This is the last in a series of five. The other posts address warning signs of low-trust organizations coming from:

• Employees
• Teams
• Leadership
• Products and Services
• Clients and Customers (this blogpost)

How Your Clients and Customers Tell You You’re Low-Trust

It’s almost inconceivable that a high-trust organization will have low-trust relationships with its clients or customers. And that works in reverse: low-trust buyer relationships are a tip-off that something is amiss internally as well. Sometimes it’s easier to read the external signals, so here they are:

1.    Your colleagues speak disparagingly of your customers.

• “They’re trying to pull a fast one on us; we can’t let them get away with it.” Whoa, simmer down. People who ascribe negative motives to customers’ actions without data, will generally do the same within the organization.  With all due respect to Andy Grove, paranoia is rarely a good corporate value to promote.
• “I’ll believe it when I get it in writing.” If your people insist on contractual, legalistic relationships with customers, they’ll do the same internally. And since trust greatly reduces time and costs, that attitude is costing you dearly, internally as well as externally.

2.    You haven’t gotten a new referral client in 6 months.

• This is such a key concept that it has been quantitatively refined (brilliantly) in the Net Promoter Score first developed by Bain’s Reichheld and Markey. At its heart: the single metric that best correlates with success is your clients’ tendency to promote you.
• If you have great referrals, you almost certainly have delighted customers and energized employees. And that rarely happens without great levels of trust within the organization.

3.    You’re losing customers and don’t really know why.

• Look at your customer list: is it basically growing or shrinking? Come on, you know the answer, pick one.
• Now ask yourself: do I really know why that is? Or do I have a list of anecdotal, seemingly unrelated reasons? The CEO left; that guy’s a complete jerk; they decided to go with the low-price provider; they’re rationalizing suppliers.
• That is not an unrelated list, after all. The common denominator is, they don’t trust you. And if your customers don’t trust you, the odds are remote that you live in a high-trust organization.

4.    You’re being asked to submit bids and respond to RFPs for long-time clients.

• We don’t want to be dogmatic about this one: there is a long-term, secular trend toward professional procurement. That trend is not Evil incarnate; the procurement people are your new clients. Treat them as such, respectfully.
• However: if YourCo seems to be singled out for this treatment, if it’s not a slow trend but a landslide for you, then maybe the market is telling you something. It’s telling you you’re not trusted. If you were trusted, you’d be seeing many fewer RFPs, you’d be getting sole-sourced where reasonable, you’d be getting in to define some RFPs, and you’d be getting some very personal coaching from the customer about how to operate in the new procurement world.
• That’s not happening? Then odds are, your customers don’t trust you. They’ve never been shown the difference between genuine concern and manipulation. They’d prefer to deal at arms-length, with professional buyers who are immune to emotional bullying and enticement alike. They prefer to deal on price, because they haven’t been shown any good reason to deal on any other basis.
• And if you’re quoting on price, using self-oriented sales tactics with your customers, then you probably don’t respect your own products, value and organization. Sounds like low-trust.

We hope you’ve enjoyed this little series on warning signs of a low-trust organization. Writing it has reminded us of two things:

1.    Trust is infectious. A high-trust organization is highly correlated with high performance on so many dimensions: innovation, people, leadership, products, and markets.

2.    Trust begins at home. Correlation is not causality, but causality is clearly at work in trust. Furthermore, it flows more in certain ways than in others. In very broad terms, the five factors we’ve discussed move in the following manner to create a high-trust organization.

It generally starts with leadership; but that’s a different series for another time.

This post was written by Sandy Styer
Sandy Styer is TAA's practice leader for the Trust Quotient, Trust Quotient 360 and Trust Temperament service offerings, and Trust Audit services. You can read more about her here. You can follow Sandy on Twitter @sandystyer

• Employees
• Teams
• Leadership
• Products and Services (this blogpost)
• Clients and Customers

Product/Service Warning Signs of a Low-Trust Organization

Take a hard look at YourCo’s products and services. Not only do they provide tipoffs about high or low trust – they are themselves the beneficiaries (or victims) of high or low trust. YourCo’s market offering is very much tied up with trust.

