The Trusted Advisor

Highlights

• Most important, we learned that you don’t get the chance to employ advisory skills until you can get someone to trust you enough to share their problems with you. No one ever taught us how to do that either.
• Trust doesn’t just “happen” with the passage of time. Typically it requires a form of personal courage—the will and the skills to raise difficult issues, to communicate empathy and understanding, and the ability to genuinely entertain different and difficult ideas.
• Implicit in both Gates’s and Buffett’s description of their trusted advisors is something easy to overlook: the ability of their advisor to deeply pay attention to their “client.” This ability to focus on the other person is evident in virtually all the trusted advisors we have encountered.
• Professionals who apply trust most successfully are those who are at ease with concepts like: Do well by doing good What goes around comes around You get back what you put in Use it or lose it
• A common trait of all these trusted advisor relationships is that the advisor places a higher value on maintaining and preserving the relationship itself than on the outcomes of the current transaction, financial and otherwise.
• Trust frees us from the need to spend time on inconsequential projects or tedious procedural issues.
• Finally, one of the most significant rewards of a trusted advisor relationship, for both client and advisor, is that in such a relationship the individuals are allowed to be fully who they are.
• Behaving with a professional colleague as you would with a friend (conducting yourself at the office as you would outside it) is an extremely valuable reward of a trusted advisor relationship.
• Trust doesn’t automatically accrue with the passage of time (though one component, reliability, is time-related). Instead, trust increases in step functions—moments that matter. These are moments in which the would-be trustee answers a question a certain way, chooses to raise an issue (or not), even raises their eyebrow in a certain way at a particular moment.
• It’s not the person that buys, nor is it the business—it’s the person in the role that is doing the buying.
• The potential of trust violation is always there in a trusting relationship. The choice on the part of the advisor not to violate that trust is what makes the relationship special.
• Creating trust entails taking some personal risks. It is the essence of trusting. If you’re not a little scared on occasion, then you’re not taking a risk. And if you’re not taking a risk, you’re not likely to create trust.
• At any point in time, trust is more like ballroom dancing. One person must lead (trust) and one must follow (be trustworthy), if it is going to work. If there is ambiguity about who is leading and who is following, then the dance collapses into (at best) two parallel exercises in solo movement.
• The ability to trust someone else is a necessary, though not a sufficient, condition for being trustworthy.
• The truth is, “institutional trust” is a half-truth. We don’t trust institutions or processes in the same complex, rich way we trust people; to say so is to anthropomorphize institutions.
• It is not enough for a professional to be right: An advisor’s job is to be helpful.
• “People don’t care what you know until they know that you care.”
• The principle here is that the successful advisor assumes responsibility for the proper mutual understanding.
• The most effective way to influence a client is to help the person feel that the solution was (to a large extent) his or her idea, or at the very least, his or her decision.
• If you can’t deal with client politics, you cannot be an effective advisor.
• “There’s no such thing as a ‘business relationship,’ only relationships with people with whom you’re doing business.”
• Before you go into any meeting with a client (or prospective client), figure out the two or three things you want the client to absolutely believe about you by the end of the meeting.
• Accordingly, as you listen to a client talk, the question on your mind should be, “What makes this person different from any other client I’ve served? What does that mean for what I should say and how I should behave?”
• Like the overeager spouse, you must learn to hold back the temptation to say, early on, “I know how to solve your problem. You need to do the following.” You may be right, but you will fail as a trusted advisor, and your advice will probably not be accepted. Clients don’t always want advice; they often just want a sympathetic ear.
• We all want to hear solutions to our problems, but we are not at all inclined to take them seriously unless the person giving the answers has “earned the right” to give them. Earning the right has three parts: Understanding the client’s situation Understanding how the client feels about it Convincing the client that we understand both of the previous two items
• Demands are usually resented, while requests for help usually evoke a positive response. It is an interesting feature of the human condition that we often resent those who have done us a favor, because we now owe them something in return. In contrast, we feel kindly disposed to those we have helped.
