Build trust from the top down

Trust in CEO credibility across industries has dropped 12 points to 38 percent, according to the 2012 Edelman Trust Barometer, which calls into question how hospital leaders are viewed by hospital C-suite members, employees and patients. Anthony Cirillo (pictured), president of Fast Forward Consulting, this week urged CEOs to practice what they preach and reinvent themselves, just as they instruct employees to do, thus building peer-to-peer trust. Cirillo also stressed that hospital CEOs "practice radical transparency," in which they speak first to employees, enabling them to drive conversation with their peers.

Referencing the IBM model, "the CEO must organize a major wake-up call, and the entire C-suite must lead the shift," he wrote in a Hospital Impact blog post this week. "A winning attitude starts with a winning vision that employees share because they created it. … A wake-up call is what is needed in business, none more so than healthcare," he said. --Read the full blog post on Hospital Impact