Here are some product/service indicators of low trust at YourCo:

1. Innovation is low in YourCo.

• Pick five big-picture indicators of innovation and rank your organization vs. your competitors. If you rank high, you probably have a high-trust organization. Low? Then probably not so much.
• If you don’t rank well, you’ve got well-rehearsed excuses. “We’re like Apple, we’re not first in but we get it right.” “We focus more on service quality than on innovation per se.”  But you know what? Apple innovates. Ritz-Carlton innovates. Just in different areas. What’s your area?
• The simple truth is, high-trust organizations foster high levels of innovation; low-trust organizations don’t. The lack of innovation is a canary in the coal mine; innovation itself is one of the great benefits of high trust.

2. Complaints are considered routine at YourCo.

• Nobody’s perfect? OK. But if a complaint about your product or service no longer produces pain or angst within YourCo, then you’ve lost trust. Customers will sense that you’re unreliable, and – worse – that you don’t care.
• Maybe this is just us, but we think those “please take a moment and rate your service” approaches hurt trust. They are automated; they leave no room for creativity; worse, they are all about YourCo and YourCo’s internal evaluation scheme. And worst of all, they pretend to be about the customer.

3. You don’t offer guarantees.

• If you’re a retailer offering $1.99 items, “satisfaction or your money back” is no big deal. But if you’re a professional services provider, the value you provide may be way beyond the cost you charge.
• What would it cost you to guarantee the cost of your service? If you’d lose money doing that – then maybe you have a service quality problem. The perception of not standing behind your service is that you yourself don’t trust it.
• If you do offer a guarantee but it’s in small print, and you quibble over it, you just lost the value of the guarantee. That means you view guarantees as a cost of doing business, and not as a sign of confidence and customer respect. That will cost you trust.

4. Information is not forthcoming.

• In this day and age, all customers – B2B, B2C – want easy access to every question they might have. The organization that gives you easy access to answers is the one that gets your trust.  The organization that manages your access to information so that you only see what they want you to see when they want you to see it – that’s the organization that loses your trust.
• Put everything you can imagine on your website. That doesn’t mean it has to be all above the fold on page one; it just means you have to make it very available, and reasonably accessible. If I can’t find it, I infer you must be hiding it.  And I don’t trust you.
• There are some questions I want help with; that’s when you make 800 numbers available, click here for live chat…  If instead of those options I get, “this is a recorded message; please call back during the hours of…” that’s when trust declines.

5. You think you’ve got the hamburgers.

• In the early days of McDonald’s in Moscow, I’m told, customer service attitudes were hard to change. As one employee told a hapless American from corporate, “You people don’t seem to understand.  You see, we have the hamburgers; the customers don’t. They should be nice to us.”
• Working from trust in business means you don’t trap people into doing what you want. Instead, you give them what they want; then let them live up to their humanity and give you what you want. The best way to create trustworthy customers is to trust them with your products and services.

The next blogpost in this series will be the last: client and customer tip-offs about whether you’re a low-trust organization.

——————————————————————————————-

Many Trusted Advisor programs now offer CPE credits.  Please call Tracey DelCamp for more information at 856-981-5268–or drop us a note @ info@trustedadvisor.com.

This post was written by Sandy Styer
Sandy Styer is TAA's practice leader for the Trust Quotient, Trust Quotient 360 and Trust Temperament service offerings, and Trust Audit services. You can read more about her here. You can follow Sandy on Twitter @sandystyer

• Employees
• Teams
• Leadership (today’s post)
• Products and Services
• Clients and Customers

Leadership Warning Signs of a Low-Trust Organization

Look at the leadership in your organization. Does it have some of the following characteristics? If you’re a leader yourself, think hard, you might be contributing to a low-trust organization. These issues all arise from leadership choices, after all.

1. The Cult of the Corner Office thrives.

• Do you have corner offices that are not conference rooms? Do they come with extra appointments, more square footage, better desks? Are there criteria for who gets them? You may have an issue.
• If you have sanctified real estate, the odds are you have other visible symbols of class status and rank. With one exception, class systems detract from trusted relationships in an organization.
• The exception: you’re intentionally running a business that connects meritocracy and materialism. Some trading operations fit that description. But you’re not likely to confuse them with high trust environments anyway.

