Trust is now one of the most important assets a company holds. But that trust is neither automatic nor secure. While business remains more trusted globally than government or media, that advantage is increasingly conditional and fragile. Edelman research shows 61% of people globally now hold a grievance mindset, believing institutions serve narrow interests while making their lives harder. In that environment, trust is not a permanent advantage. It’s an asset companies must continuously earn and actively protect.
Most companies understand trust matters. Few manage it with clear ownership. Responsibility is spread across communications, legal, compliance, HR, government affairs, and security, each operating with different incentives and time horizons. The result is inconsistency between what companies say, what they do, and how stakeholders experience them. That gap becomes visible when decisions are tested under pressure.
This is the structural gap companies need to solve. Trust is now business-critical, but in most organizations, nobody is directly responsible for managing it as a strategic discipline across the enterprise.
I spend my days helping companies evolve, promote, and protect their reputations. But reputation and trust are different things. Reputation is how a crowd feels about you at a given moment. Trust looks forward. It reflects confidence in how a company will behave tomorrow. It’s the reason someone takes a chance on you, buys from you, stays, and recommends you.
A handful of companies, mostly in tech, have created Chief Trust Officer roles in recent years. Airbnb, Salesforce, Atlassian and others have appointed executives with that title. But those positions have largely grown out of the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) function, which focuses on cybersecurity, data protection, and platform safety. That work matters. It is also not the same thing. What most companies still lack is someone accountable for trust as a business strategy across stakeholders, operations, communications, and decision-making. This is about making sure a company’s actions, communications, and decisions remain aligned across the stakeholders it depends on. That is the role I am proposing. Without centralized ownership, trust remains reactive instead of managed deliberately as a business discipline.
1. Trust drives revenue growth
Many companies treat trust as a communications problem, something you handle through PR or crisis management after things go wrong. That assumption leaves companies exposed. Trust is built over years of consistent behavior; it cannot be patched together during an emergency. When people trust a company, they stay and advocate. When they don’t, no marketing budget will close that gap.
Trust is what determines whether a company can survive a contentious moment without losing customers, employees, or market value. It’s the difference between a brand that takes a position and gets heard and one that takes the same position and gets punished. The difference is not the position. It is the confidence they have built up over time. The companies that come out ahead will not be the ones with the sharpest crisis response. They will be the ones that don’t need one.
2. Trust has gone hyper local. Your playbook needs to follow
Some executives look at the current landscape and see it as a rough patch. They expect polarization to ease and public trust to drift back to something more stable. That perspective is unlikely. The breaks are structural, not temporary. And the pace is picking up.
Seven in ten people worldwide now have what Edelman researchers describe as an insular trust mindset. They are reluctant to trust anyone who is different from them. Trust is shifting away from institutions and toward smaller circles. Among those who say world events have changed who they trust, confidence in neighbors, family, and coworkers went up. Confidence in government leaders and major news organizations went down. People trust companies headquartered in their own country far more than foreign ones: a 31-point gap in Canada, 29 in Germany, 29 in Japan.
For multinational companies, this is not a messaging problem. It is a structural one. When trust becomes local and familiar, someone needs to be tracking where confidence is falling apart, where geopolitical shifts are creating new exposure, and where old assumptions about what a brand can say or do no longer apply. This is a shift from a multinational playbook to a more localized one.
3. “Apolitical” is a fiction your customers stopped believing
Many executives still believe their company can stay above the political fray. That avoiding a position means avoiding risk. But the way business works now makes that objective impossible. Stakeholders have greater visibility into decisions: which causes get attention from leadership, which get ignored, whether lobbying money lines up with public statements, whether internal policies match external messaging. Your customers and stakeholders are more attuned than you think. This is not speaking on every issue. It is about understanding that every decision will be interpreted and being deliberate about what those decisions signal.
In last year’s Edelman Trust Barometer, we found that 53% of consumers say if a brand stays quiet about societal issues, they assume it is hiding something or doing nothing. When asked directly, 73% say a brand that reflects the culture around it builds more trust than one that tries to ignore culture and stick to selling products.
Every company operates within a broader societal context, whether it intends to or not. Speaking up says something. Staying quiet says something too. The real question is whether a senior leader is responsible for understanding what stakeholders actually expect, what trade-offs come with each decision and how to communicate those choices in a way that’s right for the company. A Chief Trust Officer makes sure trust is built through consistent, deliberate alignment, not improvised in the moment when a crisis hits.
Right now, most companies spread trust across public relations, legal, human resources, government affairs and other business functions that often pull in different directions. A Chief Trust Officer does not replace those groups. The role sits across and connects them: a forward-looking executive responsible for ensuring decisions hold together across stakeholders before they are tested in public.
A Chief Trust Officer is not another layer of communications or risk management. The role establishes clear ownership of trust as a business discipline. In practice, that means:
The question the role organizes around is straightforward: are we building trust or losing it with the stakeholders who matter most to our future?
The question is no longer whether trust matters. It is whether it is managed with the same rigor as other business-critical functions. The next set of challenges is already taking shape. Companies still asking, “should we say something?” are behind. Those asking, “how do we build trust to handle what comes next?” will be the ones ready for it.
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