This is the most important factor behind successful social businesses

Taking time to build trust is crucial to running a successful organisation, says Ernest Darkoh in this video for the Schwab Foundation: “We do a lot of work with public-private partnerships, and one of the lessons I’ve learned is that you cannot bypass building trust. You have to invest a lot of conscious work upfront before it begins to yield dividends down the line.”

This post is part of a major series from the Schwab Foundation looking at lessons from leading social entrepreneurs.

Darkoh is one of the founders of BroadReach Healthcare, and a globally renowned healthcare leader. He says it pays to invest genuinely in what you do: “People really don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care. You cannot just show up, tick the boxes and leave, hoping it will have a good effect. The world is experiencing a crisis of meaning and a crisis of trust,” he says. “We owe it to ourselves and to the community that we’re trying to serve to be connected and to care.”

Darkoh’s final leadership lesson is to embrace failure as a critical part of our story: If I’m hiring somebody and they cannot tell me of instances where they’ve truly failed – whether it’s in their personal or professional life – I will not hire that person; because with failure comes so much growth.”

Author: Ernest Darkoh, Co-founder of BroadReach Healthcare

Image: Corporate recruiters (R) gesture and shake hands as they talk with job seekers at a Hire Our Heroes job fair targeting unemployed military veterans and sponsored by the Cable Show, a cable television industry trade show in Washington, June 11, 2013. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst