Archive for November, 2009
4th in Series: Calling All (Crisis) Leaders to Rebuild Trust in the Finance Industry
Wednesday, November 18th, 2009In my first three blogs in this series, we defined trust, looked at what led to the dismantling of trust in the finance industry, and discussed why we, the public, felt betrayed by this industry. Now, in the final blog in the series I’ll delve more into the betrayal and steps the finance industry can take to begin rebuilding our trust.
As human beings with emotions and passion, betrayal in any form is devastating, and worse, is extremely hard to recover from. Once our trust is betrayed we immediately put our guard up and are reluctant to trust the individual again, or even other individuals in a similar situation. We experience feelings of despair, hurt, anger, and potentially a desire for revenge. Betrayals hit at the core of what is important—a set of firmly entrenched values, assumptions, beliefs, and expectations (VABEs) about how people, organizations, or industries should behave. In the case of the American public as the stakeholders in the financial industry, the economic crisis can be interpreted as a betrayal by retail customers, credit issuers, investment banks, and more. The consequences of this betrayal can be severe enough to debilitate progress at precisely the time when forward momentum is critical to recovery.
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