Greater Transparency Is the Key to Building Greater Trust

Trust Measurement

Trust and Transparency
Go Hand In Hand
Brad Rawlins' research shows that doing things right isn't nearly as important as doing the right thing.

by Katie Delahaye Paine

About five years ago, Linda Hon, Jim Grunig and I wrote a white paper about measuring trust that set out some pretty clear steps as to how organizations could do it. At the time, we gave some general advice on what to do if you found that trust in your organization was less than what you wanted it to be.

To be honest, most of these recommendations fell somewhere between "duh," and "of course," and mostly had to do with doing things right:

• Articulate a set of ethical principles,
• Create a process for transparency that is appropriate for current and future operations, and
• Establish a formal system of trust measurement.

And they are all perfectly acceptable things to do.

However, new research by Brad Rawlins (he is our Measurement Maven of the Month for this month), shows that doing things right isn't nearly as important as doing the right thing, and that being transparent is a driving factor in the fostering of trust.

In a recent presentation at the Universidad Del Norte in Barranquilla, Colombia, Dr. Rawlins outlined his findings, and we summarize them below. (You can read the whole paper here, excerpted from the IPRRC proceedings of last spring. Read my blog coverage of that presentation here.)

The overall results of the study demonstrate that transparency and trust are highly correlated, and, "one could conclude that as organizations become more transparent they will also become more trusted." Although the study was limited to employees, the results are strong enough to imply that the correlation between trust and transparency will hold for other stakeholder groups as well.

Definitions

For definitions of trust, see our paper above, since Rawlins uses the same terminology. For transparency, Rawlins starts with the 2005 Mirriam-Webster definition:

• Free from pretense or deceit
• Easily detected or seen through
• Readily understood

He then supplements it with one from Anne Florini of the Brookings Institution:

The opposite of secrecy. Secrecy means deliberately hiding your actions; transparency means deliberately revealing them.

According to Rawlins, there are three aspects of transparency:

1. Informational Transparency means openness, making publicly available all legally releasable information -- whether positive or negative in nature -- in a manner which is accurate, timely, balanced, and unequivocal. Information must be substantial to meet stakeholders needs. Disclosure by itself does not equal transparency, in fact some forms of disclosure can defeat the purposes of transparency.
2. Participatory Transparency is what separates transparency from disclosure. Transparency cannot be successful unless you know what stakeholders want and need to know. So, to ensure that the information shared is relevant and useful, stakeholders must be allowed to identify what they need to know.
3. Accountability Transparency. Transparency holds people accountable for their actions, words and decisions. Rawlins cited The Naked Corporation: If you're going to be naked, you'd better be buff. In other words, if you want to shine, you have to clean up your act.

In addition, Rawlins suggests that each organization might experience differing levels of transparency:

• Active transparency, where transparency is simply part of the culture;
• Forced transparency, in response to Sarbanes-Oxley or other legislation; and
• Pseudo transparency, in which an organization obfuscates through disclosure and greenwashing, which is self-promotion disguised as transparency.

Methodology

1200 employees of a large regional healthcare organization were surveyed on issues of trust and transparency. 385 surveys were completed for a 32% response rate. Twenty-four surveys were deleted because they were incomplete, leaving 361 surveys for analysis. The sample demographics matched approximately those of the healthcare organization's population.

Conclusions

1. Trust and transparency are significantly and strongly correlated.

Trust was closely connected with transparency and the two are positively related. According to Rawlins, "As employee perceptions of organizational transparency increased so did trust. Additionally, the three components of trust (competence, integrity, and goodwill) and three components of transparency (participation, substantial information, and accountability) are positively related."

2. Regression analyses indicate that employees found integrity and goodwill more important to overall trust than competency.

Employee participation that leads to an organization sharing information that employees find useful and substantial, and that holds an organization accountable, is the strongest predictor of overall transparency.

3. Employees see sharing information as a sign of integrity.

Sharing substantial information and being accountable was tied to employee perceptions of organizational integrity.

4. Employee participation and willingness to be accountable was tied to perception of goodwill.

Final Thoughts

Dr. Rawlins is the only speaker I've heard of late that closed his presentation with a quote from the bible that I actually found to be entirely relevant to the presentation.   Would that more of our corporations heed these words:

And this is the condemnation. That light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil, for everyone that doest evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved, but he that doest a Truth cometh to the light that his deeds maybe e manifest, that they are wrought in God.  John 3:19-21

Comments

[Charles H. Green]

This is very good work on the part of Rawlins and you, Ms. Paine. Well, to be transparent about it, what I mean to say is it corresponds very much with how I have come to think of the subjects.

For example: in my own work, e.g. in The Trusted Advisor with Maister and Galford, and in Trust-based Selling, I use three models. One, a deductive model, suggests trust as an equation: (credibility + reliability + intimacy) / (self-orientation). To be clear, this is not a measure of bi-lateral trust, but of the trustworthiness of the one who would be trusted.

While that's more a personal model of trust, it certainly dovetails with the survey's findings that employees rate integrity and transparency higher than competence. That is precisely the meaning of our equation as well: competence is largely credibility; the biggest single factor in the trust equation is low self-orientation, which probably traverses similar ground to what Rawlins is calling integrity and goodwill.

The organizational model of trust I posit consists of four principles, one of which is transparency. (The other three I use are collaboration, medium-to-long term perspective, and an other- or customer-focused instinct).

The role of transparency in trust is fundamental in a logical sense, so it's hardly surprising that a regression analysis would prove it. Transparency worth the name fits only the first of the three "levels" of transparency that Rawlins posits--freely given transparency about any and all things.

The absence of such freely given and free-ranging transparency can only call into question the motives of those who refuse or hesitate to be transparent. When motives are questioned, whether you use his "goodwill" or my "self-orientation," all bets are off. It means that credibility is the next to fall, because you can't believe what someone says if it is tainted by self-interest or obfuscation. And if you can't believe them, then you end up with pseudo-versions of trust. (My favorite: Ronald Reagan's "trust but verify," which was classic Cold War doubletalk for "I'll trust you as far as I can throw an elephant"--not trust at all).

It can be misleading to use the word "is" when describing fuzzy but meaningful concepts like trust, because it entirely depends on how one defines the terms--even the dictionary is basicallly just documenting anthropological preferences over time.

But the definition of transparency is more clear than most, and quite central to trust. Bravo to you for giving it clear airing.