The Challenge of Building Trust

“What will it take to rebuild trust?” asked Leadership Now CEO Daniella Ballou-Aares in the latest Democracy & Business Update on LinkedIn. “It starts with courageous individuals like Leadership Now honoree Al Schmidt, Pennsylvania's Secretary of State, who [in January] was awarded one of America’s top civilian honors for his defense of the 2020 vote while overseeing the Philadelphia election as a Republican City Commissioner. Even while he and his family endured threats to their safety, he stood up to Trump’s pressure to overturn the election results.” 

“But people like Al Schmidt alone won’t be enough to defend and rebuild democracy for the long term,” Daniella wrote in the Leadership Now update. As NYU professor and democracy expert Richard Pildes discussed at Leadership Now’s 2022 annual meeting, polarized, ineffective government fosters an atmosphere where autocratically-inclined leaders who promise to ‘deliver’ and create order through strength can gain popular appeal and undercut democracy. We've seen this play out in countries from Hungary to Brazil to Italy to India in recent years.

“With the Edelman Trust Baromoter once again showing that business is the most trusted sector in society, the burden for all of us to use that trust wisely is high. How can you help rebuild trust in our system, even as some political leaders burn it?”

Read on in the Monthly Business + Democracy Update

for Daniella Ballou-Aares’ tally of the low and high points for trusted leadership that have defined the start to 2023 — and the latest perspectives of Leadership Now and its members in the press.

Subscribe to the Monthly Business +  Democracy Update on LinkedIn.

Classified Documents Risk Further Eroding Trust In Democracy

How is it possible that the current president, the former president and the former vice president all be tripped up by the same federal document control system, ostensibly designed to keep America’s most vital secrets safe? And what does that have to do with the strength of American democracy?

Leadership Now Project CEO Daniella Ballou-Aares took on this question in a recent appearance on MSNBC, joining American Voices with Alicia Menendez to share her perspective on the burgeoning controversies over improper possession of classified documents by some of America’s most prominent and powerful public officials.

“One of the really worrying things about this whole scandal is that [it] further erodes American trust and democracy,” she told viewers. “We need to look at the system and make something that actually works.” She emphasized the need to modernize the system and also ensure we “find the real instances of threats to national security and intent to undermine it,” rather than simply that documents marked classified were retained after officials left office.

While the complications associated with classification are a serious challenge to public trust, they may also present an opportunity for reform —and for taking a robust look at how the U.S. government strategically uses information and keeps it secure. In 2010, President Obama passed The Reducing Over-Classification Act in response to findings by the 9/11 Commission that overclassification had undermined national security. In 2023, we again find the system – replete with overclassification and confounded by a lack of clarity around what should be classified – posing a risk to national security by undermining Americans’ faith in the system and creating a weakness our adversaries will see as an opportunity.