Restoring Trust: Leadership in an Age of Disruption

Welcome to Leadership Reimagined, where game changing conversations are reshaping the world of work. I'm Janis LG CEO and founder of l A Group, Executive search advisors and pioneers in redefining executive search through are unwavering commitment to helping organizations hire outstanding executives to build inclusive environments. Today, on Leadership Reimagined, our topic is restoring trust leadership in an age of disruption, and I'm delighted to welcome Kirsty Graham, the US Chief executive Officer of Edelman.

Edelman is a global communications firm and partners with businesses and organizations to evolve, promote, and protect their brands and repute. Kirsty is a renowned executive leader with more than thirty years of experience in policy, communications and public affairs across government, corporate leadership, and global agencies. She began her career in international diplomacy, spending sixteen years in the New Zealand Foreign Service, which included serving as Private Secretary to the Foreign Minister, deputy spokesman at the British Embassy in Washington, and as New Zealand's Deputy Ambassador to the United Nations.

After her government service, she joined Peiser, where she spent a decade in senior leadership roles, including Head of Global Policy and Senior Vice President of Corporate Affairs for the Biopharmaceuticals Group, overseeing global communications and policy across more than one hundred and twenty five markets. Since joining Edelman in twenty twenty, Kirsty has held multiple global leadership positions and now serves as a member of the firm's Global Executive Leadership Team, advising clients at the intersection of business, policy and society.

This includes advising business and government leaders on the increasingly concerning Edelman Trust Barometer. Kirsty, welcome. I know our audience really wants to gain more in depth understanding what has become a profound global crisis of trust and a world retreating toward insolarity. Thank you, Jenes, it's wonderful to be here today.

Well, let's start a little bit about that history and your story, because you grew up in a very small community, rural community in New Zealand, and you had two academic parents, right, So how did this shape your worldview this beginning? So it's true I did grow up in a very small rural part of New Zealand. My primary school had sixty students. My parents were both academics.

My father had actually been a Fulbright scholar here in the US. My mother was a Catholic nun for thirteen years. So my parents had extraordinarily different backgrounds and at the age of eight we moved to Singapore. My parents both were offered jobs in Singapore in academic in an academic life, and it was a profound experience to go from a very small rural community to a hugely different society.

We were there for three and a half years. Unlike other New Zealand families who were moving there, most of those kids went to British prep schools or the American school. My parents were firmly in the view that we should go to the local school, so we went to a school called Henry Park Primary School, which I actually went and visited last year. It is still there, and it was a profound experience because it was a school of two thousand in the morning in two thousand in the afternoon.

It was it was a massive school and when I look back on that, I think it had a profound experience, a profound impact on probably why I joined the Foreign Service, we traveled enormously around Southeast Asia. We also traveled around Europe. It really was putting us into a very different experience early on for me and my younger brother, and I look back on that time with incredible gratitude because I'm not sure I would have gone into the Foreign Service had I not had that. So you were there with many of the locals, yes, going to school with them, Yes, see how they lived?

Yes, right do you won't. My parents thought that the Singaporean education system was very sophisticated, had a strong focus on maths and science, and this was what the eighties, and you know we came back when we came back to New Zealand, we were really strong in math and science, and they thought it was really important that we live in a different culture and experience it very in a very real way. We also learned I wish that that pushed us to learn Chinese. We said it was really hard.

So sorry, so he didn't do it? No, no, we didn't, but you know, it was an incredible experience. And so what impact did this have on you going into the Foreign Service and starting as the Private Secretary. Was that your first role to New England's Foreign Minister.

To New Zealand's Foreign Minister. So I think it made me realize I loved travel. I loved different experiences, you know, different food, different temperature. My husband will say I've always I love humidity.

So I think that probably started from Singapore, but really had this. It made me really interested in other cultures and different experience, being out of my comfort zone, learning new things. And I studied philosophy at university, came out and thought foreign service. I didn't know a huge amount about it, but they had come around the university's recruiting and put myself forward and went through the interview process, and after six months working on mostly Japan trade issues, I had a call to go and interview with the Foreign Minister to work in his office as Private secretary.

