You’re an upper-level manager or senior executive whose company faces increasing expenses or declining revenue due to loss of trust. The loss of trust may be external, revealed by increased demand for customer service resources, low customer loyalty, or poor product reviews. The problem may be internal, resulting in decreased efficiency due to interdepartmental, interpersonal or management / employee trust erosion. The low levels of trust that concern you may have developed through accident, misunderstanding, mismanagement, a compromise of quality, or a confluence of coincidences. A friend or colleague may have recommended me; you want to know what I deliver that’s distinct and valuable for your company.
While working as a surgeon, I built trust within minutes. Not just the kind of trust that you rely on for advice when you buy a car or a TV, but the kind of trust that makes you certain it should be my hands that your life and body functions depend on while you are helpless and unconscious on an operating room table.
I enjoyed building that trust and never let down anyone who invested his or her trust in me. After years of industrious work in the healthcare provider silo, I realized that my one-on-one work with patients was waning in its effectiveness against the rising tide of dysfunction in the healthcare system. The roots of most of the health problems my patients faced were beyond my scalpel’s reach in the complex milieu of economics, culture, and individual choices—choices shaped more by entertainment and advertising than by education. My problem-solving skills, sharpened by managing complex medical problems with solutions incorporating both benefit as well as significant risk, have readily translated to complex business problems.
In my work addressing root-cause solutions for health care, I’ve traded the scalpel for the power of communication. I’ve expanded my experience by working with professional communicators and a large advertising agency. I've studied the trust quality inherent in social media. My studies of neurobiology and neuroeconomics have complemented my face-to-face and social media experience to produce a deep understanding and appreciation of the factors that build and erode the precious, dynamic, evanescent commodity known as trust.