2. The highest performer is a values-offender.

• Name the 2-3 smartest, highest-bonus, most successful persons in your organization.  Does at least one of them get there by thumbing his or her nose at your avowed corporate values? Then you have a problem.
• Values mean nothing if they are not enforced. Very few values statements have exceptions clauses (“…unless you can make a really profitable sale..”). What part of “team player,” “integrity,” or “client-focused” do you think rhymes with not showing up at team events, obfuscation, or self-aggrandizing?
• Nothing shoots holes in values statements like blatant hypocrisy.

3. Blame is an art form.

• Blame is the opposite of responsibility. If leadership means anything, it means taking responsibility. If the first words out of leaders’ mouths in the face of difficulty are to blame the situation or another person, what you have is the absence of leadership.
• Don’t confuse an explanation with an excuse. Explanations are important; they help us know what to do differently next time. They do not, however, let anyone off the hook. Leaders can’t be let off the hook; that’s part of the definition of leadership.
• Blame and its twin “inability to confront” corrode trust. They both try to disconnect responsibility from the truth. Leaders don’t do that.

4. “Need to know” is your catchphrase – and you’re not in the military.

• The military, and military contractors, legitimately operate on a “need to know” basis. Not too many others do. It’s an easy rationalization that leads to low trust.
• If I say you don’t need to know something (outside the military), it means you can’t be trusted with the information. Maybe you’re incompetent, maybe you’re a blabbermouth, maybe you’ll misinterpret it; there can be many reasons for low trust. But they’re all low trust.
• If I don’t understand or accept why I have no need to know, then I will resent you telling me. Resentment leads to all kinds of avenues, none of them good, and all of them low-trust at heart. Need-to-know erodes trust.
• None of them above is any different because it’s a policy: a policy to withhold the truth systemically just means you have a systemic approach to withholding the truth. Now you have a whole organization that is untrusting.

5. The need to “have a positive outlook” trumps the need to tell the truth.

• Many a leader has said, “We need to keep people’s morale up, make sure they hear this the right way, don’t let them get depressed.” That way lies trouble. Because the truth has a way of getting out.
  • Most people in most situations would prefer to hear the truth, to make up their own minds. They don’t trust people who assume they know better.  Remember Colonel Jessup in A Few Good Men, yelling, “The truth! You can’t handle the truth!” Don’t be that guy.

In the next post, we’ll explore 5 ways in which products and services can indicate a low-trust organization.

This post was written by Sandy Styer
Sandy Styer is TAA's practice leader for the Trust Quotient, Trust Quotient 360 and Trust Temperament service offerings, and Trust Audit services. You can read more about her here. You can follow Sandy on Twitter @sandystyer

This is the second in a series of five, totaling 25 warnings signs in:

• Employees (first post)
• Teams (today’s post)
• Leadership
• Products and Services
• Clients and Customers

Team Warning Signs of a Low-Trust Organization

Look around the teams in your environment. Do they have some of these characteristics? Then you might be a member of a low-trust organization.

1. A low-trust team isn’t productive.

• It misses milestones. It doesn’t deliver on time, or on spec. The team doesn’t do what it says it will do. The team is unreliable.
• It produces mediocre work. It settles for what looks to be low risk, getting the lowest common denominator. It chokes off innovation in the name of risk, often masking jealousy and NIH (not invented here) Syndrome.
• It fails to achieve its goals. Goal failure is more than milestone failure writ large. It speaks to a failure of common purpose and common commitment.

2. Low-trust teams typically form sub-groups and cliques within them.

• There are flurries of private emails and hushed conversations. This is sub-team bonding, not even tribal – it is transient, shallow, and superficial – Mean Girls bonding.
• Team members are guarded in their communications. They are concerned someone else might hear, and that would be in principle a bad thing. It’s the ‘in principle’ part that’s worrisome.
• Information is hoarded as a source of political power, rather than shared to create greater team power and organizational success.

3. Low-trust teams are less than the sum of their parts.

• A great team – even a just pretty good team – can accomplish so much more than simply the sum of its parts. But a low-trust team can’t.
• They choke off innovation and personal growth – things that happen organically even in a neutral, social organization. A low-trust team isn’t benign, it’s toxic.
• People are massively influenced by those around them – a group of low-trust people can bring even a strong team player down to their level of low trust.
• If the team is bureaucratically protected from competition, it will have low turnover among a core group and high turnover from the occasional newcomer. If the team is in a competitive environment, it will show high turnover everywhere. No one likes staying.

