Rebuilding Trust With Katie Paine

After reading Chapter 11 of Katie Paine's "Measure What Matters," which dealt with rebuilding reputations after crises occur within a corporation, I found the topic of trust really sparked my interest. Trust is a concept that floods every aspect of our lives, and one that is especially prevalent in the topic of public relations. I really liked how Paine outlined trust in in the chapter by breaking it down in a few different ways.

First, she broke it down into three dimensions of trust that are measurable by the Grunig Relationship Survey. The three dimensions and their descriptions are below:

1. Competence - the belief that an organization has the ability to do what it says it will do
2. Integrity - the belief that an organization is fair and just
3. Dependability/Reliability - the belief that and organization will do what it says it will do consistently and dependably

This is a good way to define trust in a very general sense. Paine then breaks it down a little further and defines trust between organizations and its publics as having a few quantifiable characteristics. These characteristics and their descriptions are listed below:

• Multilevel - trust results from interactions which span coworker, team, organizational and interorganizational alliances. The multilevel aspect of trust between organizations and its publics is why it is important to cast a wide net when you survey publics on trust.
• Culturally Rooted - trust is closely tied to the norms, values and beliefs of the organizational culture. This is why it is of utmost importance to truly know your brand's self-image and self-definition of your publics if you are going to accurately measure trust.
• Communication-Based - trust is the outcome of communications behaviors, like providing accurate information, explaining decisions and providing sincere and appropriate openness in times of prosperity and crisis.
• Dynamic - trust is constantly changing as it cycles through phases of building, destabilization and dissolving. 
• Multidimensional - truth consists of multiple factors at the cognitive, emotional and behavioral levels. All of these aspects affect an individual's perceptions of trust.

I think it is important to understand trust before figuring out just how to get your publics' trust. This part of the chapter made me think back to my play analysis course from last semester where we learned about what people psychologically find funny. Knowing the science behind comedy in order to make people laugh onstage is very akin to having to know how trust works before trying to gain trust from various publics. You can stumble upon both an audience's laughter or a publics trust on accident or luck, but I find learning the background helps you work smarter and not harder.