As the years and now the decades have passed, the more I’ve come to appreciate the transcendental and transforming impact of trust. I’ve come to appreciate that trust draws its strength in many dimensions. I would classify them as:
- Strictly personal
- Interpersonal
- Organizational
- the “fly-wheel impact”
Trust has to start with trust in ourselves. Some years ago, I was asked this question by a college student: “Mr. Pepper, if all you had was a paper napkin to write on, what would be the three things you would write which you would most want your grandchildren to remember?”
I thought for less than a minute. Here is how I responded:
Believe in yourself; believe in your best self.
Do what you believe is right.
Love people.
I started with believing in yourself—your best self. That’s foundational. And there is, of course, no way that you can believe in yourself if you don’t inherently trust yourself. Trusting yourself not in the sense of knowing it all or being all important. But trusting yourself in the confidence that your actions will mirror your deepest instincts and that you will try to do what you believe is right. Trusting that you will do your level best to fulfill what you believe are your responsibilities.
This trust in one’s self is the foundation for self-respect —for having clarity and confidence in who one is. It starts there.
The next dimension I cite is the role of trust in forming strong interpersonal relationships. There is a lot to those few words.
I have long said that trust is the most important gift we give another person, other than our love; and without trust, love cannot endure.
Trust conveyed to me by others has made all the difference in my life. The greatest gift of trust I ever received was from my yet-to-be wife, Francie, more than 55 years ago. I received that trust singularly and indelibly when she answered my request for her to marry me in May 1967 with two words: “I will.” I knew at that moment, nothing could go wrong.
Decades before that, I received the gift of trust from my parents, especially my mother. She had surrounded me with unbounded love from the first time I recognized her. I felt that love. But equally, perhaps even more, I felt her implicit trust that I would accomplish important things. I didn’t know what they might be. I didn’t think much about it. But that trust, inchoate as it was, engendered a high level of self-expectations that drove my commitment to excel.
Self-expectations matter and other people play a big part in establishing what these self-expectations are. They have mattered a great deal to do with what I achieved in my career. It probably started in May 1960 as I entered the Navy. While on board the destroyer U.S.S. Blandy, with its complement of over 300 sailors, I couldn’t believe that at only the age of 23, the captain of the ship was leaving it entirely in my hands as officer of the deck during Midnight watches. While serving a couple of years later in the Philadelphia naval shipyard, I could hardly believe that an admiral visiting from Washington to examine three Korean War-era PT boats for possible deployment in the then-emerging action in Vietnam appointed me to lead the entire recommissioning.
This pattern of people’s trusting me led to elevated self-expectations and a sense of responsibility which continued pretty much nonstop.
Jack Clagett, my first two-up boss at Procter & Gamble, told my then newly married wife that he felt someday everyone in the company might be working for me. I couldn’t believe what he said. I actually thought I might be told that P&G wasn’t the right place for me. I silently, maybe even vocally, rejected Jack’s idea but I’m sure that it registered. The fact that I remember it 55 years later is testimony to that.
I am not alone in citing the importance of one person’s trust in elevating the vision of what another person can achieve. Again and again, fellow P&Gers have told me the importance of another person’s trust in them to what they were able to accomplish. Listen to how Herbert Schmitz, who led the development of P&G’s business in Eastern and Central Europe in the 1990s describes what enabled him to take the risks that led to his breakthrough results: “I felt trust and respect from those to whom I reported. They had confidence in me…they had fun in taking the risk with me. I could see it in the sparkle of Wolfgang Berndt’s eyes (Herbert reported to Wolf). It gave me oxygen. I knew that he would forgive mistakes as they occurred.”
Trust is, of course, at its most powerful when it is authentic and spontaneous. A personal encounter brought this home to me early in my career during a car ride that lasted no more than ten minutes. I was Advertising Manager and had been attending a presentation by a senior creative director of one of our advertising agencies. John Smale, then a Group Vice-President several levels above me, offered me a ride back to the office. In the short trip, Smale asked me what I thought of the presentation. I told him I hadn’t thought much of it. I had found it superficial. It turned out he felt the same way.
What I recall from this brief exchange was the obvious respect and trust Smale had for my point of view and his interest in having a real interchange with me.
This reminds me of an encounter I had many years later at our P&G plant in Johannesburg, South Africa. I had been touring one of our production modules with a Black Afrikaner. It had been a good visit; the line was running well and was obviously well led.
