When Your Client Gets In Your Face

What do you do when your client gets angry at you, upset with you, in your face?

In truth, most clients don’t actually yell at you.  But of course you can tell when they’re upset. Maybe we even project a little bit, and imagine the horrors of what they might actually be thinking, regardless of what they actually say.

It all feels pretty horrific.

Well, there’s a simple two-part way to deal with that situation.

  1. Recognize it’s about them, not about you, and
  2. Ask to talk about it.

Here’s how that plays out.

It’s About Them

When someone’s angry at you, even yelling in your face, about something you may or may not have done, it’s critical to see what’s happening.

  • What you think is happening is, “he’s angry at me.”
  • What you need to see is happening is, “he’s angry.”

If the “someone” is your three-year old child, we have no problem doing this. We think, “Oh, he’s tired,” and we have patience. What we don’t do is take seriously for a moment whatever horrible things the three-year old is saying about us.

But let’s say your child is 15; suddenly, it’s all personal, and we become offended and lash back at them. We feel attacked, and return anger for anger.

And when clients do it, it’s infinitely worse.

But – it’s still your choice. You can react as you do to a three-year old – with calmness and understanding about what’s going on with them – or with anger, getting sucked into a downward spiral.

Guess which response is right. Always remember: when someone’s angry at you, the key observation to make is that he or she is angry. It’s an emotional state in them.

The fact that they’re angry at you is relatively unimportant. You may feel hurt for a hot moment, because pain is inevitable – but suffering is a choice. Your choice.

Ask to Talk About It.

People get angry because they feel afraid about something, and are trying to be heard.

So – hear them.

Find the words to acknowledge their anger. In fact, to go further than that, and ask them to tell you more about it.

Them: I can’t believe this whole thing happened, and it’s your fault. It’s costing me money, and time, and I’m now behind schedule, and I want to know what you intend to do about it! Right now!

You: Whoah, wow. I’m not sure I appreciated how important this obviously is to you. And I get it, you’re upset – at us, and at me in particular. I, uh, think I really need to take some time and hear you out on this.

Them: I’ve been talking to you guys; I want to know what you intend to do about it.

You: Fair enough. You deserve that.  At the same time, I don’t want to hip-shoot some solution without really understanding fully your context. And obviously we haven’t done that yet. So – give me 5 minutes to really understand your perspective; I promise to listen, and to talk about action steps – in 5 minutes.  Now please – talk to me.

Or words to that effect. Nobody can script for you exactly what to say – that’s a function of who you are, and who your client is. But the point is to acknowledge the anger, and commit to listening.

And by the way, this doesn’t mean you need to be all passive and apologetic. You can, and should, push back on the insistence on immediate action. It can wait 5 more minutes, and the truth is until you really have listened to your client’s outbursts, he or she is not going to listen to your solutions.

Remember: It’s not about you. And until you talk about it, they’re not going to accept your solutions.

 

Trust-based Networking and the Paradox of “Collateral Benefit”

A (seemingly) simple question: What is the goal of business networking?

  • The goal of most business networking is to make new connections in order to get more business. 
  • The goal of trust-based networking is to help others develop their businesses.  The “collateral benefit” of trust-based networking is that others then help you.

When it comes to networking, injecting trust into the picture creates a sort of paradox. It’s exactly the same paradox that arises when we think about injecting trust into selling, or advice-giving, or getting people to review your books. 

That paradox was expressed well by Dale Carnegie, Zig Ziglar, and a host of others: basically, the best way to get what you want is to help others get what they want. 

It’s easy to forget how radical that proposition is; and how infrequently people actually do it. 

 Current Networking Practice

Ask yourself: when you go to a meet-up, start looking through LinkedIn, or scan a rough lead list –  how do you proceed? Here’s what usually happens:

  • You search and scan in advance for those you’ve profiled as most likely to be prospects – focusing and prioritizing to narrow down a wide list of leads
  • You focus on honing your elevator pitch
  • During interaction, you focus on finding pain points (waiting to offer solutions at a later time).

If that roughly resembles what you do, then please take note: all three of those benign-sounding activities share one trait – they’re all about you. They are not activities that put Dale Carnegie’s insight into practice. 

Trust-based Networking

What if you were to try something entirely different? For example:

  • You search and scan for pairs of people both of whom you know, but who don’t know each other – and who could each benefit from the introduction
  • You focus not on your elevator pitch, but on a really great question you’d like to know the answer to (better yet, ask the question in the form of a Risky Gift)
  • You focus not on pain points, but on being genuinely curious and seeking perspectives. 

