What you'll learn in this podcast episode

Is trust the ultimate currency of stakeholder capitalism? If so, how can corporate leaders create a culture of trust inside and outside of their organizations? In the final episode of season 7 on the Principled Podcast, host Jen Uner talks about the role of values in building organizational trust—and frameworks to help you get there—with LRN Director of Advisory Services Emily Miner.

You can listen to the other season 7 episodes mentioned in this discussion here:

• How values inform decisions: Unpacking the role of the CECO


• Trust is at stake, and other insights from Edelman's 2022 Trust Barometer

You can access other materials mentioned in the discussion here:

• Aspen Ideas Fest panel discussion with Ellen McGirt


• Corteva case study


• LRN Benchmark of Ethical Culture

 

Featured guest: Emily Miner

Emily Miner is the Director of Advisory Services at LRN’s Ethics & Compliance Advisory practice. She counsels executive leadership teams on how to actively shape and manage their ethical culture through deep quantitative and qualitative understanding and engagement. A skilled facilitator, Emily emphasizes co-creative, bottom-up, and data-driven approaches to foster ethical behavior and inform program strategy. Emily has led engagements with organizations in the healthcare, technology, manufacturing, energy, professional services, and education industries. Emily co-leads LRN’s ongoing flagship research on E&C program effectiveness and is a thought leader in the areas of organizational culture, leadership, and E&C program impact. Prior to joining LRN, Emily applied her behavioral science expertise in the environmental sustainability sector, working with non-profits and several New England municipalities; facilitated earth science research in academia; and contributed to drafting and advancing international climate policy goals. Emily has a Master of Public Administration in Environmental Science and Policy from Columbia University and graduated summa cum laude from the University of Florida with a degree in Anthropology.

 
Featured Host: Jen Üner

Jen Uner is the Strategic Communications Director for LRN, where she captains programs for both internal and external audiences. She has an insatiable curiosity and an overdeveloped sense of right and wrong which she challenges each day through her study of ethics, compliance, and the value of values-based behavior in corporate governance. Prior to joining LRN, Jen led marketing communications for innovative technology companies operating in Europe and the US, and for media and marketplaces in California. She has won recognition for her work in brand development and experiential design, earned placements in leading news publications, and hosted a closing bell ceremony of the NASDAQ in honor of the California fashion industry as founder of the LA Fashion Awards. Jen holds a B.A. degree from Claremont McKenna College. 

 

 

Principled Podcast Transcript

Intro: Welcome to the Principled Podcast, brought to you by LRN. The Principled Podcast brings together the collective wisdom on ethics, business and compliance, transformative stories of leadership, and inspiring workplace culture. Listen in to discover valuable strategies from our community of business leaders and workplace change makers.

Jen Uner: Is trust the ultimate currency of stakeholder capitalism. If so, how can corporate leaders create a culture of trust inside and outside of their organizations? Hello, and welcome to another episode of LRN's Principled Podcast. I'm your host, Jen Uner, strategic communications director at LRN, and today, I'm joined by my colleague, Emily Miner, director of advisory services. We're going to be talking about the role of values in building organizational trust and frameworks to help you get there. Emily, thanks for joining me today on the Principled Podcast, by the way, our final episode of this season seven.

Emily Miner: Yeah, thanks for having me, Jen. I'm happy to be here and honored to be rounding out an incredible season on the Principled Podcast.

Jen Uner: It has been a great season, and I think we're going to have an opportunity to touch on some of the folks that we've had on the podcast. To get us started though, recently at Aspen Ideas Fest, Fortune senior editor, Ellen McGirt, asked a great question of her panel. She said, "Is trust the ultimate currency of stakeholder capitalism?" It's how we started our conversation today. I of course will say yes, but recently, you spoke with David Bersoff, head of Global Thought Leadership Research at Edelman, and he worked on the Edelman Trust Barometer. You had a chance to speak with him earlier this season, and I'd love for you to recap for us some of the insights that stood out to you.

Emily Miner: Yeah. I think based on the 2022 Edelman Trust Barometer, which is a fantastic annual look at levels of trust in key societal institutions, business, government, media, I think that the 2022 Trust Barometer report would say that the answer to your question and to Ellen's question is yes, trust is the ultimate currency of stakeholder capitalism. In fact, what Edelman found in their research is that business is the only institution in our society that is trusted, and that's actually a first in the 20 plus years that they have been running this type of study.

Actually, for the second year in a row is business the most trusted institution. That was one of the takeaways from the Edelman Trust Barometer, and that David helped unpack when we spoke earlier this podcast season. Given that, if business is the only trusted institution for the second year running, it really underlines the question, what does this mean for leaders? How can they ensure that business remains trusted?

People are looking more and more to business to help solve or address the problems of the world because we don't trust government, because we don't trust media, because we don't trust NGOs. With that mantle of being the only trusted institution, a lot more is falling on business and specifically business leaders and the expectations for them are a lot higher. I think that that really ... That was a current through the Aspen Ideas Institute that you mentioned through the conversation that took place there.

Jen Uner: It really does put a lot of pressure on CEOs and leaders then. One of the stats that I thought was so interesting was how I think it was 60% of employees, they're basing their employment decisions now on the values of the companies that they're looking at and the positions that companies take around social issues, and of course they expect the company to have a position on a social issue, which I thinks it's a rather new thing. Would you say?

Emily Miner: Yeah. I don't know if it's new in the past few years because I do feel like this has been a trend that I've observed in the research maybe up to the past decade or a little bit less, but it certainly every year seems to get to ... It grows. I think, first, it was a healthy minority of the global workforce or of the workforce in the United States, and now it's tipping to be a majority of the workforce. You see some of this in demographic changes as millennials grow in the size of our workforce and now Gen Zers as they're entering the workforce and the expectations that those two generations have for their employers.

But it's certainly not a concept that millennials invented, but it does seem to be growing. Something that's interesting to me now where despite ... We're potentially heading toward a recession in the United States, and despite that, it's still very much an employee market out there. We're still in the midst of a great resignation, which is now really being more called a great reshuffling because it's not that people are dropping out of the workforce so much as they're leaving their jobs to find better jobs.

What some research has shown is that it's not so much that I can find another job that pays me better, but it's that people are no longer satisfied with the status quo and they're looking for opportunities where they can feel more values alignment, where there's more culture of inclusion and equity in the workplace, where they feel that their company is doing something that's contributing positively to the world.

Those are strong drivers of why people are jumping ship and looking elsewhere. It'll be interesting to see how that shapes the narrative and the importance of values and multi-stakeholder capitalism more generally as we continue to hopefully be coming out of the COVID pandemic and this great reshuffling in spite of some of the more negative trend lines with respect to our economy.

Jen Uner: Yeah. I was just going to bring that up. When you have a business environment that's marred by an economic downturn, that puts a lot of pressure. There's then the business financial pressure on decision-making and performance for the company. Then you layer on top of that some of the social and political challenges that are happening and this need to have a position, and can you have a position on everything? Which are the things that you need to prioritize?

I think often corporate leaders in ethics and compliance, our field, chief ethics and compliance officers, for example, the people listening here, they find themselves in a role of counselor to the C-suite as the company and as leade