And it was an incredible experience because I traveled the world with him. I was basically his note taker for many of his bilaterals. It was the first time I came to the un I went all over Asia. I really saw the world and watching he went on to become the Commonwealth Secretary General in the UK, and really seeing someone of that stature having meetings with their counterparts, watching diplomacy and honestly watching how important not just the policy agenda, but the relationship piece.

Watching someone have extraordinary relationships with their peers around the world, built largely on trust and of someone doing what they said they would do. He was an amazing mentor. What an experience. Also to hear the conversations and the questions that are being asked in the relationship building, you must have learned so much which took you on to other roles.

Bearing in mind I was probably in my early I must have been about twenty four fifty six. Now I think of those years as very formative. I remember one at an APAC meeting where he was meeting the US then Secretary of State Warren Christopher, who was talking about the Dayton Peace of Courts, and I was the note taker in that meeting, and it gave our Minister dom Kin and some ideas around some approaches to peace and parts of the Pacific. But really hearing that from someone of that stature.

In my early twenties, you know, and traveled a lot around the world. I also went to Nigeria with him for a Commonwealth meeting on human rights that was actually a few weeks before we got married. I remember, but just you know, I had never seen anything like Nigeria. Those sort of things.

In your early twenties, you learn and you remember so much from that time, which I think has informed my career ever since. You had a front row seat to history being made right and how the world was evolving, changing, interacting, disrupt Yes. What an incredible experience. Yes, And then you go on to the British Embassy to talk about that role that you had, hadn't.

I had an opportunity because the British Embassy had always had a seconded position, meaning filled by someone a diplomat from London, and they were localizing the position. We were choosing to stay in Washington for a year, and the Brits approach men said would you consider coming and working here? And that was an extraordinary moment as well, because no matter how great my time had been with the New Zealand Embassy, we were small and the nature I think there were probably four hundred people in the British Embassy in Washington.

That was two thousand and one, so it was the first Bush Blair meeting. It was September eleventh. There was some unbelievable world events that year. Seeing all that at the close range was also something where I think I've taken many lessons from that time.

And how long were you in that role? I was in that role for a year and then my father in law became very sick in New Zealand and we decided that we've had five years in DC at that stage, so we went back to New Zealand. But then you your next role as you leave, right, so mid roles, then you go into the cordword world. Well I went to the UN.

I went to the UN in between, so we went home. We had two sons who are now twenty three and twenty one. I became New Zealand's Deputy Investor at the UN and I did that job for four years five years. That was an amazing way to see not just bilateral but the multilateral setting.

How do you get a deal, how do you do negotiations, how do you what do you say in the big room versus what you say in the small room? How trust is almost the foundation to get any any sort of deal on anything. And we never left New York. So we came here in two thousand and six.

It was supposed to be for four or five years. You're right. I then made a move into corporate, into Corporate America. It came knocking on your door.

What happened. It came about because my husband and I had always had turns about whose career it was, and he had followed me to the UN and so it was ostensibly his turn. He had set up his own company. They had come through the financial crisis and had a US investor, so it made sense to stay here.

I had a friend who I had known on the hill back in Washington, you know, from my first diplomatic posting, who said there's a position going at PISA, you should apply for it in global policy. So I went to PISA. I had a lot of interviews, and the last one was with Sally Sussman, who became my mentor. I worked for her.

I was on her leadership team for ten years. I had six different roles in Peiser. But to see a company of that scale operating in so many countries around the world, it was a remarkable experience. I know Sally, she's a remarkable leader, is incredible, and what Piser has done through COVID and just an incredible company.

The leadership lessons you learned there, I mean This is major. Adjustment, major adjustment, major adjustment, and also very humbling, you know, to go from the top of one service which operates in a very different way, you know, deeply hierarchical, quite formal, diplomatic world into the business world. And I think what I learned was the importance of dock connecting. You know, you have regulatory issues, legal issues, health issues, finance issues, communications issues, medical issues, how they all come together, and the importance of being a dock connector and thinking, Okay, if this is happening, who else needs to know?

