Four Words to Immediately Establish Trust

This past summer, a friend and I took a trip to a winery. She wasn’t just any friend, and it wasn’t just any winery.

The winery, for starters, was almost brand new. Perched on top of a hillside overlooking Shenandoah National Park, its ribbons of vines were not far from a ribbon of freeway. Stepping into it felt like discovering a secret—it was notoriously hard to find. As a result, it was empty.

While for most people this would have been a magical opportunity to enjoy the wines in the quiet of the mountains, my friend was a public relations colleague. For us, the experience was deeply disturbing. The vintner regaled us with stories of Virginia’s history, growing up in Nova Scotia, and learning from the best among Thomas Jefferson’s wines. We laughed at his tales of scooping up customers as other wineries closed for the evening to fill his empty tasting tables and enjoyed the personal touch as he spun off in his 4×4 to harvest grapes from the vines we were about to taste. In exchange, we gave him a few random ideas about elevating his social media profile, installing signs along the freeway, and partnering with other wineries to cross-market themselves. Of course, the conversation eventually rolled around to the inevitable pipe dream we landed on each time we encountered a niche business that could be doing better—starting our own PR consultancy.

It’s become a running joke. 

Shortly after that visit, I started a Master of Science in corporate and organizational communication at Northeastern University. After 20 years in public relations and journalism, I had come to understand my resume had a credibility weakness. Despite attaining my Accreditation in Public Relations (APR) and winning a series of national strategic communication awards, I needed to condense my stand-out qualities into a single, simple line on my resume that would tell my next employer—or anyone, in fact—that they could trust me.

Communication is all about trust, after all.

The timing could not have been better. During this quarter, while enrolled in the Public Relations Strategy and Planning class, I lost my public relations job through organizational restructuring.

The PR Strategy and Planning class saw us working directly with a client to solve their business problem, in a model that emulated a boutique PR agency. Clients are nothing new to public relations professionals, of course, but, to date, all my experience has been working inside organizations that had already demonstrated a degree of trust in my work by the nature of hiring me. To succeed in this class, however, we needed to rapidly build trust with our classmates—our PR consultancy team—and then on a second level with the client. As I listened to my classmates summarize their backgrounds in the client presentation, it occurred to me that every one of us used our master’s to quickly establish a basis for client trust. Strategically delivering results for the client helped cement that trust and reputation. 

Now, as I begin searching for a new job, I have moved my partially completed master’s to the summary section at the top of my resume as an easy way to set me apart from the hundreds of other applicants in a flooded job market. That one simple line summarized in four simple words–masters, corporate organizational, and communication-–denotes professionalism, knowledge, and strategic expertise. It backs up and supports my professional experience by neatly tying it together. It serves to build trust with a prospective employer.

Participating in the PR Strategy and Planning class also served another purpose. It has given me the confidence to consider public relations consulting as a realistic future, not just a pipe dream. In the past couple of weeks, I noticed the shiny new signage for the winery along the freeway, caught a story on NPR aimed at cross-marketing Virginia wines, and stopped at a roadside cafe displaying a stack of glossy brochures created through a collaboration of vintners—the Nova Scotian included. He had taken our ideas and run with them.

I called my friend. She asked about my class and my job. I told her I was ready to step out and make our pipe dream a reality, and I asked her if she was ready to join me in pursuing higher learning and business creation. As public relations professionals, we are always striving to build trust and enhance our relationships. The tools we need to achieve our aspirations are right in front of us. So, I asked, “What are we waiting for?”