Want Clients to Trust You? Try Trusting Others

Establishing trust is not a one-way street. Trust takes risk.  And that risk doesn’t just come from your clients taking a leap of faith when you hand them a proposal and a firm handshake. To build trust, especially with your clients, YOU have to take the risk too.

So, you want your clients to trust you? Read on…

If you’re trying to sell your services, you already know the value of being trusted. Being trusted increases value, cuts time, lowers costs, and increases profitability—both for us and for our clients.

So, we try hard to be trustworthy: to be seen as credible, reliable, honest, ethical, other-oriented, empathetic, competent, experienced, and so forth.

But in our haste to be trustworthy, we often forget one critical variable: people don’t trust those who never take a risk. If all we do is be trustworthy and never do any trusting ourselves, eventually we will be considered un-trustworthy.

To be fully trusted, we need to do a little trusting ourselves.

Trusting and Being Trusted

We often talk casually about “trust” as if it were a single, unitary phenomenon—like the temperature or a poll. “Trust in banking is down,” we might read.

But that begs a question. Does it mean banks have become less trustworthy? Or does it mean bank customers or shareholders have become less trusting of banks? Or does it mean both?

To speak meaningfully of trust, we have to declare whether we are talking about trustors or about trustees. The trustor is the party doing the trusting—the one taking the risk. These are our clients, for the most part.

The trustee is the party being trusted—the beneficiary of the decision to trust. This is us, for the most part.

The trust equation is a valuable tool for describing trust:

But where is risk to be found? How can we use the trust equation to describe trusting and not just being trusted? How can we trust, as well as seek to be trusted?

Trust and Risk

Notwithstanding Ronald Reagan’s dictum of “trust but verify,” the essence of trust is risk. If you submit a risk to verification, you may quantify the risk, but what’s left is no longer properly called “trust.” Without risk there is no trust.

In the trust equation, risk appears largely in the Intimacy variable. Many professionals have a hard time expressing empathy, for example, because they feel it could make them appear “soft,” unprofessional, or invasive.

Of course, it’s that kind of risk that drives trust. We are wired to exchange reciprocal pleasantries with each other. It’s called etiquette, and it is the socially acceptable path to trust. Consider the following:

“Oh, so you went to Ohio State. What a football team; I have a cousin who went there.”

“Is it just me, or is this speaker kind of dull? I didn’t get much sleep last night, so this is pushing my luck.”

“Do you know whether that was a social media reference he just made? Sometimes I feel a little out of the picture.”

If we take these small steps, our clients usually reciprocate. Our intimacy levels move up a notch, and the trust equation gains a few points.

If we don’t take these small steps, the relationship stays in place: pleasant and respectful, but like a stagnant pool when it comes to trust.

Non-Intimacy Steps for Trusting

The intimacy part of the trust equation is the most obvious source of risk-taking, but it is not the only one. Here are some ways to take constructive risks in other parts of the trust equation.

  1. Be open about what you don’t know. You may think it’s risky to admit ignorance. In fact, it increases your credibility if you’re the one putting it forward. Who will doubt you when you say you don’t know?
  2. Make a stretch commitment. Most of the time, you’re better off doing exactly what you said you’ll do and making sure you can do what you commit to. But sometimes you have to put your neck out and deliver something fast, new, or differently.To never take such a risk is to say you value your pristine track record over service to your client, and that may be a bad bet. Don’t be afraid to occasionally dare for more—even at the risk of failing.
  3. Have a point of view. If you’re asked for your opinion in a meeting, don’t always say, “I’ll get back to you on that.” Clients often value interaction more than perfection. If they wanted only right answers, they would have hired a database.
  4. Try on their shoes. You don’t know what it’s like to be your client. Nor should you pretend to know. But there are times when, with the proper request for permission, you get credit for imagining things.”I have no idea how the ABC group thinks about this,” you might say, “but I can imagine—if I were you, Bill, I’d feel very upset by this. You’ve lost a degree of freedom in this situation.”

