Beyond stakeholder satisfaction: aiming for a new frontier of sustainable stakeholder trust

We live in a period in which management's efforts to satisfy an organization's stakeholders, i.e. customers, employees, shareholders, etc may not be enough for survival or to achieve high performance in the long run. Despite worldwide recognition for excellence, as defined by the markets and/or models for assessing business excellence, several organizations today suffer from the lack of trust and what future revelations will bring. There have been simply too many instances of well-known companies, even as widely rewarded and innovative as Xerox, that could not enjoy the unquestionable support of their stakeholders, because something critical was missing, and that was their previously taken for granted trust. In this paper we examine ways that an organization can achieve the level of trust needed for sustainable excellence. The proposed approach involves the simultaneous improvement of exploring the space of navigating the future and setting a vision and supporting strategic goals, the building of sound relationships among participants in their realization, and the effective relative to goals (and efficient relative to resource utilization) execution of plans in each period. The common denominator in each type of improvement is the development of skills for effective conversations among those within the organization as well as outside stakeholders. The aim for all types of conversation is to go beyond the satisfaction of stakeholders by meeting their needs and expectations-as this goal is limited to specific transactions or time periods. The new challenge for organizations is to reach a new frontier associated with the development of trust among its stakeholders, which makes it possible to endure the hard times, and continually to explore, with success, emerging opportunities.