4. A low trust team is addicted to faux team-ness, happy talk, not real team walk.

• We can’t prove this, but we sometimes wonder if the presence of those motivational posters isn’t negatively correlated with team behavior (or is that just us being cynical?)
• Lip service is the coin of the realm, because to be honest would be to acknowledge the existence of low trust. Honesty is what distinguishes a merely critical team from a low-trust team; the latter is disengaged.
• The opposite of low-trust teams isn’t competitive, meritocratic teams; it is teams who know enough to wish they were trust-based, and try to pretend to appear so.
• There is frequently a high-performer, one who achieves great results but does not follow the values. This manifest unfairness results in resentment among the rest of the team.

5. A low-trust team has trouble collaborating.

• Low-trust teams are likely to prefer individual compensation schemes; they don’t believe in, or trust, the ability of the team to do well for them, preferring to fend for themselves.
• Collaboration drives innovation; but low-trust teams exalt solo work, thus buying into the “solo inventor” myth of innovation.

If teams in your ecosphere look like this, you may be hanging around a low-trust organization.

For some ideas on how to improve trust, see Three Strategies to Improve Business’s Trust.

In the next post we’ll explore Five Warning Signs in Leadership that suggest a low-trust organization.

This post was written by Sandy Styer
Sandy Styer is TAA's practice leader for the Trust Quotient, Trust Quotient 360 and Trust Temperament service offerings, and Trust Audit services. You can read more about her here. You can follow Sandy on Twitter @sandystyer

The canaries in the low-trust coal mine fall into five groups: we’ll devote one blog post to each of:

• Employees (today’s post)
• Teams
• Leadership
• Products and Services
• Clients and Customers

Employee Warning Signs of a Low-Trust Organization

Look around your offices. Do you see the following five signs? Then you might be a member of a low-trust organization.

1. The copy room bulletin board has those round smiley cartoon figures laughing and rolling on the floor saying, “You want it WHEN?!”

• Humor is revealing. This particular cartoon pokes fun at the internal customer. Allegedly. When is it a good idea to make jokes about the customer?
• What it really indicates is insecurity on the part of the copy room staff. What it really says is, “Please don’t blame me, I feel un-validated around here. And besides, all I want is to follow simple rules that I don’t have to think about, why are you making my life so miserable with all your requests?”
• And when you see those cartoons, it isn’t just about the copy room. They’re a canary in the company mine. It means you’ve got insecure employees reporting to people who can’t give clear feedback, and a culture of entitlement. Good luck trying to get things done around that place.

2. People email others on the same floor way more than they talk to each other.

• Sure, email provides an invaluable record of communication. And yes, it’s efficient. And no, I’m not going to say you have to be more empathetic and caring in all your relationships – that’s your call.
• But email is for transactions. An organization that kids itself that it can reduce all decisions to transactions is an organization that can’t tell forests from trees.
• Interactions that are overweighted into transactions become poor at executing  strategies (despite their attention to detail), because strategies require frequent strategic-level thinking.
• A culture that over-celebrates impersonal transactions is likely to be non-innovative, because innovation thrives on the trust that allows people to challenge each others’ ideas.

3. Blame stalks the halls.

• One of the worst sayings is, “No one ever got fired for hiring [IBM, McKinsey, etc].” It may not be bad for IBM or McKinsey, but it means that business decisions are being made by employees based on personal risk-aversion, rather than on the organizational good. That makes for some very bad decisions.
• Behind blame lies fear. Employees driven by fear will never properly value risk. They will avoid people and decisions based on their personal fears; this avoidance increases inefficiencies and lowers innovation. Ironically, it ultimately also raises risk.
• Blame is captivity, as Phil McGee says. When blame reigns, you can’t tell who’s responsible. When you’ve got no responsibility, accountability is meaningless. Blame leads to ineffectiveness; and that means you can’t make decisions, respond to markets, or do positive things.