While trust always requires a trustor and a trustee, it is not static. The players have to trade places every once in a while. We don’t trust people who never trust us.

So, if we want others to trust us, we have to trust them. Go find ways to trust your client; you will be delighted by the results.

This post first appeared on RainToday. 

The Problem With Lying

We learned in grade school not to lie (probably just a bit after we’d already learned how to lie – sometimes you have to know a vice before you can see the virtue that counteracts it).

But even if we learned it – the lesson didn’t seem to stick. (Check daily newspaper headlines). As we see headlines about LIBOR, Volkswagen, drug pricing and you name it, are we losing the ability to be shocked by lying?

——–

When in doubt, look to humor – particularly sarcasm.   Here’s Dilbert on trust and lying:

dilbert

Scott Adams nails it.  And with a surgical sledgehammer, as usual. The pointy-haired boss is ethically clueless, and blatantly so.

We all get the joke, much the way we get the old George Burns line, “the most important thing in life is sincerity – if you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”

But sometimes it’s worth deconstructing the obvious to see just what makes it tick.  So at the risk of stepping on the laugh line, let’s have a go at it.

Lying and Credibility

The most obvious problem with lying is that it makes you wrong. Anyone who knows the truth then immediately knows, at a bare minimum, that you said something that is not the truth, aka wrong.

The shock to credibility extends even to denials. Think Nixon’s “I am not a crook,”  or Clinton’s “I did not have sex…” or the granddaddy of them all, the apocryphal Lyndon  Johnson story about getting an opponent to deny having had sexual relations with a pig. In each case, the denial forces us to consider the possibility of an alternate truth – and the damage is done.

But credibility is the least of it. There are two other corrosive aspects of lying: evasiveness and motives.

Lying and Evasiveness

When you think someone is lying to you, you likely think, “Why is he saying that?” Evasive lying is rarely as direct as the Dilbert case; more often it shows up in white lies, lies of omission, or lies of deflection. “You know, you can’t really trust those damage reports anyway,” “I wouldn’t be too concerned about the service guarantee if I were you,” and so forth.

If the first response to a lie is to doubt that what is stated is the truth, then the second response is to wonder what the truth really is. And we sense evasiveness as we run down the list of alternate truths, each more negative than the last.

Lying and Motive

But the most damning aspect of lying is probably the doubt it casts on the liar’s motives. We move from “that’s not true!” to “I wonder what really is true,” to “why would he be saying such a thing?”

To doubt someone’s motives is to add an infinite loop to our concerns about the lie. First of all, motive goes beyond the lie, to the person telling the lie – who is now incontrovertibly a liar.

Second, the rarest of all motives for lying is an attempt to do a  greater good for another. Despite frequent claims that “I did it for (the kids / the parents / justice), almost all motives for lying turn out to be self-serving at root.  (Including the lies we tell ourselves about why we’re telling lies). Why would he do such a thing? Because there was something in it for him, that’s why! It’s almost always true.

And if people act toward us from selfish motives, then we know we have been treated as objects – as means to an end and not as ends in ourselves. This is unethical in the Kantian sense.

Worst of all, bad motives call everything else into question. “If he lied about this, then how can I know he was telling the truth about that? Or about anything else?” This is why perjury is a crime, and why casting doubt on someone’s character is a common way to counter their statements.

Recovering from Lies

We’ve all told lies. At least, everyone I know has. Okay, I have. We can often be forgiven, just as we can forgive others their lies to us. To forgive and to be forgiven, the liar must express recognition and contrition around the full extent of the lie, and then some.

This can be done more easily for the wounds of credibility and evasiveness. “I was wrong to do that, I know it, and I am sorry.” It is harder to forgive the part about motive, because it goes to something much deeper. How can someone be believed about changing their motives?  How easily can you change your own?

This post first appeared on TrustMatters.