How will this be connected? I think also a much broader sense of stakeholder management. It was the first time I really was in a commercial environment. My husband really thought I would love being in business.

I did. I learned a lot around quarterly earnings, you know, M and A, what the street would be looking for, as well as patient advocacy groups, how a drug launch in a particular country could be very different in another country. I traveled enormously. I think I probably went to China maybe twenty times in those and those years a lot of time in Africa, Sub Saharan Africa, where we had a lot of programs with various NGOs.

It was really around dock connecting commercial acumen and thinking about judgment. And the costumer of focus here must have an extraordinary rate. I mean definitely. You know you had traveled the world before, obviously, how did this differ when you're communicating more with the locals there in terms of what FASER was doing, its brand, how it could help that country.

It was actually, you know, it was probably the first time I really reflected on the advantage of having spent time in government because so many of the things we were doing, and you know, I was in a corporate affairs role, but in many of the countries we were visiting, government was a really important partner, whether they were the customer or whether you were talking about individual patients or patient organizations. You had to have a clear understanding of the role of the government in the healthcare conversation.

How this can really turn up in quite different ways depending on the country and the regulatory system that you're in. And so now your next chapter, Yes, you join Edelman as Global Chair of Health and today obviously as CEO of Edelman US. Yes, so take the background that you've had in diplomacy and then in the industry, biaser and how there's making a difference for what you're doing there at Edelman. Today's a very good question.

When I think about CEOs that I've worked with, and when I think of conversations that companies and boards are having now, I think probably ten fifteen years ago, some of those were quite silent. I think of the issues that the world's confronting. You might even say it's rapidly accelerated. How those intersections Even since COVID, you know, you could think about those things and almost screet verticals political, economic, social, Now they've all come together so much.

I think it's actually enormously helpful to understand government and understand business, and then flip it again and think, as an agency offering counsel to CEOs and clients, how are different stakeholders going to see things? And when I think of the issues that we've been working on just in the last six months, being able to see it through different lenses, I think is very, very practically helpful. And so the Edelman's Trust Barometer. Everybody reads this, everybody wants to know, you know, what where is trust today?

A Chris's business, the Christ's government, across media andngos, when you joined in twenty twenty, how did this information strike you in terms of what their data was revealing. One of the reasons I ended up by joining Edelman is I knew Richard, who's also been, like Sally, a great mentor. But I also knew the Trust barometer right I'd followed it. It's been going for twenty six years.

It looks at trust in four different institutions, in government and business, in media, and NGOs, And I think in twenty twenty it was probably a pre pandemic, just literally two months prior, probably a simpler world. In some ways, there was greater trust. There was certainly more trust in government. So when the barometer first started in nineteen ninety nine, it was really around looking at the storming of the World Trade Organization in Seattle, and at that point you saw NGOs as the most trusted group.

Fast forward to the start of the pandemic in twenty twenty, government became the most trusted institution, and then within four or five months trust created, maybe because the expectations and the degree of challenge that countries all around the world were facing with COVID, Trusting government fell and for the first time business became the most trusted and that has continued since twenty twenty. And where is that today? You're still seeing the trust is in business ahead of the government or.

So government trust and government has gone down considerably. We have we look at it through sort of two different axes or two different lens, ethical decisions and competency. So ethical broadly means trusting that institution to do the right thing. Competence means trusting the institution to actually get things done.

What's been noticeable is business has moved in both and is now more trusted on both of those. In NGO used to be that, you know, NGOs were considered the most ethical. Now actually business is at the very top. I think you've definitely seen trust in media and in government go down, but I think overall we've seen a loss that we've seen trust levels in institution go down in the last five years.

So Richard Adelman called it a clarion call because we've moved from fears to polarization, than grievance and hostile activism to insolarity. What are your thoughts on this and how do you advise your clients who are trying to navigate through such troubled and uncertain widers. So I think it really speaks to what have we seen out of the barometer this year the key findings, And then that's good summary because when we looked at the data we two years ago, what we saw was increased polarization.

