Moments of Truth, Improvised

by Andrea Howe on Thursday, September 2, 2010 (post #774)

Anyone who’s been in professional services for more than a week has probably encountered a tricky client situation or two. Some examples:

- A prospective client asks you point blank, “What experience do you have in xyz industry?” and even though you saw that question coming, you didn’t think it would be quite so direct, and the honest answer is zero, zip, nada—only you’re afraid to say so because you think it’s a deal-breaker and you’ve got other relevant experience that surely they’ll want to hear about before summarily dismissing you!

- You thought the draft deliverable you turned in yesterday was pretty good until you got an email from your client saying how disappointed she is in the product and that, quite frankly, she’s seriously re-considering sending you to London for the next and largest revenue-producing phase of the project.

- You’re seconds away from beginning a meeting with a very senior client, originally scheduled to discuss how to expand the successful work you’re doing together, but an hour earlier you accidentally overheard him in the lunchroom speaking with colleagues about dumping your company and hiring your number one competitor instead.

(By the way: 2 of those 3 really happened to us: which is the made-up story?)

I call these Moments of Truth—when something happens, and suddenly it feels like you’re alone on a sinking ship with no life preserver in sight, and you’d rather be anywhere but where you are.

Daniel Goleman, author of “Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ,” taught us to understand the science behind our reaction, using the phrase “amygdala hijack” to describe how our well-functioning “thinking brain” (the neocortex) gets completely overruled by the part of the brain that manages our survival. Then our amygdala-threatened-selves do stupid things like spin a great story of how we don’t exactly have direct experience in xyz industry but blah blah blah … or subtly (and maybe overtly) blame our colleague for the sub-par work product … or completely sidestep an awkward interaction altogether in favor of maintaining the pretense that everything really is OK after all. In other words: we're in fight or flight mode, and often both at once.

Moments of Truth become Moments of Learning

We spend a lot of time dealing with Moments of Truth in our learning programs because they happen a lot in your business relationships. How you handle them speaks volumes about what you’re made of. It speaks to whether or not you have the mindset, motives, and agility of a Trusted Advisor. Being effective in a Moment of Truth requires more than mastering a few behavioral tricks; it demands a new way of thinking and being.

So we do a lot of out-of-the-box experiential learning that deals on the spot with your own live, real situations. Occasionally we use our own caselets for you to experiment with—ones that have been tested for a decade and earned a special place in the hearts of our alumni, like “The Lunchroom.” In other words, we do what most classroom learners universally dread: we role-play.

All right, collective groan--I know, I know, I hate role-playing too. It’s scary and contrived. And there’s never enough background or history or facts to be really comfortable in a role-play. It’s a common refrain during debriefs: “If only I’d known more about the situation I could have handled it better.”

But let’s be real: How many times have you prepped for hours for a meeting, only to learn in the first two minutes that the client just came out of another meeting in which a major decision was made that completely alters not only your agenda for this meeting but your entire set of recommendations for the engagement?

In a Moment of Truth, background and history and facts don’t matter one iota because your reptilian brain doesn’t care—it’s focused exclusively on the emotions of the moment. It has neither the time nor the inclination to process anything else.

Q. Faced with an MOT, what’s a Trusted Advisor to do?

A. Learn how to improvise.

The Practice of Improvisation: a Key Trusted Advisor Capability

To improvise is to “invent, compose, or perform with little or no preparation.” Which is exactly what is called for in a Moment of Truth—the ability to deal on the spot with something unexpected.

Believe it or not, you get better at improvising by practicing improvisation. (And that only sounds like an oxymoron—it’s actually very true). Practice is exactly how professional improv comedians (think, Whose Line is it, Anyway?) become so skilled at their craft.

They practice being quick to respond instead of over-thinking. They practice “yes-and” responses, where they build on what’s already been said, instead of contradicting or denying what someone else has already offered. They practice subordinating their own egos to support what’s being created by the collective instead of hogging the spotlight and stealing a scene. They practice giving up being clever and witty and funny and instead get real.

How do they do this? They get together and … role-play. They do it again and again, always with new scenarios and relationships that are completely made up on the spot. And when it’s show time and the curtain goes up, they still have no idea what they’re going to create together because everything is based on audience suggestion. But what they do know is that they’re fully rehearsed at being responsive, collaborative, and authentic.

