| BEING RIGHT IS NOT ENOUGH, SAY AUTHORS OF NEW BOOK FOR PROFESSIONALS WHO ADVISE OTHERS
“Advisors and clients alike often think that technical excellence alone is all that is needed to solve business problems. Like the emperor and his new clothes, they are kidding themselves,“ say David Maister, Charles Green and Robert Galford. Technical ability is indeed necessary—but is not sufficient. Before you can get anyone to accept your advice, you first have to get them to trust you with their problems. And few of us are ever taught how to win someone’s trust and confidence.
In their new book, THE TRUSTED ADVISOR (The Free Press; Oct.5, 2000; $25.00 hardcover), authors David Maister, Charles Green and Robert Galford reveal how a better understanding of the role of trust in advising, negotiating, and managing complex relationships with others can result in bottom line success and greater satisfaction in business.
Trust isn’t based on credibility alone—or on just honesty, or good intentions, or a solid track record, or years of getting to know the client. Trust is a complex blend of all these and more—but there is a clear way to grasp it, say the authors who break trust down into its components and analyze it. They use a model, the “Trust Equation”—credibility plus reliability plus intimacy, all divided by self-orientation. These four factors correspond to believable words, dependable actions, safe confidences, and client-focused emotions. To attain a truly trusting relationship, they assert, it is necessary to succeed in all of these areas. If the advisor succeeds in just one or two of them, he or she may be merely believable, or predictable, or empathetic, or giving, but not fully trustworthy.
By altering each factor in the trust “equation,” the authors show how various forms of mistrust or lack of trust arise—and how to cure them. Most professionals focus on the first two components of trust—credibility and reliability. These are the “rational” pieces of trust, the ones that drive content expertise. But the other two factors—intimacy and low self-orientation, the more emotional components of trust—are often critical. These emotional undercurrents of trust are powerful enough to overcome—or to sabotage—even the most brilliant content or accomplished technical expertise.
Trust in the New Economy
Is trust an anachronism in a wired world? Far from it. As Tom Peters says, “in our ‘world gone mad,’ trust is, paradoxically, more important than ever.” One reason is that interpersonal contacts are increasingly numerous, frequent, short, and not face to face. In a world like that, anyone who can convey the emotional components of trust (intimacy and “other-orientation”) both quickly and particularly through “impersonal” mediums, has a huge advantage in creating trust-based relationships. Rapid trust creation—if the trust is sincere and genuine—becomes a key success factor.
Five Steps to Trust
THE TRUSTED ADVISOR details five steps to creating a trust-based relationship: engage, listen, frame, envision and commit. In chapters devoted to each of these five steps, the authors use lists to convey common mistakes, desired behaviors, phrases to use, and must-do’s. In addition, they reveal anecdotes about their own and others' successes and mistakes.
Maister, Green and Galford pool their extensive experiences in this book. Maister is the “guru's guru,” who has written about and consulted with professional service firms for two decades and is the author of previous business bestsellers including Managing the Professional Services Firm and True Professionalism. Charles Green is an executive educator and consultant, and founder of Trusted Advisor Associates; and Robert Galford is Executive Vice President and Chief People Officer at Digitas, Inc, a leading Internet professional-services firm. Green and Galford have together taught seminars on trust-based client relationships for some of the world's most prominent professional firms.
Advance Praise for THE TRUSTED ADVISOR by David H. Maister, Charles H. Green, and Robert M. Galford
“This is a brilliant--and practical--book. In our ‘world gone mad,’ trust is, paradoxically, more important than ever.”
Tom Peters, author of The Professional Service 50
“The Trusted Advisor offers an invaluable roadmap to all those who seek to develop truly special relationships with their clients.”
Carl Stern, CEO, Boston Consulting Group
“Trust is the key that can unlock a priceless dialogue with your clients. The Trusted Advisor tells you how to build relationships that can last a lifetime.”
James E. Copeland, Jr., CEO, Deloitte & Touche, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu
“The authors have produced a readable, helpful guide to a central issue for all professional services firms. They provide sensible and practical advice, making the components of trust appear clear and straightforward. The book is easy to read and use and many of the check-lists are very valuable. I will encourage my partners to read it and to keep it close at hand.”
Michael Bray, Chief Executive, Clifford Chance
“Our company’s development has been guided by and benefited from The Trusted Advisor concepts--and they work!”
George Colony, Chairman and CEO, Forrester Research
“The Trusted Advisor will make any advisor more effective in winning and servicing clients’ business. It is a must read for anyone working in professional service firms.”
Thomas W. Watson, Chief Growth Officer, Omnicom Group, Inc.
“This book provides valuable insight into how one can become and, equally importantly, remain a trusted advisor, which is essential to success in a wide variety of professions.”
Howard G. Paster, Chairman and CEO, Hill and Knowlton, Inc.
“This is a major contribution to the consulting profession, a richly illustrated and humanistic look at what differentiates a truly great advisor from a good one. This book will be valuable reading for the novice and experienced professional alike.”
John Lynch, Chairman and CEO, Towers Perrin
“This book is engaging, enjoyable and absolutely on target. It is packed with truth. The Trusted Advisor will guide success not just in the advisory professions, but in leadership and life as well.”