Walking back from the visit, just the team leader and me, I turned to him and asked how he liked working at the plant since P&G had taken it over from Richardson-Vicks a couple of years before. He turned, looked me right in the eye and smiled and said he was loving it and everyone else was, too. He said this with such enthusiasm I had to ask him, what accounted for the energy of his response. He turned to me again and said very simply, “Mr. Pepper, because before P&G was running this plant and people like you were here, no one would have asked me a question like that.” Isn’t it startling, amazing and sobering that this simple act of trusting the value of their answer can mean so much in empowering another.
Consciously and I’m sure unconsciously, too, I’ve tried to reciprocate the life-changing benefits I’ve gained from people who conveyed their trust in me. As I was retiring, I was deeply moved to receive a letter from Johnip Cua, one of the most outstanding General Managers I ever worked with. He reminded me that, in 1991, when he was still a young Product Supply manager, I had observed him in a meeting and recommended to his management that he undertake a training assignment in Marketing, likely leading to General Management.
Johnip recalled, “It took me two weeks to think through what I wanted to do, and what I thought I was capable of doing. To be honest, I was not sure but because you placed so much trust in me, I decided to accept the challenge and the rest was history…” And what a history it has been. Johnip led the Philippines to record after record, year after year. Countless men and women have grown under his leadership and, yes, under his trust.
How, as I think back, did people convey their trust in me? How do I believe I conveyed my trust in others?
Perhaps most importantly, they simply listened to me, listened intentionally.
How one listens really matters. There are all kinds of listening. There is pretend listening; there is part-time listening, that’s listening knowing you should be listening but having your mind on something else. There is listening with your mind focused on how you’re going to respond. Then, there is truly intentional listening: listening to truly understand and gain the benefit of another person’s experience, thinking and ideas. You can’t fake how you are listening, not for long. People will figure it out; they will see the reality and they will greatly appreciate your being deeply engaged.
Personally, I have found it easy to listen intentionally to many, many people. Why? Because I’ve come to see how much I have to learn from others, including many people whom I started out wondering whether I could actually learn anything from them. People who were different than I was in their background, their ethnicity. However, the number of times I’ve discovered wisdom and fresh thoughts from someone I didn’t know to have them is beyond counting.
Beyond the simple fact of listening, people have conveyed their trust in me (and I hope I have in others) by following a deeply felt recommendation of mine even though they had a contrary point of view to begin with. People did that for me again and again. Sometimes it worked out; sometimes it didn’t. But I never left such a decision without feeling empowered and having a greater sense of responsibility.
There is no surprise that the most effective leaders I have known and observed have established personal relationships founded on trust and an organization culture empowered by trust.
No one has talked about the importance of choosing to trust others more compellingly than Ed Artzt, who preceded me as CEO of P&G. In an unforgettable speech at Harvard Business School titled “How to be a Winning Manager,” Ed said this: “Trust is a character trait that does not come easily to many people. But I believe that winning managers inherently trust the judgment, competence and integrity of their subordinates, and are successful because they communicate that feeling to their people as part of the winning spirit that they ultimately create.”
“Losing managers on the other hand are often inherently distrustful of the judgment, competence or integrity of their people, and they inevitably transmit that feeling much to their own detriment and to the detriment of the enterprise.”
Ed went on to say, “Understand I’m not talking about blind, unquestioned, hands-off, let-your- people-run-wild trust. I’m talking about developing the capacity to convey to people the trust they have earned through their efforts and their performance.”
“Remember just one thing. Trust your people. If you trust them, they will give it back ten-fold.”
No one embodied the spirit and actions that Ed Artzt espoused as much as John Smale, who preceded him as CEO at Procter & Gamble. Of all the leaders whom I have known in business, John Smale stands tallest. There are many elements to the strength of his leadership. But perhaps more important than any other is the trust and sense of responsibility he engendered in the individuals reporting to him and the trust he infused throughout the entire organization.
Smale was very intentional in identifying individuals that he could trust through their ability, character and willingness to perform at the highest level, just as he expected that of himself. With painstaking intent, for example, he chose Ed Artzt to drive the global expansion of Procter & Gamble’s business. With sharp intentionality, he chose Wahib Zaki to reinvigorate P&G’s R&D operation and Harry Tecklenburg to start up P&G’s pharmaceutical business and on and on it went.
Smale’s trust did not come lightly. It was based on careful evaluation. Importantly, the high expectations of others which he made clear, not in a heavy-handed or dictatorial way, carried with them a tremendous sense of empowerment combined with a high level of responsibility on the part of the individual. That sense of responsibility was bolstered by the confidence that Smale would be supporting them all the way. I felt this again and again as I reported to Smale.