4. People talk about each other.

• People talking frequently about each other suggests gossip, which usually means talking behind people’s backs. This signals an inability to confront real issues. This means politics replaces truth telling.
• Ask someone where they work in an organization. At a great company, it might be “in bubble memory technology.” Or, “in the semiconductor division, in R&D.” In a low-trust organization, the answer will be, “In Robinson’s group.”
• The cult of leadership is just another cult. Steve Jobs may have been revered (or not), but he knew the desired obsession was not about personality, but the business. Celebrate, but don’t idolize.

5. People complain.

• Complaining is wrong because it is wishing, not doing. If you didn’t win the lottery, you’ve no business complaining if you didn’t buy a ticket.
• And if you bought a ticket and are complaining about the odds, you don’t understand the lottery.
• If you bought a ticket, understand the odds, and are still complaining, you have no sense of your obligation in this organization, which is to do something about it. Go make a better lottery.
• Complainers suck out the air in the room. They are self-oriented, they drag down productivity, and slow results. If you don’t get rid of them, it’s probably because you’re fearful (see #3, above).

These employee behaviors are warning signals of low trust in an organization. Low trust threatens your economics, innovation, speed to market, cost position, overhead structure, employee turnover, and customer indifference or worse – and a whole lot more.

For some ideas on how to improve trust, see Three Strategies to Improve Business’s Trust.

In the next post we’ll explore Five Warning Signs in Teams that suggest a low-trust organization.

This post was written by Sandy Styer
Sandy Styer is TAA's practice leader for the Trust Quotient, Trust Quotient 360 and Trust Temperament service offerings, and Trust Audit services. You can read more about her here. You can follow Sandy on Twitter @sandystyer

The Trust Equation

The Trust Equation is familiar to many of you, both regular and even occasional readers of this blog.  It’s a formula for measuring our own trustworthiness through the Trust Quotient assessment.

For many people, Intimacy is the hardest piece of this simple formula to grasp and to put into practice.

Deconstructing Intimacy

We look at Intimacy in business relationships as having three components:

• Discretion – the wisdom to know what to do with information another shares with us
• Empathy – the ability to see another person’s point of view from the inside out; to identify with another person’s feelings, and
• Risk-taking – vulnerability

The first two are about the other person: safeguarding their sharing, picking up on their feelings and acting appropriately.

The last one – risk taking – is about you.

The “I” Part

The “I” part of intimacy means opening yourself up to the other person.  It means becoming vulnerable.  It really is all about you, and the risks you’re willing to take.

We often get asked what Intimacy sounds like or looks like in business settings.  I would argue that it doesn’t require knowing the name of your client’s or colleague’s kiddos or pets (though for some people that works as Intimacy too), but rather saying or doing the thing that feels risky.

It may be as simple as asking for feedback, when you really don’t want to hear bad news:  “I don’t feel that I’m doing this job to your satisfaction.  Can we discuss it?”

It may be revealing something personal about yourself, perhaps saying at the start of a big presentation:  “Although I am completely convinced that our plan is a good one, I find myself a little intimidated talking to this senior group.”

It may be a matter of just voicing something you both know to be true:  “I believe your boss didn’t think we were the right supplier for this job, and you went out on a limb to get us approved.  What are your particular concerns?  How can we make you look good?”

The I in Risk, and in Trust

A good rule to remember about trust in business is that it’s generally not about you.  Except, of course, when it is. And when it comes to intimacy, it is about you.

In our White Paper we show with hard data that the “I” factor drives more trust than the other three.  And it is where risk shows up: taking the risk of Intimacy is what creates the reciprocal exchange that is trust.

If you’re lucky, your client or colleague or boss will lead by taking the first risk. If you don’t trust to luck, make some luck of your own. Take a risk. Lead with intimacy. Create some trust.

You can do that.

This post was written by Sandy Styer
Sandy Styer is TAA's practice leader for the Trust Quotient, Trust Quotient 360 and Trust Temperament service offerings, and Trust Audit services. You can read more about her here. You can follow Sandy on Twitter @sandystyer

Use Common Sense when hanging your pictures.

So simple.  So elegant.  “Use common sense.”  What would it be like if we could use this as the advice on everything?  Three-word tort reform.  No more fine print disclaimers.  And a vote for self-confidence, trusting our tummies.

