to everyone in the business regardless of role, and the results must be posted publicly on the internet or another business-wide communication system. This is not a “behind closed doors, and only revealed if the results are good” assessment.

The following are the 12 trust curve statements. The platform question is simply, “What percentage of time are these statements true?”

1. My leader’s behavior helps me feel as though I can express my ideas freely, openly, and without hesitation.
2. The business’ processes and systems help me to feel as though I can express my ideas freely, openly, and without hesitation.
3. What my leader tells me is always true.
4. The information the business communicates is always true.
5. My leader and the business have my best interests in mind anytime decisions are made.
6. My leader listens to me, and I know my leader hears what I say because they respond with genuine questions, comments, or beneficial concerns
7. My leader and the business always make me feel supported, and help me to know that I add value. I know this to be true because following up with commitments made is a priority that is always attained.
8. The business environment allows me to freely make decisions, take care of clients, and implement new ideas in my own unique way.
9. Every leader in the business shows compassion. The business leaders genuinely empathize with others and show sympathy with authenticity.
10. The business environment makes me feel safe and protected emotionally; I completely trust that my leader’s response to my ideas will not cause me to feel shame, hurt, or guilt.
11. The business environment makes me feel safe and protected physically.
12. I trust that I can be my true self within the business, and that all leaders and peers genuinely respect my true self in the business.

Here’s the deal: If you want to know how to improve trust in your business, people will tell you, and they will be right. It’s amazing. The people in your business are brilliant- that’s why you hired them. They know exactly what the business and its leader need to do right now in order to move up the trust curve.

Here’s the twist, and the change from business-as-usual activity: The next step in the process is for people who make up your business to create a trust curve action plan that all the leaders in the business will be expected to follow. Additionally, the business needs to add the collective trust curve assessment score to each leader’s annual review, the score having a direct impact on each leader’s personal financial gain. The key term there is collective. The score every leader is held accountable to is a collective trust curve score, not an individual leadership score. This means that if one leader in the business chooses behaviors that take the business down the trust curve, every leader goes down with them- no exceptions. This is what you call collective responsibility.