It’s safe to say that individuals are more likely to do business with organizations they trust. With that in mind, establishing and preserving a good name is critical to the long-term success of any organization.
In my book “Trust Is The Tie-Breaker” I provide checklists, step-by-step instructions and real-world examples organizations need to succeed. Here are the three cornerstones to building a good name for your organization.
Ask tough questions
Reputation building starts with asking tough questions and insisting on truthful answers. Here is a partial list of questions you should be asking:
- Are you getting and keeping the customers you really need?
- Are you able to recruit and retain excellent employees?
- Are you creating important new relationships on a regular basis?
- Is your business growing at the rate it should?
- Do stakeholders know what makes you distinctive?
- Do you really care about stakeholders in ways they understand and appreciate?
- Do you have vulnerabilities that need to be fixed before they blow up into a crisis?
- Do your company’s actions match its words?
- Do you give people reasons to trust?
If a good reputation is on your wish list, ask the tough questions and get the right people in the room to help answer them. Then, implement an improvement agenda.
Focus on the relationships that matter
Every company has 10 or 20 key relationships. It’s never a big number, but it’s the people who can make or break your enterprise. Their impact on your company’s reputation is huge.
Keep them current. Ask for their advice. Track those relationships. Provide lots of TLC along the way. Be upfront with those key relationships when there is a problem or an issue. Never, ever surprise them. Whether the news is good or bad, they need to hear it from you first.
Set the bar high
What goal is higher than wanting to be the organization of choice?
That starts with establishing your organization as distinctive in ways that mean something to your stakeholders.
You can achieve distinctiveness in the workplace when you encourage a culture that values teamwork or which constantly reinforces the expectation of high ethical standards.
You can achieve distinctiveness with customers by constant repetition of actions that place their interests ahead of yours or by services that are truly easy to navigate.
Almost without exception, organizations can identify distinctiveness and those that can’t do so today can identify potential to reach that goal tomorrow.
Define what your organization does really well. Make sure everyone reinforces that distinctiveness in ways that address benefits to others. ●
Davis Young is the principal of DY Author & Speaker LLC and is the author of “Trust is the Tiebreaker,” an e-book published by Smart Business Network, currently on www.amazon.com. Contact Young at (440) 248-9550 or [email protected].