And bear in mind this is a survey across twenty eight countries roughly thirty three thousand people. The sense was in many countries around the world, people becoming much more polarized in their views. Last year we saw it moving into a sense of grievance of people saying the system leans towards the powerful, the wealthy, and I'm not getting a fair share. Fast forward to this year's findings, and I think the three big ones were we've moved into insolarity.

We've moved into a sense of if people are different from us, they've either got a different background, different values, have a different approach to social issues. We found that seventy percent of people were unwilling or hesitant to trust anyone with different views. That's kind of profound. We also saw burg delta and in the US quite pronounced between how high income versus how the bottom twenty five percent lower income feel about these institutions.

So if you go back to twenty twelve, there was almost no difference. I think it was six points fast between exactly exactly now it's fifteen percent globally. The gap in the United States it's twenty nine. So that has been a burg change.

It's really accelerated over the last couple of years, but it's almost it's almost as if you've got two different realities. Perhaps the third data point that was most interesting was a lapse in economic optimism, with only thirty two percent of people saying that they believe the next generation would be better off, and you know, markedly low scores in continental Europe, the US, I think we were in we're at twenty one percent, but we've gone down in a year, sorry, gone down nine points in a year.

Interestingly, also big big shifts in India and Singapore and China, they had all gone down. So the sense that no matter where you are in the world, people have lost a sense of economic optimism. So it's not just us and no, it's throughout the world. Correct.

Correct, You're always describing something that's tribal in terms of people don't want to listen to anybody else, right, only their tribes. Right. One hundred percent. And when you think about that insularity piece, the two other data points that were interesting.

It's not just that you don't trust someone who's different from you. You also tend to be less trusting of a foreign company. You tend to go local. One of the other things that we noticed is that people said that they were less likely to go to diverse news sources, so a big decrease year over year globally, which means that if you think about insularity, people are just turning inwards.

They less about sort of the community, the world, the we much more about what do I need to do for survival and staying inside an information bubble, staying inside your national sort of paradigm, and very much socializing or engaging with people like you as opposed to having an open mindset around the difference. So what does this mean in terms of what the responsibility that global leaders, both in government and in business have to embrace here to sort of change this. I think it's the situation very important because first of all, we have to recognize what's going on.

Perhaps you know, it may sound dystopium when I go through some of those stats, I think the most uplifting piece of data in the whole of the twenties. Twenty six research was that seventy six percent people globally actually think this level of insularity is a really big problem. Almost half of that group think that it's a crisis level. So people aren't happy where we are.

And that's a global finding that actually gives me comfort. It already makes me think that leaders, whether they're business leaders, political leaders, media leaders, or even as we conduct ourselves as individuals, we have to think about how you build trust. And one of the things we found for those who do have an open mindset when we ask them why, single biggest thing was if people were open with them about their differences. So don't try and don't try and hide that, be open with me and don't try and change me.

So the sense of the power of listening, the power of individual connection, of walking in someone else's shoes. We don't have to agree with different opinions, but we certainly have to show respect and understanding of why someone might feel the way they do. And I think if you look at so many things across our world, that to me resonates that when you go insular, when you go inwards, you lose the ability to think of different ways of doing things, and you lose the respect that comes for perhaps a different approach.

I also think and I think about this, particularly when I was working on some health issues during the pandemic. We have got to allow people the ability to ask questions. Sometimes people even think about AI are incredibly fearful, especially if you don't know a lot about something. You've got to create an environment where people feel they are being brought together, to think of the things that we have in common rather than the differences, and where you can ask questions when you ask me how we're counselor our clients.

We're really encouraging business to lean into broker and trust. There is a huge expectation across all institutions that you should try and bring people together. Not necessarily take a side, but the power of convening and pulling together is very important. And interestingly, people see business as the best place to do it.

And so do you see that. You know businesses, CEOs and their teams are receptive to this in terms of yes, let well, I know many of them are so customer centric. They're listening more right, and they're listening to their employees. We give awards here in UK in the US to the Most Human Companies the tc Lions Awards, which I participated in the end of the year.

And so you think of the humanness of companies, humanness of governments. But it's about listening to people, isn't it. We've lost that art of listening. But I completely agree with that.