Common Sense Tips

Herewith, an offbeat and highly personal collection:

• In “Common Sense Education – Or, Rules of Thumb for Life” UVA’s Meredith Jung-En Woo quotes American philosopher George Santayana, covers “shrewd intelligence,” community”, and the hazards of trying to measure everything.
• Project Managers Alert!  In Herding Cats, Glen B. Alleman tackles Ten Rules of Common Sense Program Management.  They include (1) Put Together the Right Team (5) Manage Risk and (7) Manage Problems when They Appear.  My favorite?   (2) Execute or Suffer the Consequences.
• Though not a parent, I love the simple wisdom and breezy writing in commonsensemedia.org.  Check Carolyn Knorr’s 5 ways to bring back rules after summer.  Good for all of us adults, too.  Less screen time and more real life.
• Please, stop “thinking outside the box.”  I have yet to read Deborah Meadenbrook’s book “Common Sense Rules“ (and is Rules a noun here, or a verb?  I’ll let you know once I’ve read it) but I really like her Business Cliches I Could Live Without.
• What about today’s hotspot, social media? Social Meteor’s Common Sense Rules suggest that employees’ use of social media shouldn’t cut down on productivity, and shouldn’t negatively impact the company.  Simple.
• Common Sense Rules from the Governor of Svalbard (look it up) make sense for living lightly on the earth as well as for basic Arctic travel. Think “Be considerate of others” and “Help take care of the biodiversity. Do not pick flowers.”

Still, here’s one common sense rule you won’t find in any of these other blogs or books:  “Do not leave the settlements without a suitable gun, and experience in using it.”

From now on, let’s just preface our instructions, fine print and disclaimers with this simple three-word phrase:  use common sense.

This post was written by Sandy Styer
Sandy Styer is TAA's practice leader for the Trust Quotient, Trust Quotient 360 and Trust Temperament service offerings, and Trust Audit services. You can read more about her here. You can follow Sandy on Twitter @sandystyer

The bartender says: “What is this, some kind of joke?’”

Notice: It’s never a manufacturer, a schoolteacher and a dancer who walk into the bar and serve as setup-lines for our jokes.  Instead, it’s those who should be our most trusted advisors: doctors, lawyers, spiritual leaders.

Ever wonder why?

Untrustworthy Advisors?

I am one who trusts.  I strongly believe that the vast majority of people in each of these professions, or callings, can be trusted with my life.  And yet I still find the doctor-lawyer-preacher jokes pretty funny.  Which got me thinking about why these folks are the protagonists of so many stories and jokes.

Here are three reasons I came up with:

1. Because these are meant to be respected professions, it’s easy to laugh at the bad apples and contrarian behavior.

2. Because we need our doctors and lawyers and spiritual leaders to be truly trustworthy advisors, the experience of dealing with them can be pretty emotional.  We are, in many cases, entrusting them with our lives, our money, our most personal family matters and more.

Trust is risky – the very definition of trust means we are taking a risk in relying on the advice, actions or discretion of someone else.  And that can be scary.  With so much at stake, we need the release that humor offers when dealing with serious, scary themes.

3. Perhaps the greatest reason these trusted advisor are so prominent in jokes is that they represent different aspects of ourselves, internal paradoxes we are trying to manage and integrate.  The doctor –the body, or the physical; the lawyer – the head, or the intellectual; and the rabbi/priest/preacher –  the heart, or the spiritual. These jokes are a form of stories—metaphors for aspects of life.

My Musings and Yours

These are my musings about the doctor, lawyer and rabbi who just walked into my bar.  Seriously, now, let’s share a beer and talk this through.

This post was written by Sandy Styer
Sandy Styer is TAA's practice leader for the Trust Quotient, Trust Quotient 360 and Trust Temperament service offerings, and Trust Audit services. You can read more about her here. You can follow Sandy on Twitter @sandystyer

Connectors and Catalysts

Connectors, like Andrea, are strongest in Intimacy and (low) Self-orientation. They can be described as:

• Magnetic and caring
• Those others trust with sensitive information
• Seeing the world from the point of view of people

Catalysts, like Charlie, combine strong Credibility with Intimacy. They:

• Love sparking—and gaining—new insights
• Like to make up their own rules
• Tend to see the world in terms of ideas

Setting the Stage

Sandy: Let’s start with workshops and presentations. You both have the same goal: to help people become powerfully trustworthy. You’re both terrific at what you do. Yet, you are very different temperaments. How do you prepare for a new workshop?