In Trusted Advisor terms, they’re credible, transparent, other-oriented, related.

And that is something worth practicing to get good at. So: role-plays? Yep, role-plays.

The Trusted Advisor/Improviser—a Brief Commercial

If you think your skills could use a tune up or you wish you felt more confident in the Moments of Truth you face with your clients and colleagues, we’d love to have you come practice with us Sept 28 and 29 in Washington, DC. Being a Trusted Advisor: Walking the Talk is a rare opportunity to immerse yourself in the mindsets and skill sets of a Trusted Advisor.

We’ll improvise. We’ll laugh a lot. And we’ll be sure you walk away with far greater value than you expected.

Interested in learning how to increase trust anywhere, with anyone, anytime? Join us in Washington DC in September. Click here to find out more.

Andrea Howe is an Associate with Trusted Advisor Associates LLC, and founder/CEO of BossaNova Consulting Group. Read more about Andrea at http://trustedadvisor.com/consultants.andreahowe/

Trust Me, I'm from HR/ IT/ Legal/ Finance !

by Charles H. Green on Wednesday, September 1, 2010 (post #773)

When we hear the phrase “Trusted Advisor,” most of us think of external experts: consultants, actuaries, accountants, lawyers, the professions. But there is another group for whom that term is at least as relevant—maybe even more so. That group is made up of internal staff functions: and mainly the “Staff Big Four:” HR, IT, Legal and Finance.

These internal staff have exactly the same challenge that their outside brethren have—to successfully persuade and influence others, over whom they have exactly zero direct authority.

But it’s worse for internals: first, because they eat in the same lunchroom as their clients and are known by their first names, they tend to not get the same respect that outside experts do.

Second: an internal consultant can’t fire his or her client. They are joined at the hip, like a married couple, for better or worse.

The Big 4 staff functions represent a big chunk of our business at Trusted Advisor Associates, not far behind external Trusted Advisor work, at about the same level as Trust-Based Selling work.. And although the keys to success are pretty much the same for internal advisors as for externals, there are some distinct cultural problems that each of the Big 4 staff functions face. 

Differences Between the "Big 4" Staff Functions Affecting Trust

The IT Challenge. Ask any line employee. “The problem with IT,” they’ll say, is “they use too much jargon and don’t deliver on time or on budget.” Strip out the value-laden words and what we hear is that IT has a reputation for being non-user-friendly, and that its big trust opportunity may lie in improving reliability.

The HR Challenge. Unlike their IT brethren, HR suffers from speaking the same language as everyone else; which means everyone else feels equal to them in expertise. AS HR folks will tell you: they "can’t get no respect;" and the more they ask for it, they less they get.

The Legal Challenge. You know this one too. “The trouble with lawyers is, they always tell me what I can’t do, and don’t help me with what I can do.” Let’s translate that into simply a predilection for avoiding Type 1 error (doing the wrong thing) at the cost of Type 2 error (not doing the right thing). Let’s call this one a misalignment around risk profiles.

The Finance Challenge. Finance tends to speak clearly, meet deadlines, and be very sober about risk. In fact, very sober about pretty much everything. The fear that clients have of finance people is that of being relentlessly ground down on budgets, financial analyses, plans and forecasts. They are relentlessly, somberly, right. 

Each of these groups can take some simple, solid steps toward improving their level of trust by their clients. (And if you’re an external, keep reading: this applies to you too).

Five Trust-Enhancing Opportunities Facing Key Staff Functions

Improving Credibility. More an issue for HR than the others, remember that credibility is not only—in fact, not even mainly—an issue of credentials. The average internal client is not impressed that you have advanced degrees, or that you are a recognized expert in OD. You can argue that’s not fair, but arguing fairness just digs the hole deeper. 

What improves credibility is the capacity to apply your knowledge to a specific client situation--in their language. Instead of letting the client know that you’ve seen the latest, greatest research on teaching emotional intelligence—instead, use emotional intelligence yourself to help identify, and identify yourself with, client issues. For example, “Joe, do you find your people are as involved in work as you’d like them to be? Where do you see that playing out? And how big an issue is it for you? In what terms?”

