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Casino royale
Even the most trusting of souls find their good will challenged by the Las Vegas-style casino antics of far too many players in the global financial markets, with risk ratios that are insane except if you assume perpetually rising markets, and financial bets underwritten by nothing more substantial than gambling fever.
At the very least, rolling rewards or bonuses that kick in at various milestones of a deal or transaction or project, would get people who place such bets with more sagacity, to be engaged throughout until these initiatives mature and are converted from potential value into real results.
However, in order to significantly rebuild trust, the following and related questions have to be asked: What type of people are we recruiting and what are their motivations?
How much do you have to pay to get people not to care about the potential destructiveness of what they’re doing? If such bonuses are now not sustainable, how else will you recruit and retain? Will you look for different skills, motivations and values?
What skills do we most value – number manipulation, or creating relationships, structuring deals that produce value, coaching execution and supporting the achievement of key milestones along the way?
Is trust a "demo" or a non-negotiable? Is violation of trust something that fundamentally removes options we passionately want to retain as an organization or something to manage, rationalize, and spin?
What if we went with, as Paul Kearns has argued, the value motive, and not just the profit motive? What if value to society was something companies were evaluated on? By value we mean producing the best results, optimising assets competitively and yet with integrity and a measure of sustainability.
What if winning, with all its zero-sum paranoid implications was made secondary as Charles Green has argued, to succeeding? And what if we defined success in terms of real value: financial results, social impact, maximisation of resources, production of choice for consumers in a free marketplace, tapping the productive value of our talent, producing the best results for our customers. What if "customer success" became an overarching compulsion and drive for credible companies?
If that became true, in terms of our products and services, how we incentivised and rewarded, what we invested in and what we genuinely stood for, we would rebuild trust for sure. Nothing less will. Nothing less should.
Omar Kahn is founder and senior partner of consulting firm Sensei International