And you know something that the power of personal really really matters. And when I look back at the way we all communicated during COVID, we saw a little bit more of each other. Right, there was much more vulnerable, much more open. There's Janesi's pet, there's Janesi's house, there's Janese's sitting room.

You know, Kirsty may not look put together today, something happened, but you got a better sense of people. I think people enjoyed and had trust in seeing a wider sense of the person of the human. So that's one thing I think about communicating in a way that is real. I think you raised employees unbelievably important because when we first did the barometer, when I was first involved in twenty twenty, the biggest indicator of success was how your customers, your clients felt about your services.

Now, the thing you have to get right is your employee base. You have to understand where your employees are. You have to make sure you're connecting. They are your ambassadors, They your first first place, and that I think has been a huge shift in the workforce and the CEO mindset of understanding what are the stakeholders, what are the levers.

You've got to start with your employee base. I think you also see much more resilience in the CEO community. You know, when you think of twenty twenty and COVID and how extraordinary the demands were, and then you fast forward to just some of the things that happened in the first few weeks of this year, whether it was Greenland, Venezuela, tariff's events in Minnesota, you know the share and then you put on top of it AI cost of living misinformation. I think that a lot of leaders are just getting used to a new normal.

And the way we talk about it is agility has almost become the new stability. If you're agile, now that is the single biggest thing to bring stability. You've got to be able to You've got to be able to pivot. And the other thing I would say from CEO conversations I've had recently.

Is it's also making CEOs think about hiring differently, especially especially at the executive level. I think the ability to connect and to see over and across various issues. So even if I think about it just in the communications world, I think companies that have comms, public affairs, government relations policy together are arguably more effective in their communication because all those strands have to come together. Think about companies around communications and marketing.

I think that's blurred a lot more. What's a corporate issue versus a brand issue. All of those pieces have come together in a way that I'm I was saying earlier. Nothing's really in its silo any longer.

So CEOs are certainly hiring for that skill to be able to see across. It's interesting because when we're doing searches, we're often looking for cross functional, multidisciplinary leaders who have sat in different seats. You know, they have an enterprise wide perspective and they know they could going to be moved around. It's like Jamie Diamond driving people around.

You know, you don't know if you're going to be the CFO tomorrow. You're going to have private wealth. That's that's good, that's so important, and I think for the world we live in now, the ability to be able to think in a number of lanes and simultaneously think what are the financial implications of this, what are the tech implications, What is. It going to mean socially?

What does it mean for our customers? What does it mean for our employees? The ability to do that, and I think quite rapidly across lines, that is a skill now that I'm seeing every CEO think very differently about their senior teams. So yeah, so when the CEO is looking at their senior team men looking at themselves, what are some of those attributes that now become almost hard skills or abilities to be able to interact with your employees, your communities, your customers, your shareholders, all those constituents out there that really define your brand and your reputation.

It's no longer you know, just you know, commander control. It's not as just you know, oh, they're a banker, so they can do this new banking job that we have. One hundred percent. And you know, I keep going back to reading Warren Buffett's letter when he was hanging up his boots.

I think you said incredibly important things around the value of soft skills, and I think of this when I think of leaders I work with EQ unbelievably important. I mean, I think you can teach people a lot of skills, people can learn a particular industry, but that EQ around judgment, around communication, around relationship, the LAD is at a premium. I also think given the complexity of the world we're in, having a sense of humility that you don't actually have all the answers, that it's okay to say that that you can think about who else you need to be vulnerable?

Be vulnerable? And that's what we saw in our living rooms in twenty twenty. We weren't necessarily perfect, and I think people who are open to that, I think have extraordinary opportunities to lead. I also think collaboration of speaking with a group of UN ambassadors that a retreat last week and saying that if you look at these findings and you think about insularity, every single one of us has to ask ourselves, what can I do to be less insular?

Who do I have round my dinner table? Am I engaging with different people? Am I partnering with organizations that people may not expect? Am I talking to people who might be critical of what we do.

