In this blog, I would like to extend my respect and thanks to a person in the “Trust Community” who is a tireless worker and friend, and who has done as much as anyone I know to advance the cause of trust worldwide.
I have known Barbara Brooks Kimmel for nearly 10 years, and I am continually impressed with her creativity to come up with new ways to encourage leaders to become stronger on building, maintaining, and repairing trust.
With her husband, Jordan Kimmel, Barbara founded Trust Across America-Trust Around the World nearly a decade ago. Barbara began studying the impact that trust has on organizations of all types.
All of her work is research based, and there is substantial data that links the level of trust to the success of organizations worldwide.
Their proprietary FACTS® Framework is a way to rank organizations in terms of trustworthiness. The acronym stands for:
• Financial Stability & Strength
• Accounting Conservativeness
• Corporate Integrity
• Transparency
• Sustainability
Each year her firm analyzes and ranks over 1500 of the largest US public companies to determine which ones demonstrate the highest trust levels. Moreover, the Framework correlates their performance with how profitable they are.
Barbara is a prolific writer and has produced a steady stream of pithy articles and white papers relating the various aspects of trust to performance and making suggestions for how organizations and leaders can do a better job of building higher trust.
She shares her information on the Trust Across America: Trust Around the World website, a clearinghouse of organizational trust resources and tools.
Through her efforts, an association of trust professionals was established three years ago. The Trust Alliance is a growing global membership organization comprised of a cross functional group who work and write in the field of trust and related topics. These people network as a support group to suggest research topics and keep pushing the state of the art.
Each year Barbara runs a competition to identify the top thought leaders in the trust industry. This is her way to provide recognition to professionals who are at work daily as practitioners and also with their teaching, writing and consulting to advance the cause.
Individuals who are named a top thought leader for five years are honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award from Trust Across America: Trust Around the World. There are only a couple dozen people who have achieved that level of consistency. I am proud to be among them.
In addition, the program publishes a listing of top service providers each year in Trust! Magazine. The fall 2016 edition is available for free at the following address.
Barbara Kimmel is a tireless advocate of organizational trust. In 2012 she was named one of “25 women changing the world” by a group in NY called Good Business International. She deserves our thanks and gratitude for her continuous support of trust and the people who carry out this work.
If you are involved in the trust business, and I think everyone should be to some extent, look up the website and see the wonderful resources that Barbara has developed to be helpful. The world owes her a vote of gratitude for the work she is doing.
Posted by trustambassador