Let’s assume a High-Trust organization is highly desirable, and focus on how we get there.
A High-Trust organization is made up of people who are trustworthy (and appropriately trusting) in an environment that enables trust.
Let’s use the word ‘virtues’ to describe what high-trust people do. And let’s use ‘values’ to describe what guides their organizations.
What are those virtues? And what are the values that support them?
The Virtues of Trust
The virtues of trust are personal—our level of trustworthiness, and our ability to trust.
The Four Virtues of trustworthiness are contained in the trust equation: Credibility, Reliability, Intimacy, and Low Self-orientation. If someone exhibits those traits, we call them trustworthy.
We consider it virtuous for someone to tell the truth, to behave dependably, to keep confidences, and to be mindful of the needs of others.
The virtues of trusting-ness are the ability to take emotional risks, and an inclination to look for, notice and create positive potential. We consider it virtuous for someone to be generous, and to lead with generosity rather than fear in dealing with others.
The Values of Trust
The virtues of trust are personal; the values of trust are institutional. A person’s virtues ought to be consistent with (and reinforced by) an organization’s values.
There are Four Values of trust (I have called them Principles of Trust elsewhere). They are:
Customer/client focus for the sake of the customer/client;
A habit of collaboration;
A focus on the medium-to-long term, on relationships rather than transactions;
A default stance to transparency, except where illegal or injurious
The Trust Values in a high-trust organization drive the organization’s external relationships, leadership, structure, rewards and key processes.
Each of those four values speaks to the nature of relationships—because trust is about relationships.
The High-Trust Organization
The high-trust organization knows how to define and find people who can trust. It helps people grow their own trustworthiness. (See our own Trust Quotient as an example of a diagnostic and development tool built around the four virtues of trustworthiness).
A high-trust organization is not shy about using a term like “virtue.” It is hard to define the level of virtue inherent in a single act by a single person; but in the aggregate, it is very easy.
Trust is, at root, a moral concept. A high-trust organization is an organization whose people behave ethically simply because it’s the right thing to do, and which itself supports such ethical behavior—not just particular policies, but ethical behavior itself.
The high-trust organization is clear about its values. It may or may not use the specific Trust Values outlined above, but those it has will be relationship-relevant.
A high-trust organization believes that high economic performance and social responsibility are both maximized by the consistent pursuit of trust-based relationships over time.
The goal of a High-trust organization is not economic performance; but high economic performance is very often the outcome.
When I talk about trust-based selling, the question closest to the surface for most listeners is:
"What do I do when my client says to me, 'your price is too high'?"
I sat down with Peter Clayton, of TotalPicture Radio to talk about just that. If you want to settle back and listen, you can hear that conversation in the totalpicture.com podcast interview that resulted.
If you prefer your experience visual rather than aural, you can click below the "Listen to the Podcast" box to read the transcript.
Here's a taste, beginning with Peter's intro:
"If you're like most professionals, you're not comfortable with selling. It's not easy fighting the feeling that hyping yourself is somehow inappropriate. And it's worse when you have to deal with objections, doing presentations, and getting rejections — or waiting for the phone to ring." — Charles H. Green
Welcome to a Success Strategies podcast on TotalPicture Radio, with Peter Clayton reporting. When I came across Charles H. Green's article in RainToday (a fabulous sales and marketing resource), I immediately contacted Charlie and asked him share his insights with us. He is founder and CEO of Trusted Advisor Associates based in West Orange, NJ.
Charlie is the author of Trust-based Selling and co-author of The Trusted Advisor. Centering on the theme of trust in business relationships, Charles works with complex organizations to improve trust in sales, internal trust between organizations, and trusted advisor relationships with external clients and customers. He is a speaker and executive educator on trust-based relationships and trust-based selling in complex businesses.
We're all in sales today. And for sales adverse people such as myself, learning how to present yourself, and your expertise using positive, "deal winning" sales skills has become a matter of survival.
You know how sometimes you hear a theme every once in a while, and you don’t make much of it? But then you hear it five times in a week, and suddenly you say whoah, something’s going on here!
That’s how it is for me with trust and innovation. I have now seen enough about their connection that I notice it.
Got problems with innovation? R&D not giving you much bang for the buck? Suffering from same-old service offerings? Product un-differentiation got you down? Read on.
Observation: Pessimists Don’t Innovate, Nor do they Trust
In Why Victims Can’t Invent Anything, Michael Maddock and Raphael Louis Viton suggest a simple test for the ability to innovate: the old glass is half full, half empty test. If you are optimistic, you are a creator. If you are pessimistic, you are a victim. Guess which one wildly out-innovates the other?
