Trust, Change, and the Pressure We Put on People

Several weeks ago, I spent a few days with about 200 leaders from the International Better Business Bureau at their annual Trust Summit and Torch Awards.

I was there to deliver my keynote, The Mission Doesn’t Pause for Burnout, but one of the best parts of the week was sitting in the audience and listening.

• Zach Mercurio spent two hours talking about mattering, and the impact leaders have when people know they are seen, valued, and needed.

• Tal Goldhamer took us into AI and innovation, not just what the technology can do, but how leaders should be thinking about understanding and governing it.

• Chad Foster shared his story of losing his sight and what he learned about adversity, perspective, and turning a perceived disadvantage into an advantage.

• Maurie Monroe from TNS talked about the next frontier of trust and the technology behind Enterprise Branded Calling.

• Nicole Smith from Amazon closed out the week with a conversation about the technology, trends, and data Amazon is using to strengthen trust across its marketplace, including work they're doing collaboratively with the BBB.

In between were honest internal conversations about business development, technology, marketing, and where the organization needs to go next.

Then Lisa Lovely, Amanda Bowen, and acting President Jonathon Liebert gave me the opportunity to moderate the week's final conversation: Turning Insights Into Action.

That was probably my favorite part.

Because after two days of talking about leadership, culture, AI, innovation, adversity, technology, and trust, the question became pretty simple:

Now what do we do with it?

Like many organizations with long, successful histories, the BBB is navigating a rapidly changing environment. AI is changing how businesses operate. Technology is changing how consumers interact with them. And increasingly, it's hard to know who, or what, is legitimate.

That makes the BBB's relationship with trust interesting to me.

Trust isn't becoming less relevant in this environment. I think the opposite is happening. As the environment becomes more dynamic and harder to verify, our need for trusted people, businesses, and institutions becomes even more important.

And I didn't fully appreciate the connection to my own work until I was sitting there listening to all of it.

Change creates uncertainty. Uncertainty creates pressure. And when organizations respond to that pressure by asking good people to absorb more, move faster, and figure it out, there's eventually a cost.

That's where resilience becomes a leadership issue, not an individual one.

The answer isn't always to ask people to get better at handling more. Leaders have to look at the environment they're creating. Where are we creating unnecessary uncertainty? Where have priorities become unclear? Where is the load consistently falling on the same people? And where can we create enough predictability and capacity so people can keep performing when the environment itself isn't going to get any easier?

That doesn't mean removing pressure. That's not gonna happen. It means becoming much more intentional about which pressures are necessary and which ones we're self-imposing.

What impressed me about this group was their willingness to have the harder conversation about what is changing around them, what needs to change internally, and what they want to protect as they do it.

It doesn’t have to be an either-or choice; organizations don’t have to choose between adapting for the future and protecting what made them successful in the first place.

I was grateful to be part of the week, grateful for the trust Lisa, Amanda and Jonathon placed in me, and especially grateful for the opportunity to contribute to an organization that has spent more than a century trying to make trust matter in business.

A lot is changing right now. Trust still matters. Maybe more than ever.