• There is no more certain way to make somebody think you are fascinating and enjoyable to be with than to keep them talking about themselves.
• Insecurity is a common source of trust problems. We have already noted the common temptation, in a client conversation, of jumping too soon to “the answer.”
• Just as wanting all the credit and none of the blame is self-focused, so is accepting all the responsibility. Neither is client-focused, because neither is grounded in objective reality.
• Inclusive professionalism means acknowledging and engaging the professionalism of others. It means that the unique talents of each party should be brought to bear jointly for the greater good. It means joint responsibility for the effectiveness of work.
• The truth is, both long-term and short-term results are maximized by long-term behavior on our part.
• The disconnect between stated principles or values and their manifestation in daily behaviors is deadly.
• While socializing is not necessary, being sociable is. It’s the window into the clients’ selves as people, their needs, hopes, and fears.
• One of the most important lessons to learn is that to earn trust, you must bet on the long-term benefit of the relationship.
• Credibility isn’t just content expertise. It’s content expertise plus “presence,” which refers to how we look, act, react, and talk about our content.
• The concept of credibility includes notions of both accuracy and completeness. These parallel the rational and emotional realms. Accuracy, in the client-advisor world, is mostly rational. We check facts, logic, and other people’s experiences to assess whether someone is accurate. Completeness, on the other hand, is frequently assessed more emotionally.
• The best service professionals excel at two things in conveying credibility: anticipating needs, and speaking about needs that are commonly not articulated.
• Don’t tell lies, or even exaggerate. At all. Ever.
• Make sure you’ve done absolutely all your homework on the client company, the client marketplace, and the client individual, and that it’s absolutely up to the minute. Even if you know them and their business cold, there is a decent chance that some news about your client may have been published that very day.
• There’s no reason to show off. They already assume you know what you’re talking about (or how to handle a situation). The number of times clients actually want to test your knowledge is actually quite low.
• Judgments about reliability can be “borrowed” by checking the experiences that other clients have had with the advisor. These are temporary estimates, however, and can be quickly revised by the client’s own direct experience.
• Reliability in this largely rational sense is the repeated experience of links between promises and action. We judge someone’s reliability with due dates and quality levels: “on time and on spec.”
• Reliability also has an emotional aspect, which is revealed when things are done in the manner that clients prefer, or to which they are accustomed.
• A good advisor will find (or create) a number of opportunities to demonstrate both rational and emotional reliability, by making promises, explicit or implicit, and then delivering on them.
• Strategies for reliability include setting up a series of deadlines or opportunities to deliver discrete work product components within a short and usually agreed-upon period of time.
• The biggest leverage for reliability enhancement probably lies in the emotional realm. The more a provider can do to understand and relate to the usually unconscious norms of the client, the more the client will feel at ease and experience a sense of reliability.
• High intimacy skill in an advisor is experienced by the client as “a safe haven for tough issues.” This means that the advisor is seen as discreet, that they are low-risk for sharing confidences. It also means the client feels free to be vulnerable.
• Establishing intimacy is playing a “game” of mutually increasing risk. One party offers a piece of himself or herself and the other party either responds (thereby deepening intimacy) or chooses not to respond (thereby drawing an intimacy line).
• By getting closer to the emotional components of the client’s decision making, we can ask people questions they haven’t previously heard from advisors. It shows we have a different angle, a different point of view, and a broader perspective. It’s fun for them and it’s fun for us. It builds rapport and repartee. And you learn a lot.
• In short, any form of preoccupation with our own agenda is focusing on something other than the client, and it will reduce trust directly.
• Think about how you would help your client if you were responsible for this person’s future success. Even if you are a specialist called in only on specific occasions, think about their success. Try to make their concerns your concerns.
• Framing consists of formulating problem statements, hypotheses, and points of view, built around what is important to the client. Framing is usually the point in the process where the client becomes consciously aware of value being added by the advisor, and hence where significant levels of trust can be built.