Those are very different activities: they’re not self-focused, they’re other-focused. And, they are more likely to result in relationships and in interesting conversations. It is those relationships and conversations that result in true connections of interest – and before very long, in leads and business development conversations.

The “collateral benefit” of behaving this way is – leads and sales. In fact, more leads and more sales than if you go in with the usual self-centered approach of trying to get leads and sales directly. 

But the paradox must be respected: if you engage in these other-focused activities as mere fig-leaf cover for your true goal of getting more sales – it won’t work. We all see through such base motives. You actually have to commit to the alternative goal – that of helping others.  

A good test of whether you’re really committed is your choice of metrics: do you measure the result of networking by how many entries you generate for your CRM system? Or instead – by tracking how you’ve been able to benefit your new acquaintances. (Hint: what would Dale Carnegie say?)

 

Learn more about this strategy by viewing our Trust Matters webinar: Network Like a Trusted Advisor: Take the Work (and Stress) Out of It, delivered by our partner and co-author of The Trusted Advisor Fieldbook, Andrea Howe, together with Stewart Hirsch, our head of business development and leadership coaching (and CEO of his firm Strategic Relationships). You also might want to check out our eBook The Do’s and Don’ts of Trust-based Networking.

The Disconnect Between Short-term Behaviors and Short-term Results

One of the most frequent trust questions I get is typically phrased as a dilemma: how can we establish trust-based long-term relationships in a culture that values short-term performance?

But rarely have I had the question posed so clearly and sharply as in a recent discussion with an investment banker. Paraphrasing, he said:

“Listen, I make no apologies for being 100% money-motivated. That’s why I’m in the business I’m in.  If the firm changed our incentives tomorrow to a weekly basis, I’d be there in a heartbeat – doing what I have to do, week to week. So when you talk about long-term trust, I frankly glaze over. My timeframe is what maximizes my income – period.”

You can trust investment bankers to cut to the chase. It’s their job, and they’re very good at it.

But here’s what he missed.

There’s an unspoken assumption in his stark phrasing of the issue. That unspoken assumption is:

The best way to maximize short-term income is through short-term behaviors.

And that assumption is dead wrong. Here’s why.

The Disconnect Between Behavior and Results

The point is obvious if you think about strategy. Which approach to corporate strategy is likely to be more successful over the next five years?

  1. Company A, which revamps its entire corporate strategy every quarter, or
  2. Company B, which sets its corporate strategy over a five-year timeframe, and occasionally tunes it

Pretty clearly, changing a long-term strategy on a quarterly basis is the recipe for long-term bad results. But notice – long-term bad results happen a quarter at a time. Five years of bad performance shows up in 20 bad quarters.

The basis for strong short-term results (quarterly in this case) is long-term behavior – not short-term behavior.

What’s true for strategy is true for relationships as well. If you manage your client relationships by viewing them through the prism of quarterly (or monthly, or weekly) sales and income reports, those clients are bound to notice.

Few things destroy client relationships like a lame, semi-apologetic request like, “Could you maybe move that sale up a few weeks so I can get credit this quarter?”  Clients are not stupid, and there’s no way to dress up such a self-serving request for monetization of the relationship so as to disguise what it really is. Such a request will backfire on you.

So will any such behavior that betrays your true objective – if your true objective is to treat your clients like transactional piggy banks, rather than as the long-term relationships we claim to aspire to.

Long-term Greedy

Former Goldman Sachs senior partner Gus Levy is credited with coining the phrase “long-term greedy.” In typical Wall Street fashion, the phrasing was perhaps calculated to sound offensive – but in fact, it expresses something completely commonsensical, and highly consistent with trust. I endorse it myself.

What Levy meant was that the best way to do well in the long-run – and, by implication, in each quarter on the way to the long run – is to behave in a long-term manner. That means: keeping your word, taking care of clients, acting with integrity, putting clients’ needs first – all the time.

If you behave that way – in the long-term, as a matter of habit and principle – then you will actually do far better in the long run (and by extension, in the accumulation of short-terms on the way there) than someone who is constantly seeking to optimize only the next quarter.

Note this does not necessarily have anything to do with ethics. You can be, as my investment banking friend claimed to be, 100% motivated by money, and still act in ways that are largely indistinguishable from someone whose trustworthy behavior is ethics-based. You just have to not be stupid. And Gus Levy was assuredly not stupid.

The next time you hear someone say. “I can’t do that trust stuff because all the incentives around here are short-term,” explain to them why there’s nothing wrong per se with short-term incentives. The problem is stupidly believing that short-term behavior is the best way to get there.

The best short-term results come about from operating on long-term principles – and reaping the benefits every quarter along the way.

