Your business needs a higher purpose, and you need to convey it through open communication. Otherwise you're in trouble.

How do you keep people trusting you at a time like this? Trust is essential in our lives, and it has been since the beginning of our country. Yet today trust is all but vanishing, especially trust in our business leaders, whose greed and short-term selfishness seem to have been a major cause of our economic crisis. With negativity running amok, it is no small wonder that trust within the organizational context is slipping.

Ken Blanchard and Terry Waghorn explain why trust is essential at work during tough times like. "Managed properly, trust can actually grow in such adverse conditions," says Shawna O'Grady, associate professor of management at Queens School of Business, in Kingston, Ontario. "Taking this point to the extreme, consider the bonds forged between comrades-in-arms in a theater of war."

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