Do you have your customers’ trust? How about your employees? Your vendors?

We’ve talked before about how trust is an important aspect of your business. Your customers need to trust you to deliver the right product, good service, and know that you’ll do the same thing tomorrow, next week, or even years from now. It’s part of the story you tell and builds bridges to life-long customers.

However, trust is not just for customer-facing operations. Trust is a critical component for internal operations.

Enterprises, whether larger or small, are built and powered by people. And trust is obviously the keystone of relationships. It’s the component that drives conduct and shapes the perceptions of a company’s culture beyond the stories that it tells its customers. Trust is that currency that enables important strategic movement between employees, management, vendors, and contractors.

Here’s an excellent article from the Harvard Business Review titled “Why trust matters more than ever for brands,” that bears reading. It gets a little dry at times (hey, it’s from a business magazine!), but stick with it. It’s a short read and you’ll come away with some thought provoking ideas that will help shape your “big-picture” thinking.