Andrea: Before the program itself, I like to build as much rapport with the people in the group as I can—through conversations, mini-focus groups, and email exchanges with participants sharing their current relationship challenges. I want every participant to get as much from the session as possible, and these connections give me a personal sense of the people I’ll be meeting as well as the issues they are facing.

As a Connector, I have a low (or favorable) Self-orientation score, and more than anything that means I manage my Self-orientation—constantly. Meeting the group as friends rather than strangers keeps my anxiety low and helps me to be fully present during a program.

Charlie: As a Catalyst, I value preparation too, but for a different reason.  I like to know in advance about the group, the industry and the participants so I can see the big picture and get a sense of the issues facing them. I really want to know what’s going on at the macro level. This lets me make the training relevant in the moment to the participants, by saying things like: “You all know what it’s like to…”

Andrea: Yes, and you’re great at that. Though I know it’s important to connect to the big picture too, I don’t naturally lead with that in my preparation; I have to be intentional about it.

The Dress Rehearsal

Sandy: Ok, it’s nearly show time and very shortly you’re on stage.  What do you do to get ready?

Charlie: It’s all about prep, and then ego deflation. I look over the agenda, check my handouts (the few that I use), and then work on calming my mind so that I can focus.  I have a sort of prayer or meditation I do before I leave the hotel. I actually get on my knees and express my gratitude for being there on that day, and remind myself I’m there not for my own ego, but to be of service to the group.

Andrea: My approach is very different, with the same goal of being present for the participants. I create a very detailed agenda, and I work a lot on timing and transitions, which I review over and over.  Then I leave the agenda behind. For me it’s like being a professional improviser: doing lots of rehearsal in order to be spontaneous on stage.

Charlie: Whatever the method, we both try to keep Self-orientation as low as possible so we can focus on personal growth—for ourselves and for every participant in the room.  That’s what leads to being a better facilitator and a stronger leader.

Curtain Up

Sandy: What’s different about how you open up a program?

Andrea: I always start with some kind of introduction with a twist—something fun, engaging, and personal that gets people talking. I want people to get to know each other—and me—so they’re comfortable taking risks and stretching outside their comfort zone.

Charlie: And I’m more willing to skip this step and jump right in.  I want to get them thinking, first and foremost. The Catalyst in me wants to spark new ideas both in and for the group.

Sandy: During a program, how do you manage the inevitable challenges of group dynamics?

Andrea: Andrea: One of the most important tools I use as a facilitator is our Name It and Claim It practice. If I lose concentration for a moment, or misunderstand someone, or say something stupid, right away I Name It and Claim It:  “Oh boy, could I have gotten that more wrong?”

Just last week, I was leading a session and completely lost the group. We had an administrative task that took all 50 people in the room completely off course. I spoke to myself (out loud, into the mic): “OK, Andrea.  Focus. Focus. Focus!” Putting my thoughts on loudspeaker that way got us all right back on track.  Several people came up to me afterward to say that they learned something valuable by watching me simply being transparent about losing the group and my own focus.

Charlie: Being transparent is the savior of any speaker, and I’ve used it hundreds of times. Here’s another spin on it: being credible means if you don’t have an answer, you say so. I still sometimes have to say, “I’ve never thought of that question, and I don’t have the answer.”  It’s also a good way to throw a question back to the group. After all, what I know is a lot less important than what they learn.

Tough Moments and Happy Endings

Andrea: As a Connector, it’s often hard for me to close off conversations when it’s time to move on. I want to give people as much time as they need to think through their issue out loud, and I want to nurture them all the way to their own insights.  That isn’t always possible in the time we have. My temperament can play havoc with my carefully planned schedule!

Charlie: And I’m happy to stop them with a one-liner—the conclusion or insight.  Sparking aha moments quickly is pure joy for a Catalyst.  I like to hit people between the eyes. For me it’s a little tougher to stay in the emotional space for too long.

Andrea: I like to hit them between the eyes while holding hands.

