An executive team has an image of how the organization is doing with its stakeholders. That image is usually built up from conversations, signals from the corridors, an occasional media analysis, and the gut feeling of people who have been in the profession for years. That is not nonsense, but it is also not a measurement. A feeling is a sum of experiences that happened to stick. A measurement requires a fixed form, repeatable, with a moment when you go back and check whether the image still holds true.
The problem does not lie in having a feeling. The problem lies in using that feeling as the basis for decisions that affect stakeholders, without ever holding that feeling up against something else. As long as no one confronts the management's image with what is actually being said outside the walls of management, it remains an assumption that presents itself as knowledge.
The Trust Baseline consists of two surveys side by side: an internal one, among management and the people close to decision-making, and an external one, among the stakeholders themselves. Not to determine who is right, but to see where the two images diverge. That difference is the first outcome. Not a score, not a judgment about who is correct, but an exposure of the distance between what you think is going on and what is being said.
That distance is often more informative than either image on its own. An executive team that thinks a topic is at play with one stakeholder group, while in reality it lives with a completely different group, is steering on the wrong topic in the wrong place. What that difference precisely means for your organization can be read in why your image differs from that of your stakeholders.
The Trust Baseline makes no statement about what stakeholders think. That seems like a subtle difference, but it is the core of what this instrument is and is not intended for. We measure the difference between the internal image and what is being said externally. We do not know what a stakeholder thinks, until he says it himself, in his own words, at his own moment. An assumption about what a stakeholder thinks is not the same as a statement from that stakeholder. Anyone who wants to know how trust relates to what people actually say without that survey will find a starting point in how do you measure trust without asking those who are already positive.
A measured difference is a starting point, not an end point. What happens after that depends on what an organization does with that information. That is where the commitment tracker comes into play: a way to keep track of which commitments have been made in response to what has been heard, and whether they have been fulfilled.
There is a pattern here that is worth keeping sharp. A small commitment that is not fulfilled often costs more trust than a large investment that fails to materialize. A promise about a concrete, small gesture is remembered, precisely because it was small and concrete. Failing to deliver on it is more visible and more personal than postponing a strategic program whose timeline was already unclear anyway. The tracker exists to prevent that difference in weight from disappearing in the daily hustle.
A one-time measurement provides a photo. Trust changes, and so a photo has an expiration date. The signal rhythm of the Trust Baseline is designed to repeat that photo periodically, so that it becomes visible whether the distance between the internal image and external voice is shrinking, growing, or changing shape. When, for example, several departments independently speak to the same external party, a pattern emerges that in itself already says something about where the attention lies and where it does not. What such a pattern can mean is described in what does it mean when four departments talk to the same party.
Blind spots also become more visible this way: not as a one-time observation, but as a recurring pattern that consistently falls outside the internal image. Anyone who wants to understand how such a blind spot presents itself will find starting points in how do you recognize a blind spot.
The Trust Baseline is under construction. There is no dashboard you can open today and no report we can send you. What does exist: a clear setup of the internal and external survey, a working idea behind the commitment tracker, and a rhythm that has been thought through but is not yet in production. Anyone who wants to make use of this once it becomes available can sign up for the waiting list. That is not a sales trick to raise expectations, it is an honest representation of where the instrument stands now.
Measuring the difference between image and reality touches on a broader question that also plays a role outside stakeholder relations: how much of the work people currently do is actually based on assumptions that have never been tested. That same curiosity about the difference between assumption and fact lies at the basis of the work scan of FTE TO AI, which calculates per task which part of the work can be transferred to AI. Anyone who wants to know exactly where that difference in trust weighs most heavily, and which stakeholders have the most influence in this, can read further about what an influence-impact matrix entails, or find out how you score influence within your own stakeholder field.
Vraag maar. Het interessantste antwoord komt meestal van wie u nog niet heeft gesproken.
Answers come from this site’s knowledge base. Not tailored advice, and not a scan of your company.