• By jointly envisioning, the advisor and the client imagine (in rich detail) how the end result might look, without prematurely giving in to the temptation to solve the problem.
• Yet at the end of the day, that client (and nearly all clients) wants to be able to look someone in the eye and know that that someone cares for him and won’t let things go by that aren’t right for him or her.
• if the message carries any emotional flavor at all (and most do), then not to use emotive colorings or tones in our acknowledgments sends the message that we are not listening.
• If a client has a strong feeling about something, it’s incumbent on us to acknowledge that feeling in our reaction to it—just as we would acknowledge rational data by paraphrasing, we need to acknowledge feelings through a display of empathy.
• Supportive listening demonstrates empathy and shows that the listener not only understands why the client feels a particular way about an issue or problem but also that he or she will help the client feel comfortable with that point of view. (“Gee, that must be tough!”)
• The invitation to discuss an agenda, even if only for sixty seconds, sends a powerful signal at the outset that the meeting is being run for the mutual benefit of all present and is not the closely held property of one person or segment of the meeting.
• If we behave as if one of us owns the agenda, has predetermined it, is wedded to it, and has a vested interest in maintaining it, then we have effectively created a “me versus you” dynamic.
• The most brilliant, incisive insight will fall on completely deaf ears if the advisor has not yet earned the right to frame the issue by going through the necessary preceding steps of engaging and listening.
• The effectiveness of the advisor does not lie so much in the invention of the next (proprietary) paradigm as it does in finding the way to lead a particular client, with a particular problem, into seeing the relevance of an old (or new) paradigm.
• There are sins of omission and sins of commission. Not taking a position sacrifices an enormous range of options for helping a client. It diminishes the possibility of framing hypotheses, brainstorming, stimulating conversation, and gaining the client’s insight by involving them in evolving thinking. For the sake of an inward fear (read self-orientation), this so-called risk aversion surrenders many positives. It isn’t risky to do this; it’s unprofessional not to do it.
• Risk isn’t antithetical to trust; risk is part and parcel of trust. So when people say, “That won’t increase trust, it’s too risky,” we say, “Taking a risk is precisely how you build trust.”
• Most research on buying suggests that buying is a highly emotional process. This is particularly true for large-ticket, highly differentiated, complex, risky-to-the-client purchases like professional services.
• There are two kinds of risks: the risk of doing a wrong thing, and the risk of not doing a right thing.
• A trusted advisor is above all someone who is capable of totally and completely devoting himself, his caring, and his attention to the client. The biggest obstacle to doing that is the tendency to devote our caring and attention to ourselves.
• As you look at a client, force yourself to ask three questions: What is the client’s prevailing personal motivation? What is their personality? How does the state of their organization affect their worldview?
• It is said that good acting is not lying, but focusing on the one aspect of your personality or character that is needed for the role, and then suppressing the other aspects of your personality. This is good advice. Don’t fake it, lie, or misrepresent, but find that part of you that can empathize in this situation.
• Clients who are comfortable with the intimacy and self-orientation factors will signal this early. Clients who are comfortable with the credibility and reliability factors may need to be led to the intimacy and self-orientation factors.
• The truth is, sales and service, when thought of properly, converge. The two are flip sides of the same coin in service to the common goal of serving the client.
• In professional services, where the “good” being bought is not only expensive but also intangible and often vague, the seller who succeeds is the seller who can show the buyer just what it feels like to be in a relationship together.
• The professions, in a sense, sell confidence, security, and ease. But no client wants to buy air unless they can breathe it first.
• The biggest thing I have found in progressing a relationship is to do it in a completely non-self-interested way. The client is in effect asking, “How much do you understand me (the person you are trying to connect with) and who I am?”
• Serving a client does not just mean going away, doing the work, and coming back with a wonderful product that you expect them to praise. Instead, we must keep clients up-to-date, continue to ask them questions that show we’re working on it for real, and build their input quite visibly into our work product.