The impact of trust goes beyond the individual relationships it empowers. It also affects, it permeates, indeed it molds, for better or worse, the entire culture of an organization. Without strong trust, you will never have a strong culture.
Over 30 years ago, I heard one of the most meaningful presentations of my life which speaks directly to this. The presentation was by a professor at the London Business School. His name was Sumantra Gohshal. Gohshal framed his just over 8-minute talk at Davos with a metaphor: “The Smell of the Place.” He was talking about the mysterious but all important subject of culture. He likened the culture of an organization to air. It’s just there. It surrounds you, for better or worse.
In drawing out the metaphor, “The Smell of the Place,” Gohshal contrasted two environments he was very familiar with: the city of Calcutta, where he grew up, in summer. Temperature nearing 100; humidity close to the same. Try as you might, it was hard to be creative in that environment. The environment was controlling.
In contrast, Professor Ghoshal described the environment of the forest at Fontainebleau, where he had spent a great deal of time. Here, surrounded by leaves budding and birds chirping, he averred it was easy to be creative; it came naturally.
He went on to make this flinching comment: “Too many organizations are like Calcutta in the summer. Their environment is characterized by compliance, constraint, contract and control. That was the attitude of the management. And that made it very hard, to be creative just as the temperature and humidity in Calcutta made it hard to be creative.”
In contrast, he chose four words to describe the environment in Fontainebleau. I’ll never forget his choice of words:
Stretch
Discipline
Support, and underpinning it all,
Trust
I was so impressed by his presentation and this metaphor that I invited him to come to Cincinnati to speak with P&G’s top leadership group. He did. And I dare say, most of the people there, like me, remember what he said to this very day. And they try to apply it.
Why? Because it’s easy to identify “The Smell of the Place” in an organization. I picked it up as I went from P&G subsidiary to subsidiary. I picked it up when I went from school to school in Cincinnati. Talking this recently with my son, who is in the venture capital business, he tells me he picks up the caring “Smell of the Place” in his different start-up companies. And not surprisingly he is more inclined to invest in the ones with a positive smell.
It is impossible to create this kind of climate and culture if people don’t trust each other to be doing the best job they can and to talk straight. It would be impossible if they don’t trust their leaders to be calling the shots as they see them and, even if they might disagree with them on a decision, they know they are working to do the right thing for the sake of the institution.
My son recently pointed out another benefit of trust. He calls it the “flywheel effect” and he was hitting a key point.
Trust within an organization is recognized, appreciated and responded to by other stakeholders. Customers work with P&G in a different way because they trust the brands we sell and because they trust P&G people. I found again and again that government leaders in countries we were entering accorded us respect and support because they trusted us to deliver on our promises, to live up to our principles and values, to act ethically and fairly. I’ve been welcomed on college campuses where I’m recruiting young students by career advisors because they trust P&G to not only teach young graduates the business but work hard to advance their career development.
Yes, there are many dimensions to trust.
They start with trust in one’s self. They characterize the best interpersonal relationships. They frame and mold the culture of the organization. And they constitute the basis on which an organization is respected and valued by other stakeholders.
A warning: we must never take trust for granted. We must protect it. We must recognize that it is vulnerable to actions which contradict our principles and values. They have happened. I’ve seen them. I’ll always remember an incident at one of European countries where we discovered that its leader was offering customers free cruises in the Mediterranean for preferential merchandising treatment. We learned this practice after had gone on for a couple of years without our knowledge. When we did learn about it, we terminated the person. What happened next was what impacted me the most. A number of members of the organization told me they thought we knew all along this was happening. And they had come to think our principles and values were simply a lot of propaganda.
Sometimes a leader might undermine trust without being aware of it. An offhand remark; an action they might not have thought enough about. It is incumbent upon the person observing this to speak up and make that clear to him or to her. Failure to do so is an abdication of responsibility.
Never forget what it is that underpins our trust (or lack of trust) in other people. It is our experience that they are saying what they mean and mean what they say; that even if we don't agree with them, we know they are trying to do the right thing, the principled thing, not the expedient or convenient thing. That is the bedrock of trust.
Going back to where I started, trust is the most precious gift we give one another. Trust is the most important attribute of personal relationships. Trust is an essential element of an empowering, high-performance culture, no matter whether that is a business or an athletic team or a university or a healthcare organization. And trust earns trust from other people who observe it and respect it and want to be associated with an organization that not only says the right thing but acts on doing it.
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