Trust is the Strategy
Trust isn’t a side effect. It’s the strategy.
Let’s stop pretending it’s a brand problem.
It’s a congruency problem.
We’ve confused visibility with credibility.
We’ve prioritized performance over presence.
We’ve focused so long on sounding right—we forgot to be right.
Here’s what’s true now: People are paying attention.
To your language.
To your leadership.
To what you fund.
To what you fight for.
To what you say in public—and what you ignore in private.
And when what you say doesn’t match what you show?
They feel it.
They name it.
They leave.
And when they leave, they don’t just take their feelings with them.
They take their loyalty. Their labor. Their dollars.
And that shows up everywhere—from attrition to share price.
What misalignment looks + feels like.
Misalignment doesn’t always start loud.
It starts in the gut.
It’s the tension an employee feels when reading a press release that doesn’t align with their lived experience.
It’s the dissonance when leaders say “belonging” but reward conformity.
It’s the slow erosion of belief when your values don’t show up in your systems.
It’s the story outside the building saying one thing—while the culture inside tells another.
And when that gap gets too wide, people stop bridging it.
They stop speaking up. Stop investing. Stop believing.
Misalignment leads to disengagement. Attrition. Cynicism. Silence.
The quiet quitting before the actual quitting.
The resignation that happens long before the notice is given.
Because if your people can’t trust the company they’re helping build, why should anyone else?
The cost of incongruency
This isn’t theory. It’s not hypothetical. It’s happening right now—in boardrooms, in earnings calls, and in the quiet, unspoken decisions of employees and customers who have simply stopped believing what companies say.
In early 2025, Target made a highly visible decision to roll back its internal and external commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion. It wasn’t subtle. It was loud. Public. A deliberate shift away from previously stated values. The response was swift and measurable as foot traffic continues to decline, with no turnaround insight.
But numbers only tell part of the story. Inside the company, the impact was deeper—quieter. Employees who had once felt seen and valued now felt exposed. People who had helped build the culture no longer recognized it. Trust fractured not because of a single act but because the ground shifted underneath them.
Meanwhile, Costco faced the same external pressures and chose a different path. It raised wages. It publicly reaffirmed its DEI commitments. There were no big campaigns, no messaging maneuvers. Just a consistent throughline between what the company professed and how it behaved. The result? Stability. Loyalty. A workforce that continued to believe in the company’s word—they saw it lived in its choices.
It plays out differently in tech, but the principle holds. In 2023, OpenAI—an organization founded on the promise of ethical AI for humanity—suddenly fired its CEO, Sam Altman, without transparency or clear alignment. The reaction was immediate and internal. More than 95% of employees signed a letter threatening to leave. Not because of strategy. Because of trust. Because the organization that asked them to build the future had just violated the values it claimed to center.
And in another corner of the world, Volkswagen spent years telling a story of clean diesel and environmental innovation. Behind the scenes, it had engineered deception. When the truth came out, the cost exceeded $30 billion. But long before the headlines, people inside the company knew something was wrong. Integrity was overridden. Employees were left to reconcile the story they were helping tell with the systems they were trapped inside.
Three companies. Three industries. Different values at stake—social equity, governance, and environmental responsibility. But the thread is the same.
Each professed something to the world.
Each broke with it.
Each paid the price—not just in public, but within.
Because misalignment doesn’t start with consumer backlash.
It starts with the moment an employee sees a headline and feels the pit in their stomach:
“That’s not who we said we were.”
A new construct for business.
This isn’t about being a nice brand.
It’s about being a trustworthy one.
Business as usual is eroding.
People are watching. Inside and out.
And the line between values and valuation has never been thinner.
We need a new construct.
One where strategy and story are built on the same blueprint.
One where trust isn’t a tactic—it’s the architecture.
One where congruency isn’t a communication choice—it’s a leadership standard.
Because the companies that will lead the future are not the loudest.
They are the most aligned.
As SGNL turns five, we’re not just marking an anniversary—we’re naming what we know to be true:
Trust isn’t built through messages.
It’s built through systems.
Over the last five years, we’ve been invited into rooms where the stakes were high: Leadership was shifting. Growth was accelerating. Teams were fracturing. Belief was wavering.
And no matter the surface-level brief—strategic planning, executive comms, crisis management, employee engagement—the real challenge was always the same: the signals didn’t match the system.
That’s why we built the Brand Trust Network—a system-level framework for designing congruency at scale.
It’s not a model. It’s an operating system.
The Brand Trust Network ensures that what an organization claims publicly is made real through its internal architecture—through the way it plans, leads, communicates, listens, and decides.
Because trust isn’t an outcome of good intentions.
It’s the result of coherence across what we call critical trust nodes—leadership, internal communications, employee brand, stakeholder alignment, strategic planning, crisis response, sustainability, and more. Each of these is powerful on its own. But together? They form the infrastructure of belief.
These aren’t isolated functions.
They are interdependent signals in a shared system.
When they’re aligned—when internal comms echo external commitments, when leadership actions mirror stated values, when strategic plans hold space for real belonging—trust flows.
But when they fracture, when one signal contradicts another, when culture is asked to carry what structure won’t support? That’s when trust collapses. Quietly. Systemically.
GUT CHECK | AUDIT YOUR ALIGNMENT
Misalignment isn’t always malicious. But it is always noticed.
Try this inside your team or leadership circle.
Pick 3 values you publicly claim—e.g., “People First.” “Equity Always.” “Act with Courage.”
For each, ask:
→ Where is this value practiced? Tangibly.
→ Where might we be sending mixed signals—internally or externally?
→ What are we doing today that undermines this value, even subtly?
→ Circle the gaps. Don’t defend them. Just name them.
Then ask: What system, behavior, or signal would close that gap, even by 10%?
BONUS
Ask employees or longtime customers: Where are we out of alignment with our values?
If you're brave enough to hear it, you’re ready to fix it.
The Brand Trust Network helps companies prevent that collapse.
It allows us to identify the weak nodes, rewire the broken loops, and design for integrity across the ecosystem.
And it gives organizations the clarity, scaffolding, and shared language to lead through complexity—without sacrificing coherence.
This is how you build real alignment.
Not as a comms tactic—but as a business strategy.
Because trust isn’t soft.
It’s structural.
And when built with intention, it becomes your greatest multiplier.
We believe trust is the most strategic asset an organization can cultivate.
And for the last five years, we’ve partnered with leaders ready to take that seriously.
The Brand Trust Network isn’t a theory.
It’s a way of working.
And it’s already helping companies design clarity, scale coherence, and lead with integrity—inside and out.
If this moment has you rethinking the signals you send, the systems you’ve built, or the story you’re telling—
You’re not alone. And you don’t have to navigate it alone.
Let’s build from here.