Improving reliability. Reliability—an issue that affects IT more than the other Big Four--is one of the four key components of the Trust Equation, and one of the easiest to correct. Simple awareness is a good place to begin. Reliability lends itself far more easily to measurement than do the other components of trust (credibility, intimacy, low self-orientation); figure out good measures of reliability, and track them. Think you’re already doing the most you can? Try increasing the number of promises you make, even small ones; then make sure to meet them.

Improving Intimacy. Intimacy is the variable that makes an advisor ‘client-friendly.’ Intimacy skills are what make a client feel comfortable sharing, or not sharing, information with you.  If you’re being constantly shunted into a role which is far short of your capabilities, this is one area to focus on (the other is self-orientation—see below). 

You don’t have to resort to commenting on kids’ pictures, college degrees and ‘how ‘bout them Bulls.’ Make it a point to learn things about your clients’ business lives—then ask them for help in understanding things that you genuinely don’t understand about them.

Self-Orientation. We find that nearly everyone can improve their trustworthiness by getting better at lowering their self-orientation (see “Get Off Your S”). Within the Big Four staff functions, this is particularly useful for the HR and IT organizations. Too many clients see HR as whiney, and lawyers as officious, both of which are forms of overly developed self-orientation.

The solution is harder than for the other issues, but well within reach. Simply be very, very sure to see issues from the client’s vantage point—not just from yours. No one’s asking you to abdicate your professional perspectives, just to see it as well from the other side of the table. If a client says to you, “We want to do X, how can we do it?” make sure to start with, “Interesting idea; let me make sure I understand what this means to you. Tell me more about what you could do with this, how it would make you more successful. I want to make sure I know where you’re coming from before I try to comment.”

Risk-Orientation. Both Finance and Legal get heavily tarred with the brush of being too risk-averse. To some extent that may seem unfair; after all, part of their job is indeed, to manage downside risk. 

But organizations that adopt an adversarial relationship, where Staff represents the downside and Line argues for the upside, are creating vast areas of unnecessary cost, mistrust and confusion. It’s far better to create collaborative relationships, where issues can be sorted out mutually, at the issue by issue and person by person level.

While improving self-orientation and intimacy skills are certainly relevant for many legal and financial people, there is still an underlying disconnect about risk. This disconnect has to be called out at the start. It’s no good having lawyers and finance people suggesting, from the get-go, that their role is to reign in the irrational exuberance of those id- and ego-driven people out there in the market; we can look at the pharmaceutical and investment banking industries as pockets where the relationship has deteriorated into such a caricature, and it is not pretty.

Instead, staff people have to state the terms at the outset: ‘We are here to collaborate with you in jointly determining the right amount of business risk to take on, consistent with legal, regulatory and market-based risk. We all work for the same organization; and we’re committed to working with you.’

Then, walk the talk.

Note: This article is also available in .pdf article form for ease in forwarding: Trust Me, I'm from HR/ IT/ Legal/ Finance ! [pdf]

Interested in learning how to increase trust anywhere, with anyone, anytime? Join us in Washington DC in September. Click here to find out more.

Charles H. Green is founder and CEO of Trusted Advisor Associates LLC; read more about Charlie at http://trustedadvisor.com/cgreen/

You can follow him on twitter @CharlesHGreen

Why Trust Statistics Can Be as Misleading as Crime Statistics

by Charles H. Green on Tuesday, August 31, 2010 (post #772)

In each pair, guess which city has the higher violent crime rate? 

Lexington, KY vs. New York City    ___

Tucson, AZ vs. Los Angeles, CA    ___

Tulsa, OK vs. San Jose, CA           ___

St. Paul, MN vs. San Antonio, TX   ___

Memphis, TN vs. Detroit, MI           ___

Minneapolis, MN vs. Houston, TX ___

As you might have guessed, the data are a bit counter-intuitive. In each pair, it is the smaller City (listed first in each pair) that has the higher crime rate. Data are from the FBI and the US Census Bureau.