Charlie: Yes, that’s it exactly.  (laughing) In the end, we both get to the same result: helping participants grasp the material, generate aha moments, and take those insights into their own business and personal lives.

Sandy: Sounds like the key to success is in integrating who you are with the material you teach.

About a Book

Sandy: You recently sent the final manuscript for The Trusted Advisor Fieldbook to Wiley. As anyone who’s done it knows, writing a book is hard, and writing with another person sometimes makes it harder.

Andrea: Our different temperaments made for a stronger book in the end, but along the way the preferences of a Connector and those of a Catalyst definitely created conflict. Writing the fieldbook was natural for me in many ways because it’s all about making the trusted advisor material personal and useful to each and every reader.

Charlie: And for me, it was the hardest book I’ve ever written for that very same reason. It truly is a fieldbook— a keep-a-dog-eared-copy-with-you-at-all-times book about solving real problems. The focus is less on new insights—although there are plenty in the book—and more on translating concepts into everyday action. Not my strong suit.

Andrea: I think it’s true for everyone that working in ways that play to our natural temperament is energizing, while working against type can be exhausting. We both found this to be true with the fieldbook.

Writing the manuscript gave me an opportunity to reach out and ask people to contribute stories, to reconnect with clients old and new, to have a lot of personal interaction. It takes a village to write a book, and a Connector loves a good village!

Charlie: The exhausting part for me was the effort of working within the all-too-necessary framework of rules needed to get this book done—the standard formats, the numbered lists, the rigorous reviews.  I like to create my own rules!  Which, it turns out, is very Catalyst-like.

Andrea: You’re telling me! (laughing) You Catalysts also love a good debate; we Connectors—not so much. Going back and forth with you about chapter content, along with trying to keep things on track, definitely made for some trying times for us both.

Charlie: Would you do it again?

Andrea: Can you ask me that question in about six months?

The Trusted Advisor Fieldbook: A Comprehensive Toolkit for Leading with Trust, by Charles H. Green and Andrea P. Howe can be pre-ordered between now and October 31.

This post was written by Sandy Styer
Sandy Styer is TAA's practice leader for the Trust Quotient, Trust Quotient 360 and Trust Temperament service offerings, and Trust Audit services. You can read more about her here. You can follow Sandy on Twitter @sandystyer

Our research has identified six different Trust Temperaments™, or preferences, describing how different people go about building trust.

You Might Be a Redneck If…

To borrow from Jeff Foxworthy’s famous comedy routines (though on a more serious subject), we’d like to offer you a little self-assessment opportunity.  Here are the six Trust Temperaments™ based on the Trust Quotient to check out below.  Each one represents two strengths from the Trust Equation.

What’s Your Trust Temperament?

If you like being the smartest person in the room, if you solve the hard problems, if you care about what other people think of your work, or if you’ve ever said “Lead, follow or get out of the way–”

–You might be an Expert.

If you’re organized, dependable, sincere, if you’re the PTA president or Little League coach, if you’ve ever been called a kindly (or not-so-kindly) drill sergeant–

–You might be a Doer.

If you love ideas and framing the big picture, how things are connected, collaborating and brainstorming, and if you like to play by your own rules–

–You might be a Catalyst.

If you’re magnetic and caring, if you accomplish things through others, and if people come to you to find out what’ really going on around here–

–You might be a Connector.

If you care about the group and the mission, if you’re willing to do whatever it takes to get the job done, if the phrase ‘servant leader’ has a positive ring for you–

–You might be a Steward.

And if you love the subject matter of your work (maybe more than you love people?), if you get sidetracked by insights but never by ego, if anyone has ever said to you: “Hello, we’re over here–”

–You might be a Professor.

Where do you see yourself?  To find out your type, take the Trust Quotient test.

But Enough About You–Let’s Talk About Us!

As we’ve said, these are natural styles, or tendencies, which draw on different strengths in becoming trustworthy.  Over the coming weeks some of us from Trusted Advisor Associates LLC are going to share our personal perspectives on what it’s like to be a…

Stay tuned.

This post was written by Sandy Styer
Sandy Styer is TAA's practice leader for the Trust Quotient, Trust Quotient 360 and Trust Temperament service offerings, and Trust Audit services. You can read more about her here. You can follow Sandy on Twitter @sandystyer