Small-business owner honed skills at Kodak before launching on his own

Bob Whipple has become so knowledgeable on the topic of trust that he has earned himself the title “Trust Ambassador.”

Like many other locals, Whipple spent 31 years working for Kodak. Always fascinated by leadership, he spent much of his final decade at the company running what was known as the leadership laboratory. As Whipple’s parents grew older, he decided to leave his time-consuming position at Kodak to care for his mother and father back home in Binghamton. Shortly thereafter, Whipple jumped feet first and started his own business, thus the birth of Leadergrow Inc. in 2002.

“I discovered that the whole essence of leadership, if you want to be successful, revolves around one concept. And that concept is trust,” says Whipple. “If you understand how to build an organization that has low fear and high trust, then everything else works.”

With Leadergrow, Whipple guides company leaders on a path to establishing trustful work environments to increase efficiency and productivity. Rather than concentrating his work in a particular industry, Whipple specializes in building trust in all industries for companies of all sizes.

Whipple says that he strives to help leaders recognize their potential and turn that potential into reality. The biggest challenge? “Getting leaders to appreciate and recognize that the problems that are holding them back are of their own making. They don’t like to hear that, and it’s difficult to internalize because everybody’s trying as hard as they can,” he says.

Whipple does individual coaching, but most of his work is done with the higher level teams in a company. He is mostly centered in the Northeast, but he has done work elsewhere in California, Jamaica and Trinidad. Most of his time, however, is spent working with local businesses.

“Typically I’ll work with a client for four or five sessions, sometimes less. Sometimes they only want me to come in and do a keynote for an hour and a half,” says Whipple. “It’s all over the map. I never do the same thing exactly the same way twice. It’s always customized to where the client is, what would be most helpful to them, what they can afford, et cetera.”

In his lectures and training, Whipple uses the phrase “reinforced candor.” Leaders often have this idea that they are right and everybody else is wrong. When employees approach a leader with a concern or counterpoint and the leader rejects that employee, he is not reinforcing their candor. Whipple teaches his clients that it is important to be curious and to listen when employees approach them. Ask questions and avoid getting defensive if an employee does not agree with your ideas or policy. Reinforcing candor is the key to establishing a safe, trustworthy workplace.

Whipple’s extensive research on trust has led him to earn noteworthy credentials in the field. He was recently named to Trust Across America: Trust Around the World’s Trust Council. The Trust Council is comprised of 12 leading trust experts from around the world who seek to spread the message and methods of establishing trust worldwide.

He has also written and published four books honing in on different aspects of trust, such as navigating trust online and maintaining trust during organizational transitions. He is in the midst of writing his fifth.

Whipple creates strategic plans for his clients, but he also implements a strategic plan for himself every year. As a tradition, Whipple sits down every New Year’s Eve to construct a plan for what he hopes to work on and accomplish in the year to come.

“I pick four or five strategies to work on for the next year,” he says. “For 2018, I’m going to leverage my national reputation, do more executive coaching, ramp up my speaking presence, have a higher give-back ratio and partner with the best people.

“For each strategy I have four or five tactics of how I’m going to accomplish that strategy. And then I establish measures. That’s how I run my life and my business every year. The actual plan is about 80 pages long, but I boil it down to one page that I laminate and carry with me everywhere I go.”

Just as he has chosen to focus his expertise on one specific topic, Whipple suggests other aspiring entrepreneurs do the same.

“Pick one area where you think you can make a real contribution to the world and become a world expert at that,” he says. “That means a huge investment of time and energy, but you won’t get there without doing the work.”

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Small Business is a biweekly feature focusing on entrepreneurs. Send suggestions for Small Business stories to Reporter/Editorial Assistant Nicole Sheldon at [email protected].