William F. Stasior, Senior Chairman & Former CEO, Booz·Allen & Hamilton
“The Trusted Advisor is right on the mark. Required reading for all professionals.”
Hobson Brown, Jr. President and CEO, Russell Reynolds Associates
“This book provides specific, practical and valuable guidance that will make professional advisors of all types reassess their approach to winning client trust.”
John Reeve, Executive Chairman, Willis Group Ltd.
“The Trusted Advisor will help advisors everywhere learn how to take their client relationships to a higher level.”
Dale Gifford, Chief Executive, Hewitt Associates
“The Trusted Advisor gets to the heart and soul of the advice business. This pathbreaking book is a must read.”
Professor Charles Fombrun, Leonard N. Stern School of Business, New York University
“Maister, Green, and Galford have put their fingers on the core objective of the professional services practitioner, and show effectively how that objective may be achieved.”
Jon Moynihan, Executive Chairman, PA Consulting Group (UK)
“The Trusted Advisor is a masterful
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Chapter One
A Sneak Preview
Let's start with a question: What benefits would you obtain if your clientstrusted you more? Here's our list. The more your clients trust you, the more they will:
- Reach for your advice
- Be inclined to accept and act on your recommendations
- Bring you in on more advanced, complex, strategic issues
- Treat you as you wish to be treated
- Respect you
- Share more information that helps you to help them, and improves the quality of the service you provide
- Pay your bills without question
- Refer you to their friends and business acquaintances
- Lower the level of stress in your interactions
- Give you the benefit of the doubt
- Forgive you when you make a mistake
- Protect you when you need it (even from their own organization)
- Warn you of dangers that you might avoid
- Be comfortable and allow you to be comfortable
- Involve you earl
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Chapter One
A Sneak Preview
Let's start with a question: What benefits would you obtain if your clientstrusted you more? Here's our list. The more your clients trust you, the more they will:
- Reach for your advice
- Be inclined to accept and act on your recommendations
- Bring you in on more advanced, complex, strategic issues
- Treat you as you wish to be treated
- Respect you
- Share more information that helps you to help them, and improves the quality of the service you provide
- Pay your bills without question
- Refer you to their friends and business acquaintances
- Lower the level of stress in your interactions
- Give you the benefit of the doubt
- Forgive you when you make a mistake
- Protect you when you need it (even from their own organization)
- Warn you of dangers that you might avoid
- Be comfortable and allow you to be comfortable
- Involve you early on when their issues begin to form, rather than later in the process (or maybe even call you first!)
- Trust your instincts and judgments (including those about other people such as your colleagues and theirs)
We would all like to have such professional relationships! This book is aboutwhat you must do to obtain these benefits. What changes would you make to this list? What would you add? Delete? Next, let's consider three additional questions: Do you have a trusted advisor, someone you turn to regularly to adviseyou on all your most important business, career, and perhaps even personaldecisions? If you do, what are the characteristics of that person? If you do not, what characteristics would you look for in selectingyour trusted advisor?
Here is a listing of traits that our trusted advisors have in common. They:
- Seem to understand us, effortlessly, and like us
- Are consistent (we can depend on them)
- Always help us see things from fresh perspectives
- Don't try to force things on us
- Help us think things through (it's our decision)
- Don't substitute their judgment for ours
- Don't panic or get overemotional (they stay calm)
- Help us think and separate our logic from our emotion
- Criticize and correct us gently, lovingly
- Don't pull their punches (we can rely on them to tell us the truth)
- Are in it for the long haul (the relationship is more important than the current issue)
- Give us reasoning (to help us think), not just their conclusions
- Give us options, increase our understanding of those options, give us their recommendation, and let us choose
- Challenge our assumptions (help us uncover the false assumptions we've been working under)
- Make us feel comfortable and casual personally (but they take the issues seriously)
- Act like a real person, not someone in a role
- Are reliably on our side and always seem to have our interests at heart
- Remember everything we ever said (without notes)
- Are always honorable (they don't gossip about others, and we trust their values)
- Help us put our issues in context, often through the use of metaphors, stories, and anecdotes (few problems are completely unique)
- Have a sense of humor to diffuse (our) tension in tough situations
- Are smart (sometimes in ways we're not)
What would you add to (or delete from) this list? Using the Golden Rule (we should treat others as we wish to be treated), we canprobably make a fair assumption (or at least a good first approximation) thatthis list, or your list, is not much different from a list your clients wouldmake. So, if you want your clients to treat you as their trusted advisor, then youmust meet as many of the "tests" on this list as possible. Ask yourself: Which of these traits do my clients think I possess? (Not whatyou think you possess, but what they think you do!) If yoususpect that you might not demonstrate all these traits, then how do you getbetter at each of them? That's what this book will try to answer. Note that this book is not (just) about the wonderful benefits that wait at theend of the rainbow for the full-fledged trusted advisor, who does (or is)everything listed here. The early benefits of beginning to earn trust aresubstantial and can be obtained quickly. The ability to earn trust is alearnable skill, and we shall try in the succeeding pages to show "the yellowbrick road" that leads to success.
Copyright © 2000 David H. Maister, Charles H. Green, and Robert M. Galford. All rights reserved.
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