And if you think about the issues facing the world right now, they are across borders, there are cross sectors. I think collaboration and the ability to trust, build, to bring people together is almost the paramount skill. And I love what you just said about agility is the new stability, Right, You've got to be able to pivot. You've got to be able to pivot and bring people with you, which is also that vulnerability of saying, look, I'm we're going to make a change in direction for the following reasons, or we've got new information, or here's what happened this week.

As a result, we're doing XYZ. So it's the pivot, and it's how you talk about the pivot. And do you think that the leaders today recognize that the role of the CEO is so huge that the composition of their leadership table has to be far better than it ever was before, that they can't do their job totally themselves. I do.

I do. I think that is what you are seeing, and that's certainly what I'm hearing in terms of when I think about the type of attributes people are looking for. I also think having a global mindset, you've got to you know, this is where I look bad, probably to be gratefully to my parents moving us to Singapore. I was in a tiny part of New Zealand.

I think those experiences early on shaped and understanding of different cultures. And if you look at where we are now, you have to think how many multi national companies have to think, Okay, this issue is going to land like this in DC, it's going to land like this in Europe, it's going to land like this in China, and we see growth opportunities in Africa. Okay, how are you going to do all of that? How are you going to explain that to all your stakeholders, including your staff, and how do you get that balance right between what you need is a defining corporate global center point as well as showing up locally and in the right way in different markets.

And the theme that comes through in this is it's actually all about relationships. People value a company that they see as being genuinely engaged in the local community and that has long, strong relationships. And you know, as we have this conversation, what goes through my head is we have to remember that a lot of this should be simple. It should be how we think about how we conduct ourselves personally.

Relationships are about trust. So are you op domestic that there's you know, change will come from CEOs listening to advisors such as yourself, and also the collaboration among CEOs to recognize learn from each other. Do you see this happening? Do you see we're at almost precipice of if we don't do this, people are not happy where they are today.

So it really is up to the business leaders, isn't it, along with government officials. But business can lead here. Business can lead, and I think people are asking business to lean into this. And it's almost as if, and our data supports us, that people think of the workplace as the island of civility.

Now that might be becau trust has gone local. We saw in the pandemic that people really leaned on and believed trusted the guidance they were getting from their CEO and from their local workplace. It may be that the workplace also has code of conduct you have to behave a certain way. The workplace also often has very diverse viewpoints because diversity is good for business.

I think that I keep coming back to that fact of seventy six percent of people wanting to not be in the insularity to be at this level, and I think there are more CEO conversations around both the responsibility and the opportunity of business. And honestly, the stakes are high. The stakes are really high. I think people understand that, and I think leadership matters it.

You know, if we continue along this path, you know, when this in new silarity continues, innovation is also thwarded as in it so we will fall behind other countries and that superpower that has feed of clay and this has happened in the past, so we can't afford to let it happen now. Any parting words for our listeners, I mean, you're given us so much to think about in so many areas to look for leadership attributes, traits and really to take charge here. So I guess I would say that I hope that listeners don't think of insularity just as something that's happening socially, but as a very important problem for business.

Right as you said, it imperils innovation. I think it makes it very challenging for CEOs to get a leadership or a corporate agenda moving. I think it impacts productivity. I think it's on all leaders to be able to think of themselves as a trust broker.

How do I find ways to remind people what brings us, what unites us, rather than what divides us. And I think I would simply close by saying that in a world of AI, where this AI is going to be everywhere, in the world of ALI, when technology has got so much better at mimicking us, maybe we actually you have to be better at being human. This has been so inspirational also an eye opener in terms of what leaders are facing in the years to come. So I hope you will continue with your messages around the globe in terms of making all of us more human.

And we use AI as a technological tool, but we are the human beings and people still feel that we care, feel a feel what we say and what we do and how that impacts them. So thank you so much for your insights, and I know we're going to be hearing more from you and the Barometer Index Trust Index. Thank you so much, Dennis, Thank you for having me to. That, and thank you to our audience for tuning in to another game changing conversation on leadership reimagined.

You can find me on LinkedIn or visit us at elgroup dot com. Thank you for joining us today.