by ANDREW JAFFE

Starbucks has had its ups and downs over the last couple of years. And now the market seems to be making a rough judgment on the company every day.

That’s the problem with taking a wonderful idea and building it to the point that you can launch an IPO and cash in on the goodwill you created.

But once you bite that IPO apple and allow your company to be publicly traded there are few secrets to be kept as you try to manage the brand over the shoals and storms of the world’s economies.

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NICOLETTE WURING

Garage Tip: In Today’s Low-trust World Your Promises Are Less Likely to Be Believed. Focus Instead on Improving Your Ability to Deliver Meaningful Interactions With Customers — the kind that Build Trust

A cable company in Europe launched a re-branding soon after a roll-up of acquisitions by a group of venture capitalists. The investors demanded that the re-branding take place almost immediately.This was not only premature and meaningless to employees and customers, it proved harmful.
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By Jarvis Cromwell for The Reputation Garage

High employee engagement is money in the bank. As the graph opposite shows, companies considered the best to work for between 1998-2004 had a total stock market return of 176% versus 39% for the S&P 500.

But when it comes to engaging employees in this economic downturn, chances are you’ve got at least three problems. 1) Morale is at a low ebb (surveys have been tracking its decline across most large companies for a decade); 2) high levels of distrust in management limit your ability to rally the troops; and 3) even if you could figure out what to do, the current downturn leaves you with little or no money to address it.

Don’t sit around moping. You’re a manager, so act. There are a number of things you can do that don’t have to break the bank to build trust and improve morale. After all, you can’t take the next hill (which is looking to be steep and well fortified) if you don’t have the trust of your team. The trick is to be consistent in your approach. Here are ten tips from Forbes that would be a good start.

1) Give thanks

2) Pull them aside for a one-on-one

3) Value family time

4) Invest in their future

5) Surprise them

6) Engage them by handing out pet projects

7) Reward specific achievements

Get everyone involved and limit micro-management

9) Heavy up on encouraging a team approach

10) Focus more on fun and less relentlessly on cash

The learning for trustmeisters is that low levels of trust among employees hurts performance. Given the current environment, you’ll need to work harder over the next year on this dimension of your job as a manager. See the complete Forbes slide show of all ten tips HERE.

Back in the year 2000 – shortly before 9/11, way before the invasion of Iraq, and way-way before the collapse of the global credit system – a serious debate raged. The central question was a profound one.

“Which economy are we in?”
Good question. What’s everyone think?

The year 2000 was the backside of the dot.com bubble, still bloated and ready to burst. Money flowed, valuations were generous, VC-backed investments were the rage, technology was everything, more people had more than they had ever had before. Which, I guess, meant people had lots of free time to think about exactly which economy they were enjoying so much.

Pundits said we were in the midst of the Internet economy, the technology economy, the Silicon-Valley economy, the dot.com economy, the wired economy – and the big kahuna of them all – the new economy. My personal favorite is the new economy – because it made so little sense, as if the all too human drivers of economic sustainability took a permanent vacation. Plus, the moment you anoint a new economy, it starts becoming an old economy. And as we are painfully learning today, sometimes an old economy can become barely an economy at all.

“So, again, what economy is this today ?
My answer is the same as it was in 2000. This is the Performance Economy.
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I was in Maryland last week speaking at the 30th Annual PRSA Chesapeake Conference. I had been asked to speak on the topic of how communicators can gain more influence at the c-level executive table.

This is not a question that lends itself to the typical conference diet of case studies or top ten lists. The stakes are higher than that. I tend to think of the times we live in as a kind of “triple witching hour” for both marketers and communicators. Trust in big companies has reached an historic 100-year low. Reputational risk is now seen as a top-ten worry among CEOs. And the new digital era has upended traditional one-way communications programs in favor of two-way dialogue, enabling the public to take more control of the conversational agenda.

These trends and others are making life especially challenging for corporate communicators. But we’re talking about gaining a strong seat at the C-table. So for now, let’s leave aside statistics that show as few as 13% of all Americans are placing their trust in big business, or that on primetime TV you are 21 times more likely to be kidnapped or murdered by a businessman than by the mob. We’ll also shelve for a moment the nettlesome fact that some three-quarters of folks out there feel companies don’t tell the truth in advertising. Or what about that KPMG study a few years ago that found 76% of employees in big companies observed violations of the law or company standards in a 12-month period.

Grim statistics all – but table them for now. Because the real question around the C-table typically comes down to this: how do you lead a company into strong performance?

Turns out that in recent years the low-trust headwinds that are negatively impacting so much of American life are also making leadership more difficult. A startling statistic comes from the Harris Poll, which in 1966 found that 55% of Americans had “a great deal of confidence” in the leaders of big companies. In 2007, only 16% of Americans expressed the same confidence. So imagine you are writing a speech for a company executive in 1966 to help achieve an important operating goal. Maybe you need to rally the troops around a new strategy, or convince customers of the quality of a new product, or persuade legislators that proposed regulation is unwise. Now imagine that same speech being given in 2007. It’s a pretty safe bet that the impact of the speech in the higher trust world of 1966 would have greater impact than those same words delivered in 2007.

The learning here for would-be “trustmeisters” is that our words are less believed today. That’s a big issue because leaders depend on effective communications to sell products, engage employees, and generally manage a business. That’s why communicators must become effective ambassadors of trust for their organizations. Executives who are not looking for ways to tackle the issue of distrust will find that they’ve inadvertently diluted their power as leaders. Communicators and marketers will find a ready seat at the executive table if they can help management take back the high ground.

Easy? Not at all. May the force be with you.