The FBI goes to some trouble to warn against using their data in precisely the ways I just did—to rank cities by their crime rates.   The FBI says:

For example, one city may report more crime than a comparable one, not because there is more crime, but rather because its law enforcement agency, through proactive efforts, identifies more offenses. Attitudes of the citizens toward crime and their crime reporting practices, especially concerning minor offenses, also have an impact on the volume of crimes known to police.

They are quite right to warn. During the Nixon administration, the US government founded the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration within the Justice Department. On the statistical front, the LEAA developed the National Crime Victimization Survey, an antidote to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting. The UCR had simply measured police reports; the LEAA took a survey approach, by contacting the whole population. Results varied widely, particularly in cities like Philadelphia, with police forces long suspected of under-reporting crime stats.

Trust Measurement and Definitions

Trust statistics are even more suspect than crime statistics, I suggest. In part this is due to definitional issues. On Edelman PR’s Tweetlevel tool, the New York Times twitter account scores 94.2 on trust—lower than Perez Hilton (94.3) and Justin Bieber (the King of Trust, at 97.5).

Trust Measurement and Volume vs. Frequency

But more importantly, human beings are likely to confuse buzz, spin and hustle with underlying reality; raw numbers with frequency.

Ask yourself: compared to ten years ago, with how many people outside your immediate family and co-workers do you interact daily?

Go ahead, fill it in. And let us know what your two columns added up to, this could be an interesting social statistic. (My own scores were 43 vs. 225, for a now:then ratio of 5.23).

Your now:then ratio indicates the number of Trust-Pointä opportunities you have in a given day: in my case, over five times what I used to have.

My bet is that, on any given day, I will have more instances of distrust than I had ten years ago. And yet—on any given day, I will be disappointed by far fewer people proportionately than I was ten years ago. 

Now: suppose I answer a trust survey that asks me, “How trustworthy do you find people these days?” 

·    How many of us answer “not as much as before” because we’re thinking of the increase in the absolute number of untrustworthy interactions?

·    How many of us answer “more than I used to” because we’re thinking of the decrease in the frequency rate of untrustworthy interactions?

I honestly don’t know the answer to that one. Nor, I suspect, do the people answering the survey themselves. Which suggests, if anything, that the people doing the survey haven’t got much of a clue either.

Caveat statisticator!

Interested in learning how to increase trust anywhere, with anyone, anytime? Join us in Washington DC in September. Click here to find out more.

Charles H. Green is founder and CEO of Trusted Advisor Associates LLC; read more about Charlie at http://trustedadvisor.com/cgreen/

You can follow him on twitter @CharlesHGreen

TrustedAdvisor Associates Workshops September 2010

by Charles H. Green on Friday, August 27, 2010 (post #771)

It's hard to believe Summer is practically out, although the weather still lingers. But school has started and with that comes the Fall hustle & bustle. We've been preparing for a jam-packed September and now it is finally upon us. We hope to see many of you at our events listed below. Keep an eye out for a few more additions by next week as well.

------------------

Tues. Sept. 21st      Global Access          Charles H. Green

Charlie will be a presenter in the 2010 Mediation Business Summit webinar. He'll talk about how the sales process is a powerful opportunity to create trust and how behaving in the a trustworthy manner during the sales process both creates customer trust and enhances the odds of getting the sale. He'll outline the principles of Trust-based Selling(r) and discuss how to respond to the Six Toughest Sales Questions. Cost: $100 to attend entire event 8 speakers, via telephone. For more information and to register, visit http://mediationbusinesssummit.com/register/.

  Best of Organizational Development Summit (UPDATE)
with Andrea Howe
Chicago, IL
Sept 21-24th, 2011        

Change of plan! Andrea Howe, Director of Learning Programs, will be participating in Linkage Inc’s Best of Organizational Development Summit in 2011 rather than 2010. We’ll remind you closer to the date!

Tues. Sept. 28th          Washington, DC          Andrea Howe & Charles H. Green

Interested in learning how to increase trust anywhere, with anyone, anytime? Register now for Trusted Advisor Associates' signature program,  Being a Trusted Advisor: Walking the Talk, co-led by Andrea Howe and Charles H. Green. All early registration seats are filled;register now before the program sells out!

Interested in learning how to increase trust anywhere, with anyone, anytime? Join us in Washington DC in September. Click here to find out more.

