Only trust gets graded on vibes

Mac Worsham is the founder and managing principal of The Veritas Continuum.

For more than a year of the pandemic, I sat in meetings about it every day, all week long. That was the right obsession — nothing mattered more than the health and safety of our people. But here is the confession that took me longer to make: while we were consumed by the crisis in front of us, we loosened the reins of strategic communications nearly everywhere else. The voice of the business still needed amplification, yet the steady work of telling the organization’s story went to half-staff. Nobody decided that. Attention did.

The same era delivered a second shock. It felt like I woke up one morning and every employee had become an unofficial spokesperson of the organization — suddenly everyone held a megaphone, and social channels had become primetime television for the world. We were no longer just managing engagement with our own talent; we were watching, in real time, what every one of those voices could mean for the brand externally. The first lesson was about what happens when communications loses attention. The second was about what happens when communications loses its boundaries.

I spent almost three decades leading communications at the intersection of trust, strategy, and risk, most of it inside global professional services, and those two lessons repeat everywhere. Ask any well-run company what it measures and the answer is everything: cash, daily; pipeline, weekly; engagement, quarterly, with a follow-up survey about the survey. Ask how it measures trust — the asset underwriting every number on that dashboard — and the room goes quiet.

Trust goes unmeasured until it fails, and by the time it fails, it is old news to somebody: the employees knew, or the customers knew, or a regulator had been quietly assembling a file. Trust does not collapse; it drifts — a degree at a time, in the space between what leadership says and what each audience actually experiences. And it drifts fastest in exactly the seasons when your attention is consumed elsewhere.

The practical question is not whether reputation matters. It is whether you can see the drift early enough to correct it. You can. Here is how to start.

1. Write down what you have said. What an organization says is a matter of record: its commitments, announcements, and promises, in its own words. Assemble that record in one place. Most teams are surprised twice — first, by how much they have promised, and second, by how little of it anyone is tracking.
2. Map your rooms. One story lands in many rooms at once: employees, customers, investors, regulators, partners, communities and international markets. Each tests the story against different facts and circumstances — employees against the operating reality, customers against the product, investors against the last disclosure, regulators against the public record. List your rooms and note what each one tests the story against.
3. Compare what you already collect against the story. The instinct is to commission new research. Resist it, at least at first. Most organizations hold more signal than they use: engagement surveys, satisfaction scores, coverage, investor questions, the support queue, the regulator’s correspondence file. The shift is reading every source against the same question: does the experience match the record?
4. Score the distance, consistently. Pick a simple convention — a 0–100 reading works — and apply it the same way, room by room, quarter by quarter. The number’s value is directional; the discipline is the point. A trend line turns “how is our reputation?” from a debate over anecdotes into a reading over time, and it lets a leadership team answer three questions by lunch: Is trust up or down? With whom? Compared to when?
5. Watch for divergence between rooms. The most dangerous moment is when the readings stop agreeing — when employees drift while customers hold, or a regulator’s file thickens while the coverage stays kind. The surprise almost never comes from a room you were watching. Divergence between constituencies is the earliest warning you will get.
6. Give trust an owner and a cadence. Cash has a CFO and a daily close. Trust needs the same architecture: one owner, a standing review on the calendar, and a rule that when a reading finds a gap, someone is accountable for closing it — and for checking, at the next reading, whether it moved.

A last honest word about difficulty. This discipline is simple to describe and hard to hold. The hard part is not the first reading — it is the 10th, kept consistent, comparable across rooms and honest when the number moves the wrong way. And there is one problem no organization fully solves from the inside: grading its own story. Self-measurement drifts toward generosity, quarter by quarter, the same way trust does. The readings that hold up — to a board, to a regulator, to your own leadership — are the ones somebody had no incentive to soften.

Give trust what you already give cash: a standing read, a trend line, and an owner. Start with the record, the rooms, and the readings you already have. You will stop being surprised by old news and you will never again have to choose between watching one room and losing the rest.