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• We must be prepared to deal with the client’s ever-changing mind. We can be sure that circumstances will change from the point at which our assignment begins to the point it is completed. As our client’s situation evolves and changes, we should expect our client’s goals and mind to change as well.
• Trust is built upon respect, and since respect comes in part from seeing some performance, it becomes imperative that we find the means to deliver a small, fast result to evidence our efforts. We must make something happen, and make it happen quickly.
• We must always keep clients in the loop regarding our progress. We should not wait to bowl them over with blinding insights at the end. Chances are, the insights won’t be that blinding.
• You also shouldn’t give in to the temptation to repeatedly “under-promise and over-deliver”—that combination amounts to a form of lying. You’re generally better off doing exactly what you promised.
• Clients can get especially frustrated and disappointed when advisors refuse to accept responsibility, even for unintentional acts. Hearing, “It was not my fault,” or “But that was not my intention” strikes clients as a lame defense. They consider it an abdication of responsibility, a diversion of blame, and an infraction in the trust relationship.
• We should always try to make sure that our answer is not a purely technical one. And always ask how our work affects the client individually and personally.
• To maintain trust when the project is over, we must recognize that it’s never over, as long as we check in. The impact of our work continues long after we are gone, and in ways we often can’t imagine.
• Relationship managers are most effective when they focus on the (long-term) issue of strengthening the relationship. When relationship managers see themselves primarily as salespeople, primarily focused on generating more fees from the client, they are less well accepted by the client and become less effective.
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• There is an inexhaustible supply of problems waiting to be solved. If you implicitly say that your solution set is limited by holding on to it, you appear less competent. You are better off making freely available that which is discoverable (including a point of view on occasion), because you demonstrate confidence that, whatever the problem, you will have something constructive to say on it.
• In some people’s view of cross-selling, there is the expectation that an institutional relationship can transmit trust. It cannot. Trust is personal. When the presumption of institutional transferability confronts the reality of strangers meeting, all are left with an uncomfortable feeling.
• The issue in cross-selling is not information quality and access; it is the creation of trust in fragile new relationships, where expectations are high and the hurdles great.
• There is no better indication of our intentions than to spend our valuable time on someone. It proves that we are serious about our commitment to a shared agenda, that our orientation is not only to ourselves, and that we are committed to understanding the other’s perspective.
• Whenever you find yourself thinking, “This guy’s an idiot,” immediately ask yourself, “Why does he believe this? Where’s he coming from? What happened to cause him to think this way?”
• Anyone who understands us has earned the right to engage in discussion and to be heard in return, even to argue with us. Anyone who empathizes with us has earned the right to disagree with us and still have our respect. They have greatly increased the odds of changing our mind.
• to be a good advisor we have to pay attention to three things in every conversation: our client’s words and actions (we would include feelings), our own words and actions (and feelings), and our client’s reaction to our words and actions.
• Whether you’re in a formal or informal meeting, on the phone, or in a large or small group, always start by sharing your idea of an agenda for the meeting and openly (and sincerely) asking the client to add his or her ideas to the agenda. It gives you immediate data, it models for the client the truth of your “we-not-me” attitude, and it creates buy-in.
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• The truth is, it is extremely useful to our clients for us to be able to articulate a point of view, even if it ends up being rejected, or even wrong! There are two reasons: It stimulates reactions, and it crystallizes issues. Stating a point of view serves as a catalyst, a way of helping the client think.
• Advisors who are willing to notice things outside their particular realm of expertise (and to naturally express that interest) make an impression on the client. The impression is that such advisors care, because, in fact, they do.
• The emotional subtext of open-ended questions is one of respect; the listener pays the speaker the respect of allowing the speaker to set the frames of reference: his or her worldview, the sense of what is important and what isn’t, what came first and what comes later, what is cause and what is effect.
• The truth is, expertise is like love: Not only is it unlimited, you destroy it only by not giving it away.
• The human capacity for problem redefinition and creativity is what a successful advisor brings to every situation. It is unlimited; it only gets better with practice.