Charles H. Green is founder and CEO of Trusted Advisor Associates LLC; read more about Charlie at http://trustedadvisor.com/cgreen/

You can follow him on twitter @CharlesHGreen

Why Pulling Yourself Up by Your Own Bootstraps is Hard

by Charles H. Green on Thursday, August 26, 2010 (post #770)

I used to suffer from a particularly bad version of one part of the human condition—a tendency to see things as all about me. I tried like crazy, in many ways, to pull myself up by my own bootstraps. I’ve gotten, well, better; but it wasn’t because of my bootstrap pulling.

I also reached a difficult point once years ago in studying the pedal steel guitar. I was taking private lessons from a real master, and trying very hard on technique. He gave me tons of advice (including most particularly to lighten up), and I tried my darnedest hard to take it all—pulling myself up by my own bootstraps. I never did get better, and finally sold my guitar a year ago.

Pulling On Our Own Bootstraps Just Burns Leather and Calories

Think about the physics of pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps. It’s an impossibility--which of course is why we like it as a metaphor. But life is not a metaphor, while it is constrained by physics.

So—why doesn’t bootstrap-yanking work? And why do we keep trying it?

The Pedal Steel Story

In my guitar case, the immediate cause was clear. I was trying too hard. I’d try to play free and easy—I’d try so, so hard. Which of course was the problem. 

My hands would cramp up, I was trying to so hard.  And I knew trying so hard was the problem. That made it worse, because I knew it was ‘just’ a mental issue. Which made me worry more, which made me try harder. (Substitute golf if you prefer a more conventional metaphor).

It was a vicious circle; a negative feedback loop as bad as any that Jimi Hendrix generated. And knowing the problem didn’t help solve it. It was not one of those unconscious incompetence things. My knowledge got in the way. It was one of those “you can’t solve a problem at the same level the problem was created” problems.

I still love pedal steel music. (Everyone knows Jerry Garcia’s lick on Teach Your Children, but Garcia knew he was a rank hack by Nashville standards: go listen to every note played by Tom Brumley on Buck Owens‘ original version of Together Again.) I just don’t try to play anymore.

The Life Story

In mid-life, I became aware that a lot of my problems were caused by my tendency to overly see things around me as being about me. In the terms I later developed in the Trust Equation we use at Trusted Advisor Associates, I suffered from high self-orientation.

A few years ago I suddenly remembered something I used to say back when I was “in it.” When someone close to me would say something critical about me, and I took it way too personally—even though I knew I was taking it too personally--I would describe the condition as “like having someone point a gun at my head and telling me to calm down.”

At the time, I was just trying to explain to people why I felt paralyzed to think my way out of my self-obsession. Now, in the rear-view mirror, I see it differently.

I see now it was the perfect metaphor, because the metaphor, and my own use of it, were both stuck squarely in my old paradigm. Because everything was about me, I just didn’t have the tools to imagine something that wasn’t about me. My prison was self-limiting because it was self-defining. 

The Bootstrap Story

You can’t talk about this sort of issue in a linear kind of way; you have to deal with metaphors and paradoxes. Gödel’s incompleteness theorems probably apply here, though frankly the math is beyond me.

I’m reduced to platitudes, which I find reassuring in their simple memorability. In addition to “you can’t solve the problem at the level it was created,” I like:

·    When you dig yourself into a hole, first, stop digging;

·    A lawyer who defends himself has a fool for a client;

·    Try not thinking about pink elephants, and

·    You empower what you fear.

My only solutions boil down to three:

1.    Give up. Really. Just stop. If it’s not meant to be, stop fighting. Universe 1, you 0. You’re really not at the center, after all; act like it. Just go be you.

2.    Laugh.  Make sarcastic jokes about it. Get a kick out of your insanity. Find the sick humor in it all, and focus on the humor, not the sick.

3.    Ask for help. Not with the problem, but with the meta-problem. Then accept it. See step 1.

Interested in learning how to increase trust anywhere, with anyone, anytime? Join us in Washington DC in September. Click here to find out more.

Charles H. Green is founder and CEO of Trusted Advisor Associates LLC; read more about Charlie at http://trustedadvisor.com/cgreen/

You can follow him on twitter @CharlesHGreen