Episode #643: Trust Isn’t a Feeling. It’s a KPI - with Rob McKenna

What if one of the biggest constraints on your ability to scale is something you’re not measuring at all?

In this episode of ScaleUp Radio, Kevin Brent is joined by Rob McKenna for a fascinating discussion about trust: how to measure it, why founders frequently misjudge it, and why building trust isn’t about creating a perfect culture.

Rob introduces the WiLD Trust Index, a framework designed to turn trust from something intangible into something leaders can measure, understand and deliberately improve.

For founders, there’s a particularly important message here. Delegation and succession aren’t simply transfers of responsibility. They’re transfers of trust. And the ability of an organisation to maintain and repair trust without the founder could ultimately become an important part of the value of the business.

 

Most business owners measure revenue, profit, cash, sales and productivity. But how many measure trust?

That matters because people remain one of the biggest challenges facing growing businesses, yet Rob points out that only around 4% of KPIs are people based.

So perhaps we’re measuring the outputs while ignoring one of the things driving them.

Rob’s work challenges the idea that trust is simply a feeling. Through the WiLD Trust Index, trust can be examined across 33 drivers at three different levels:

Personal: what is happening within us, including things such as vulnerability.

Team: the patterns between people, including reliability and the way colleagues behave towards one another.

Organisational: the conditions around people, including alignment with the organisation’s mission.

This produces a Net Trust Score, alongside insight into the individual factors affecting trust. Rob shares the example of one organisation whose score improved by 30 points in seven months after making trust an explicit KPI.

But measuring trust is only part of the conversation.

Trust is built through repair, not perfection

One of the standout ideas from this episode is that high-trust organisations aren’t organisations where things never go wrong.

People disappoint each other. Commitments get missed. Leaders make mistakes. Difficult conversations happen.

What matters is what happens next.

Rob describes the importance of creating an infrastructure for repair, where grace, forgiveness and honest communication allow people to rebuild trust when it has been damaged.

That creates an interesting distinction between vulnerability and transparency. Vulnerability is the openness to being hurt and therefore requires courage, while transparency is the openness to being seen.

For founders trying to create stronger leadership teams, that difference matters.

Do you know how much your team actually trusts you?

Rob also introduces his Trust Quadrant, which looks at both team and organisational trust.

Organisations can fall into four broad categories: Stronghold, where both are high; Islands of Trust, where team trust is high but organisational trust is low; Shell of Trust, where organisational trust is high but team trust is low; and Jungle, where both are low.

One of the most striking findings Rob shares is that around 48% of individuals in the research are working in Jungle organisations.

There is another uncomfortable finding for business leaders.

CEOs in high-trust Stronghold organisations tend to have a reasonably accurate view of trust, or even underestimate it. CEOs in low-trust Jungle organisations are more likely to overestimate how much trust exists.

In other words, the founders who most need to address trust may be the least likely to recognise the problem.

Delegation is a trust transfer

There’s also a powerful connection here with one of the perennial ScaleUp challenges: getting the business less dependent on its founder.

We often think of delegation as transferring tasks, decisions and accountability.

Rob reframes it as a transfer of trust.

The same applies to succession. Replacing a founder or senior leader isn't simply about finding somebody capable of performing the role. The organisation also needs to transfer the relationships and infrastructure that allow trust to survive and, crucially, to be repaired when something goes wrong.

That potentially makes an organisation’s trust infrastructure an asset in its own right, particularly when a founder starts thinking about succession, exit and valuation.

In this episode, we explore:

• Why trust should be treated as a measurable business KPI
• The disconnect between people problems and the KPIs businesses actually track
• The 33 drivers behind the WiLD Trust Index
• Personal, team and organisational trust
• Why speed and cost can reveal the consequences of trust
• The difference between measuring trust outcomes and measuring the drivers themselves
• Why repair matters more than trying to create a perfect culture
• Vulnerability versus transparency
• The four types of organisation in Rob’s Trust Quadrant
• Why CEOs can have a dangerously inaccurate picture of trust
• How delegation becomes a transfer of trust rather than simply a transfer of tasks
• The role trust plays in succession and reducing founder dependency
• Why an infrastructure of trust could ultimately contribute to business value

The standout message

Trust isn’t built by never getting things wrong. It’s built by creating the ability to repair things when you do.

That changes the leadership challenge. Instead of asking, “How do we stop trust ever being damaged?”, founders can ask, “Have we built a business that knows how to repair trust when something inevitably goes wrong?”

 

The one key thing

The one key thing from this conversation: if trust matters to the performance and value of your business, stop treating it as an invisible feeling. Measure it, understand what drives it, and build the mechanisms to repair it.

 

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You can get in touch with Kevin here:

[email protected]

 

Rob can be found here:

https://www.drrobmckenna.com/

https://www.wildleaders.org/

 

Resources:

Whole Leaders, Wild Trust by Rob McKenna - https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/whole-leaders-wild-trust-the-courageous-path-to-personal-relational-and-organizational-change-rob-mckenna/8668b708e4ebdd5a?ean=9781394379279&bkshp-astro=t

The Speed of Trust by Stephen M R Covey - https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/the-speed-of-trust-the-one-thing-that-changes-everything-stephen-m-r-covey/a4121f456343e740?ean=9780743295604&bkshp-astro=t

The Fog of Work by Adam Tarnow - https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/the-fog-of-work-a-simple-approach-to-navigating-the-complexity-of-middle-management-adam-tarnow/6e307d6740dd6cd0?ean=9781394368136&bkshp-astro=t