The Truth-Teller in the Room

A few years ago, the head of communications at a big tire producer started introducing himself, half-joking, as the company’s “Chief Truth Teller.” The joke was that it wasn’t really a joke. His job, he told the Wall Street Journal, was to give the CEO not what he asked for but what he needed. He was paid to push back, candidly, before the market or the press did it for him. 

The detail comes from a recent Journal story about the rise of the corporate communications chief2, and it’s the kind I read twice. A decade ago, a little over a third of chief communications officers reported directly to the CEO. Today, it’s nearly half. Pay has climbed sharply. One in seven now clears two million dollars a year, and companies that never had the role, Gap, Reddit, Chanel among them, created it for the first time. Uber recently made its communications chief the president of the company. 

None of what the Journal is describing is really about communications, in the press-release sense. It’s about something older and less glamorous: whether an organization can be trusted to do what it says it will do. 

That sounds too simple to be worth saying, which may be why it gets said so rarely. Companies do not cultivate trust  because it feels good. It’s the mechanism—really the only one—by which strangers agree to deal with each other at scale. I cannot personally vet the engineer who built the plane I’m flying in, or the surgeon who will operate on my mother. None of us can. So, we use a shortcut: reputation. We watch what an institution has actually done, not what it has said, and extend trust accordingly. Reputation is the residue of that watching. Trust is what accumulates when the residue keeps coming out clean. 

This is the architecture underneath modern economic life. Specialization—the fact that I don’t have to grow my own food or build my own house—works only because I trust the people who do those things for me to do them honestly. Competition sharpens people within their trade, but does nothing, by itself, to guarantee the winner is telling the truth about what they’re selling. Reputation is the layer that makes cooperation possible and competition meaningful, instead of just a race to see who can promise the most. 

 A company is just a number of people pointed in the same direction. Because it’s made of people, it behaves like one: honest or evasive, consistent or erratic. The market reads those traits the way we read them in each other. 

The function that exists to manage this, what gets called, blandly, “corporate affairs,” has historically been treated as a finishing department, the place where messaging gets polished before it goes out the door. I treated it that way myself, early on. The Journal’s reporting suggests boards are realizing this was a misreading of the job. The real function isn’t to make the company look coherent. It’s to help make it actually coherent: to notice, before a regulator or a journalist does, where what leadership says and what the organization does have quietly drifted apart. 

That drift should worry a board more than almost anything else on its agenda, because it is, by design, hard to see from the inside. No executive sets out to create a gap between promise and practice. It accumulates in small decisions, made for understandable reasons, none of which look like betrayal at the time. Companies that lose the public’s trust rarely collapse in one dramatic event. They stagnate. They lose ground to competitors who never did anything more remarkable than keep their word. Eventually, if the gap is wide enough for long enough, the company becomes a different organization than the one it once claimed to be, not through scandal, but through the slow erosion of the thing that made its reputation worth anything.  

If that’s right, the people responsible for a company’s culture and conduct have a harder job than approving strategy and reviewing results. They are custodians of something that doesn’t show up cleanly on a balance sheet and can’t be repaired quickly once it’s gone. Collaboration, competition, reputation: these aren’t values a company puts on a poster in the lobby. They’re load-bearing walls. You don’t notice them until they’re not there, and by then, the building has a different shape. I’ve come to think of the people who guard that boundary less as messengers than as a kind of internal coach—the one whose job is to ask a leadership team, again and again, whether they still recognize themselves in what they’re about to say. 

What’s notable is that the market appears to be pricing this in before most mission statements have caught up. Executives whose job is to tell leadership uncomfortable truths are being given more authority, not less. This isn’t out of sudden corporate enlightenment, but because the cost of getting this wrong, when a single internal memo can become a public document by lunchtime, has become too high to entrust to people whose incentive is to make the news rather than tell it. 

That’s worth sitting with, whatever industry you’re in. The Chief Truth Teller joke works because it names a real shortage. Most organizations have no shortage of people paid to tell leadership what it wants to hear. What they’re short of is people paid and empowered to do the opposite, before the gap between word and deed grows wide enough for someone else to point it out first. 

Want to learn more about how ExCarta can help increase your trust as a leader? Learn more about our services.