Our annual survey of trust and leadership, Building Trust in Business, will be released early next month, and we’ll have a lot to say about the findings then – but I wanted to highlight some top-level findings briefly.

Building Trust offers an important lens on how top-performing companies achieve strong results at the overlap of trust, leadership, and collaboration. Interaction Associates has conducted this research annually for the last four years, and each of those years has produced some fascinating insights.

See our 2011 Building Trust findings here.

We previewed our Building Trust findings in a webcast hosted by the Human Capital Institute (HCI) --- it's available here, FREE.

I invite you to stay tuned for our detailed 2012 report in the weeks ahead, but for now, here are some quick thoughts about our new findings:

Building Trust in Business 2012 surveyed 440 respondents from hundreds of companies across a broad spectrum of the business landscape.  The study not only collected information about the environments for trust, collaboration and leadership in these organizations, it surveyed their financial situations — aiming to see links, if any, among the data sets.

This year’s study shows that, while trust is still low in general, it’s higher in high-performing companies that have seen growth in profit and revenues. Those high-trust, high-performing companies typically practice specific behaviors that increase trust across the organization – including,

• providing for employee input;
• making clear connections between goals and strategies;
• projecting a realistic optimism and confidence about the future; and
• exhibiting leadership transparency that emphasizes shared responsibility for results.

Again, please stay tuned for more – this is just a sneak preview.

We hope you will review the webcast. And watch this website for more details about Building Trust in Business 2012.