Forget about being ‘great’, it’s important to be ‘good’ too!
By Prema Sagar, Founder and Principal, Genesis Burson-Marsteller

The race among organisations to get from ‘good’ to ‘great’ has been on for a while. It is now time for corporate leaders leading this transformation to stop in their tracks and think again. Do they want to lead a ‘great’ company or a ‘good’ company?

Before I go further, let me place a rider. I enjoyed reading Jim Collins’s Good to Great tremendously and it is not my intent to dilute the value of his message here. However, a quote by Jonathan Schwartz, CEO, Sun Microsystems, in Kathy Bloomgarden’s book Trust triggered this thought. I quote: “No one at Sun wants us to be just a great company. We also want Sun to be a good company.”

Let’s begin with a simple definition. Good, according to the Oxford dictionary means ‘having the right qualities; of a high standard’. Great, on the other hand, is defined as ‘much above average in ability, quality or importance’. The two signify a difference in focus or direction, not merely in degree. While ‘great’ implies excellence, ‘good’ to me signifies trust.

And there is no denying the dearth of trust in the business world. According to a US Gallup poll merely 20 per cent people rated the honesty and ethical standards of business executives or Congressmen as high or very high. Only lawyers and car salesmen were rated worse than them.

Let’s take this argument further. Closer to home, India has nearly become a ‘trillion dollar economy’, a feat achieved by only 10 other countries in the world. In purchasing power parity it is the fourth largest. And the growth rate too is at an enviable 9 plus per cent. The performance speaks highly for our political leadership. Having pulled the economy out of the trenches and taken it to the peaks of growth is a dream run for any leadership.

Yet, is our leadership the most trusted? Why not?

What is the X factor that eludes many in roles of leadership, be it national, corporate or in any other field?

“There is no universally ‘right way’ to build trust in the long term,” state Robert Galford and Anne Seibold Drapeau in The Trusted Leader, a book that set many a leader on a course of self-evaluation. “But the key, I believe, lies in the understanding that building trust over the long-term is multi-faceted. It’s not simply being able to say, ‘I am a trusted leader’. It’s not simply being able to say, ‘This organisation is trustworthy’. It’s being able to say, ‘I am a trusted leader in an organisation that can be trusted’. It’s about ensuring that trust is absolutely a foundation of the environment,” write the authors.

Trust is perhaps the most sought-after, yet most elusive quality in leadership. It is also the one factor — like reputation — that taunts its seekers with its intangibility. As a result, most leaders find it convenient to believe that if they perform well, they will be trusted.

That is not the case.

Having a desired legacy (and acting on it) is an essential part of being a trusted leader. Writing your own desired obituary may not be too high on your ‘things-to-do’ list, but it can be a very powerful tool on the path to being trusted.

There’s almost an assumption about how we all stand for quality and integrity. But you need to talk about it, you need to live it.

Burson-Marsteller pioneered the study of CEO Reputation with its first study in 1997. Building CEO Capitaltm is Burson-Marsteller’s fifth CEO and corporate reputation study, and it confirms that nearly 50 per cent of corporate reputation is linked to the CEO and that credibility is the number one driver of CEO reputation.

Borrowing a phrase from GE culture, the need of the hour today is “High Performance with High Integrity”. The two are not interchangeable. In fact, the critical factor to build trust in the leader and the organisation is the way you interrelate the two into your systems and processes.

Centuries ago, Aristotle (384-322 BC) wrote in the Rhetoric that ethos, the most compelling factor in building trust in leadership, was based on three characteristics: intelligence, character and goodwill.

In a world that has transformed dramatically since then, this appears to have remained unchanged. The first — intelligence — is perhaps the easiest to find among leaders as they could not have found their way up without it. But it is only when the second elusive and indefinable trait — character — is woven into the first, that a leader is able to build goodwill and reap trust.

That is when a leader can lead a great organisation on the finer journey of also being a good organisation. Every decision made every single day impacts our reputation individually and collectively as an organisation.