29 September 2011

Trust Repair – Naive Utopia or Living Reality?

Jane Lewis, Together People

Once you have lost trust in a person, group or organisation, can it ever be regained? How do you win customers back? How can broken relationships be repaired? How do we decide when to re-invest and re-build trust or when it’s time to walk away?

In March 2010, Jane Lewis, Mark Lewis and Jayne Wilde helped us to explore how developing trust with an individual, group or organisation is a process. We began to understand how it is built and developed.  In this follow-up session, we were delighted to have Jane Lewis join us again to look at how we know when trust has been lost, how we  can  learn to re-build trust with our friends, colleagues and customers, and other important questions, like:

• How trustworthy are we as individuals? What about the organisations we work for?

• What happens when we lose trust in a person, product or organisation? How do we behave?

• What about our unrealistically high expectations that we never vocalise? And,

• When we are no longer trusted by others, what can we do to re-gain trust? Are some people and organisations just more trustworthy than others?

Looking at case studies from organisational life and personal experience, we explored together how it is possible to re-build trust and confidence over time.

Our Speaker

Jane Lewis worked for Yorkshire Water for 15 years through the 1990’s when they became a PR disaster as they struggled to supply their customers during the 1995 drought, becoming known as the company who ran out of water. Through transforming the way they worked to win back their customers’ trust and confidence, Yorkshire Water went on to win ‘Utility of The Year’ three times. She now works as an independent consultant through Together People. She is also Chair of Governors of a school, a leader of a local church and is very fond of liquorice ice cream.