"If trust is so important, how does one go about winning it? How do you get somebody to trust you? It is clear that it is not done by saying ‘Trust me!’ Nothing is more likely to get the listener to put up his or her defences! The key point is that trust must be earned and deserved."
- The Trusted Advisor, Chapter 3
"Credibility isn’t just content expertise. It’s content expertise plus ‘perspective’, which refers to how we look, act, react, and talk about our content."- The Trusted Advisor, Chapter 8
Maister provides an equation to calculate trust:
T= C + R + I
S
Trust = Credibility + Reliability + Intimacy / Self-orientation
The The Big Idea is one of the elements of the equation; one that I think is misunderstood. Credibility is made up of two components: accuracy and completeness. Accuracy is mostly rational; we check facts, logic, and the experience of others. Completeness is typically emotional and this usually takes more time than fact checking. The disconnect is that as advisors, we usually sell using the facts (accuracy), but buyers buy on emotion (completeness). What we tend not to do is to enhance the emotional side of credibility: to convey a sense of honesty, to dispel any suspicions of incompleteness.
Maister gives us some solid tips on creating credibility:
"Effective trusted advisors are (without a single exception, in our experience) very good listeners. Listening is not a sufficient condition by itself, but a necessary one."- The Trusted Advisor, Chapter 11
Communication is a lot like a story. There is a beginning, middle, and an end. There is a setup, tension, and resolution. There is background, setup, and a punch line. When we talk to someone, we create a story. If the listener breaks the story by interrupting, or jumping in with their own story we get off track. We get frustrated because it’s not our story, it’s our story superimposed with the listeners story, but in their frame work.
What good listeners do according to Maister:
What good listeners DON’T do:
"On giving away ideas: The truth is, expertise is like love; not only is it unlimited, you can destroy it only by not giving it away. Love for a child is not cut in half with the birth of a second child. And expertise is not to be confused with what can be scanned into a database."- The Trusted Advisor, Chapter 22
This book has a lot of great information in lists and easy to follow systems. Near the end, Maister gives us eleven techniques that have a big impact in building trust that you can start doing right now. Here are three:
Note what they are feeling: Purely emotional and it feels risky, but this has an impact. Make a comment on how you think someone is feeling. “Joe, you look really excited today! What’s the good news?” or “Joe, you seem really distracted today, did something happen?” I find myself using this more and more and it really starts to help develop and foster emotion and trust in relationships.
Take a point of view: Again, this feels risky but it stimulates reaction and it serves as a way to get the client thinking. “Now let me float a trial balloon here…” or “Hey, who knows where this might go, but it occurred to me that…”
Return calls unbelievably fast: Like within ten minutes fast. No one expects this and it demonstrates how much you value the other person.
In my business, I am not in a consultant/trusted advisor role much, but for the times that I am, I found the techniques in this book very useful. Even the topics that were a bit beyond my scope I found thought provoking. Maister keeps it simple, which I like, and he throws in some humour every now and then to liven it up. His next book is on my list for my October summary.
Until his retirement in 2009, David Maister was widely acknowledged as one of the world’s leading authorities on the management of professional service firms (such as law, accounting, and consulting firms, and companies providing engineering, advertising and executive search services).