Now marry that up with the profile of trusting and non-trusting people from Eric Uslaner, arguably the world’s leading academic expert in trust. Paraphrasing, high-trusting people believe that life is good, and that they are in control of their lives. Non-trusting people believe life is fundamentally unfair, and that other powers are in control of their lives.
You want to increase innovation? Hire optimistic, high-energy people; shun conspiracy theorists. And why does this work? Because they trust each other.
Diagnosis: More Trust Yields More Innovation
Let’s follow this logic further. Trusting each other means people are open to each others’ ideas. Robert Porter Lynch explains the link.
Creativity happens, he says, very little by sitting around contemplating. Rather, it comes about from our interaction with others. In particular: people different from ourselves, who think in fundamentally opposite ways from the way we think.
If we’re not open to others—if our fundamental approach to others is fear-based, if we come from anger or ego or fight/flight responses—we shut ourselves off from the creative forces that come through sharing those different perspectives. We see them as threats.
The bridge is trust. If we can trust the other person, then we can hear and consider their perspectives, as they do ours. Net: communication, creativity, new ideas, innovation.
Trust and Innovation: Does It Work in the Real World?
Forget the thinkers: who does this? One who can speak to this directly is Ross Smith at Microsoft. When in charge of the Windows Security Team, Ross and wingman Mark Hanson realized they had some incredible talent on the team that was under-utilized. They needed to innovate. As Ross studied innovation, he began to realize trust was the key to getting there.
Does it work for Ross? He’ll answer a resounding ‘yes.’
In the course of the next month, you’ll be hearing from several of these people: Eric Uslaner, Robert Porter Lynch and Ross Smith in particular, as well as others. I think you’ll enjoy reading what they have to say.
For now, let’s just notice what they all agree on: the road to innovation goes through trust.
The banking and financial services industry has recently plummeted into the "least trusted groupings" of industries. And not without reason, as this blog and others have pointed out.
But of course, that's not true of everyone. There are some interesting examples of trustworthy and successful behavior in the financial sector. Here are two.
One of the Four Principles of Trust is to adopt a long-term perspective, focusing on relationships rather than transactions. What would you think of a financial advisory business that invests in new clients five years before seeing a return?
That is pretty unusual for the financial advisory business. Normally, the focus is much shorter term. In addition, garden variety wisdom in financial advisory is that you look for high net worth clients, because the typical compensation structure for the business varies with asset levels. What would you think, then, of an advisory business that focuses on lower net worth individuals?
Hanson McClain has adopted both these heretical approaches, and married them to a narrowly defined and specialized target segment -- retirees from the telecommunications and public utilities industries. The results are striking.
That segment has been relatively stable, with excellent retiree benefit plans, and has a disproportionately high percentage of its workers due to retire in the not-too-distant future. It also has some arcane aspects to its retiree plans.
But this isn’t just smart segmentation and targeting. If the common short-term orientation and focus on “big is better” had been applied to this group, the advisors would not have generated the tremendous referral network they have. The effect is to lower cost of sales, since existing clients identify and market to new ones, which also then increases sales yield rates.
Ed Thauer, Jr., runs a full service financial agency. He started in insurance 34 years ago, and branched out. He has gotten his business to Top of the Table status in the Million Dollar Round Table system. (That means he’s done very well).
Ed still does all his own enrollments. That means he personally does a job that is all-too-tempting to parcel out to others—initial data collection.
Not everyone does this; automating and delegating is an obvious way to make your time more efficient—right? So why does Ed do it?
As a mentor Ed cites once said,
“You dress up and show up and see the people, see the people, see the people. Nothing happens unless you see the people.”
Ed is also partial to a particular sales model for his industry—but clearly the model hasn’t gotten in the way of his central view of personal connection as key to the customer relationship.
Yes, there is trust in systems. Reliability, accuracy, comprehensiveness are all trustworthiness-enhancing variables. But their impact is less than the softer sides of trust—intimacy and low self-orientation; a sense that the seller actually does care about you.
February 2010
Let’s assume a High-Trust organization is highly desirable, and focus on how we get there.
When I talk about trust-based selling, the question closest to the surface for most listeners is:
You know how sometimes you hear a theme every once in a while, and you don’t make much of it? But then you hear it five times in a week, and suddenly you say whoah, something’s going on here! 
Contrary to the popular saying (“if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”), the ability to manage is not dependent on the ability to measure. 
The banking and financial services industry