Why It's Critical to Manage for Institutional Trust
In an era of declining trust, leaders must actively earn and sustain it.
I did consulting work at Walgreens in the 1990s and early 2000s. This was when the company was a juggernaut and a case study in Good to Great.
The company was, and always had been, run by pharmacists. In fact, when I started there, Charles R. Walgreen III was still the CEO. It was understood that you couldn’t become CEO unless you were a pharmacist, and numerous high level executives at the company had all started out as pharmacists in the store.
One day a Walgreens marketing colleague, who himself was a pharmacist, said, “Have you ever noticed that we don’t advertise that we have the best pharmacists?” I had never considered it, but when he pointed it out, it was obviously true. In fact, no pharmacy chain I was aware of claimed to have the best pharmacists.
This person went on to say, “We want people to trust pharmacists. So we don’t want to give them they impression that some pharmacists are good but others are bad. We want them to have complete confidence in anyone with an RPh after their name, that this person will give them the right drugs and the right advice every time - regardless of what company they work at.”
Perhaps it is no surprise that pharmacist has remained one of the most respected professions in America for decades.
People in the pharmacy profession understood that it was in their best interest to maintain trust in their profession, even at the cost of forgoing the types of marketing claims that are routine elsewhere.
This was also true in substance, not just marketing. Obviously, pharmacists make mistakes. But they take them very seriously. A misfill is a big deal. I can say that in my years working around that industry, I never once saw even a suggestion that something should be done that would jeopardize patient safety.
Walgreens is struggling as a company today along with the rest of the industry. I don’t claim to know all the reasons. My analysis applies to the past there.
It’s not news to you that we’ve seen a steep decline in trust in American institutions. It’s entirely deserved. In fact, our institutions might actually be too trusted relative to the amount of trust they deserve.
Unlike the pharmacists who were running Walgreens, we don’t see institutional leaders today actively managing for trust. In fact, they too often do things to actively destroy trust.
We saw this during the recent election season when the Des Moines Register published a shock poll the Sunday before Election Day saying that Kamala Harris was leading Trump by three points in the state.
This appears to have been plastered over the entire front page of the paper (though since I don’t live in Iowa I didn’t see the print edition, so possible this was a digital only image). It became a big national story. I saw journalists and pundits from around the country, especially on the left, trumpeting this story.
Donald Trump ended up winning Iowa by 13 points.
There are mistakes and there are Mistakes. This is definitely a capital-M Mistake.
Pollster Ann Selzer is apparently a very respected figure who had done accurate polling in the past. I find it difficult to believe she rigged it. I’ve seen some people argue that a pollster should release even outlier findings they are skeptical of rather than bury them. In any case, this was a career ender for her.
More interesting is the choice of the Register to feature such an improbable poll so prominently right before the election. They do not appear to have been concerned about what it would mean for their credibility, and that of the journalism industry in general, if it turned out to be wrong. And not just wrong, but spectacularly wrong.
The Register’s post-mortem is entirely focused on the error of the poll itself, and essentially points the finger at Selzer.
I have heard no discussions from them or anyone else in the journalism field about any accountability for the Register and its editor in what turned out to be a colossal editorial misjudgment. Their view seems to be that since they reported the results of the poll accurately, they did their job.
I disagree.
At a certain level, leaders have to be held accountable, and hold themselves accountable, for results, not just intent or process.
The net result of failing to do this is that is a collapse in trust in journalism and the media, with trust levels now at an all time low.
Newspapers run with coverage like that horrifically wrong poll, then get mad at people for not trusting them and even hating them. But what has the journalism profession done to manage for trust? It seems to be concerned principally with its own internal rules and practices, but very unconcerned with the ordinary standards of the world at large.
In an era of declining institutional trust, those of us who run institutions need to actively manage them for trust. Those of us who are in professions need to conduct ourselves and run our institutional affairs and practices in ways that manage for trust in our profession.
It’s no secret that most of our key institutions like the major media are structurally controlled by the political left. Hence conservatives benefit by undermining trust in them. (In some scenarios, there’s even a perverse logic in which conservatives who win elected office actually benefit from running that office in ways that further undermine trust and legitimacy).
That means the leaders of these organizations should in theory be working extra hard to sustain trust - but how seldom they do. In fact, as with this Register example, they often are more effective in destroying trust in their own institutions than any conservative could dream of being.
Religious institutions run conservative, and often do no better. Can anyone seriously argue that the Catholic clerical hierarchy has acted like they are concerned about trust in the church? And as I’ve written before, there’s no accountability for failure in the evangelical world.
I’m not going to argue that there’s some easy path to restoring trust in institutions in America. But for those of us who run or are leaders in institutions that we want to preserve, we should actively managing for trust.
This doesn’t mean firing everybody who makes a mistake. It also doesn’t mean that you never do anything controversial or that you don’t have enemies. Sometimes it’s not obvious what to do.
But a lot of this is not rocket science. Getting a massive story wrong that you had good reason to be skeptical of, like that Iowa poll result, is not it. Nor is sweeping major failures like evangelical purity culture into the memory hole.
Most of us are not editors-in-chief of a major metropolitan daily newspaper. But we all have some span of control and influence. We should be thinking about how to actively steward the trust level where we are engaged.
On journalists:
They're allergic to context. Whenever anyone working for me provides a number or fact without context, I get fired up. But most people, who tend to read a lot about the world through journalism, seem to pick up this habit of describing the world like journalists. In the real world, a number or fact without context does not inform your decision-making in any way.
I don't think Selzer did anything especially wrong. It seems correct to me, based on all the evidence, that polls were heavily herded this time around and the effect of Selzer's career being destroyed is that they will be even more herded in the future. So yes, Aaron is right to blame the journalists. The problem here is 100% with their refusal to provide context. Which is probably driven by a combination of the facts that (1) Very few journalists have minds that are well-equipped for analysis in the first place, and (2) Short-term thinking (motivated in part by desperation) is leading to a pursuit of click-bait incentive structures.
I can’t thank you enough for this post. Yuval Levin’s book A Time to Build essentially makes the same argument. He points out that people used to understand the institutions they inhabited and that they were responsible to be caretakers of their professions or vocations. Now, whether it be journalism, government, or (sadly) medicine some use the institutions as a platform for self promotion.
A good example is that politicians act as the inherent “outsider” and paint the institution they inhabit as the problem and never work to restore the respect of the instiitution to be what it was intended to be. He argues that we never really escape the reality that there are always going to be elites in any society. For good or ill, prior generations of elites believed they were caretakers for others. Now our elites deny that they are elites and promote themselves and tear down the credibility of institutions with their words or actions. It’s especially sad to me to see how the medical profession has undermined their credibility in so many ways when the culture relies upon them to provide care.
I was getting an Uber ride the other day from a man from Egypt. He loves this country and is like every Uber driver I’ve run into over the years whether it be from Latin America, Africa, or China. They come here for opportunities that they lack in their native lands and articulate that, if they work hard, they can provide for their families in ways they cannot in the land of their birth. The difference between their own countries and our prosperity owes, in no small measure, to the large amount of social trust that exists. Yet, on a daily basis, we are increasingly losing that social trust and it does not bode well for our further if we do not actively seek to preserve what we have left and restore (where possible) what has been lost.