Trust Matters, The Podcast: Building Trust When Industry Spirals Into Cutthroat Pricing (Episode 13)

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The Easiest Way to Create Trust

I was in a Costco store the other day, and noticed the man whose photo you see attached here. I was struck by his t-shirt: in bold, large font, it reads, “Because I Said I Would.”

That got me thinking. As founder of Trusted Advisor Associates, one of the most common questions I get over the years is some variation on, “How do I go about creating trust?”

There are many variations on that question: What’s the fastest way to create trust? What’s the most enduring way to create trust? What’s the most cost-effective way, the highest-value way, the most accessible way, and so forth.

I’ve written elsewhere about some of those, but this t-shirt reminded me of a very important one – What’s the Easiest Way to Create Trust?

So here it is (and then we’ll come back to our t-shirt guy).

The Easiest Way to Create Trust

The answer (drumroll) is – make a lot of promises, and then keep them.

Here are several reasons I call that the ‘easiest’ way:

  • We all know how to make promises; we make many of them every day (“I’ll see you at 10:00,” “I’ll have that done by Tuesday,” “I’ll take care of it for you.”)
  • Most promises aren’t really that difficult to fulfill: most of us don’t wildly over-promise, or promise things that are massively outside our ability to complete.
  • Kept promises are easy to see, and easy to credit. They go into an account often labelled “integrity,” a not-so-trivial attribute to be credited with.
  • Kept promises fall squarely within one of the four Trust Equation components – Reliability. In fact, kept promises are pretty much the main way we establish our rating of someone’s reliability.
  • It’s not that hard to come up with a list of viable promises you can make, which then offers you a list of promises you can keep. Most of our client relationships (indeed, all relationships) have frequent components of timeliness, or of quality of delivery.

But notice: if it’s so easy to keep promises, and so valuable to keep them – then why aren’t we all paragons of Reliability virtue? Because let’s be honest – we’re not.

Where Promise-Keeping Falls Down

There are three areas where we fall down in promise-keeping.

Fear. Ironically, the biggest failure of promise-keeping is failure to make a promise in the first place! Nobody can fault you – or credit you – with a promise you never made to begin with.

Why do we fail to make promises in the first place? Usually, because we fear being held accountable.  It feels safer to say, “I’ll get it to you before the end of the week,” or “I’ll be there around ten-ish,” because it leaves you lots of wiggle-room. That way – we like to kid ourselves – there’s sufficient vagueness that no one will blame us. 

We forget that the failure to be blamed for something that didn’t happen doesn’t rank nearly as high on the trustworthiness list as the fulfillment of a promise made. It’s a classic case of avoiding a risk, and thereby incurring a larger, longer-term risk – the risk of never having taken a risk. And remember – without risk, trust never exists.

Optimism. Another failure of promise-keeping is our own well-intended optimism. We really want to get that document to them by close of business Wednesday, because we sense that they’d really like it by then. So, we optimistically say we’ll do something that frankly, isn’t realistic, and then rationalize missing it later by telling ourselves it really wasn’t that important.

Sand-bagging. This one is pernicious. Are you a believer in “under-promise and over-deliver?” Because if you are – and let me put this provocatively – you believe in lying. Either you are lying in knowingly making a false promise, or in knowingly confounding the Other’s expectations. Or both!

The problem with sand-bagging is that it compounds. You may generate delight the first time, but when you do it again, the Other party figures out your game. Even if it doesn’t annoy them, they begin to discount your promises by the amount you lied the first two times. You are no longer believed. Which means your promises can’t be trusted. (Ask any firm that has tried to consistently sandbag Wall Street with calculatedly discounted earnings estimates).

The Costco Guy with the T-shirt

Back to our friend. When I saw him, I asked if I could take his photo; he readily agreed. I was very curious about whether he intended his t-shirt to mean what I would mean by that phrase – which is all the trust stuff I wrote about above.

Here’s what he said.

“It’s a personal statement to myself. I wear it to remind myself to keep my word. That’s really important to me, in all things.”

Pretty much what I’d hoped he’d say. I agree with him. And while we just went our ways, my guess is that if I’d talked to him further, he would probably have agreed with me that:

  • Promises come up a lot, every day
  • Keeping them isn’t all that hard – if you just focus on keeping them, and not be distracted by all the little temptations to let them slide, or to avoid making them in the first place
  • A lifetime lived by making a lot of promises, and pointedly keeping them, is a terrific way to create trust in our relationships with others.

Anyway, that’s my take on the easiest way to create trust: make a lot of promises and keep them.

And, since I stupidly forgot to ask the gentleman’s name, if you know him, please reach out and send this blogpost to him – with my thanks, and my congratulations.