The Twelve Steps of Business Relationships

Usually when someone hears the words “12-step program,” they’re quick to judge it as something to get out of a rut. But what if you turned that perspective on its axis? What if you saw a program – particularly one with 12 steps – as something to advance you to a new level of life, thought and, well, relationships?

Below are 12 key steps to take when looking to grow strong, trust-based business relationships. Easy? Yes. Simple? Well, see for yourself.

—–

Rarely will you see someone fail in business who has thoroughly followed these simple suggestions. Those who do fail are typically people who are incapable of being honest – with their colleagues, their customers and their partners.

Other problems may temporarily deflect you, but the ability to be rigorously honest will prove immeasurably beneficial in all your business relationships.

Twelve Steps of Business Relationships

Step 1. Accept that you have no power over people, that all your attempts at control have failed. Trying to get other people to do what you want them to do is doomed to failure, no matter how good your intentions, how right your cause, or how much benefit it would bring the other.

People just wanna be free. Go with it.

Step 2. Recognize that by yourself, you can’t succeed. Your success will inevitably be tied up in the success of other people. Not only are you not driving the bus, you are just another passenger.

Step 3. Resolve that you’re going to stop trying to drive the bus, that you’ll start doing things to help other people, that you’ll focus on getting the group to succeed. When things don’t go your way, remember “your way” is what got you into this mess. Repeat steps 1 and 2.

Step 4. Make a list of all the stupid, controlling, selfish things you do to others. Be specific about whom you do them to, and what harm it does to them. Stop at ten people.

Now add to the list a few good things you do. You are, after all, worthwhile.

Step 5. Go share your list with someone you trust. Listen to what they have to say about it and learn from what they have to say. Don’t waste time arguing with them.

Step 6. Get yourself ready to stop behaving in those old ways. Think about it for a while. Make a list of the new things you’ll do. Envision yourself responding in new ways; rehearse new “lines.”

Hint: your list should probably include listening. Also, listening.

Step 7. Pick a time of your own choosing to begin the change. It could be right now, it could be next week, but not next summer. Write that date in your calendar. When it comes, step out of your old ways and start working the new.

Step 8. Think about the customers, co-workers, peers and partners you might have tried to control and what you did to them. Think of what you might have done better and plan to do better next time.

Step 9. Go back to the customers, co-workers and partners you’ve tried to control, and tell them you realize what you have done. Acknowledge your responsibility in those situations, and tell them specifically how you plan to behave differently in future.

Hint: Don’t do this if it causes upset or harm to the other person. And don’t confuse this with trying to get them to forgive you – see Step 1, above.

Step 10. At each day’s end, do a mental run-through of how you did in your new approach. Note where you fell short and what you could have done better.

Then let it go and get a good night’s sleep.

Step 11. Create a little mantra for yourself, to remind you that your job is to help others, not yourself. Get out of the instance, secure in the idea that better relationships will float all transaction boats.

Step 12. Having recognized how to apply these principles to your business affairs, give it a shot at home and in the rest of your life.  You saw that one coming, right?

A Better New Year’s Resolution

It’s that time of year again. Resolutions come in full swing and we all start to assess how we can improve on the last year. It just so happens that I wrote a pretty good blog post at this time eight years ago, and I haven’t improved on it yet. Here it is again.

Happy New Year!

—————–

My unscientific sampling says many people make New Years resolutions, but few follow through. Net result—unhappiness.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

You could, of course, just try harder, stiffen your resolve, etc. But you’ve been there, tried that.

You could also ditch the whole idea and just stop making resolutions. Avoid goal-failure by eliminating goal-setting. Effective, but at the cost of giving up on aspirations.

I heard another idea: replace the New Year’s Resolution List with a New Year’s Gratitude List. Here’s why it makes sense.

First, most resolutions are about self-improvement—this year I resolve to: quit smoking, lose weight, cut the gossip, drink less, exercise more, and so on.

All those resolutions are rooted in a dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs—or with oneself.

In other words: resolutions often have a component of dissatisfaction with self. For many, it isn’t just dissatisfaction—it’s self-hatred. And the stronger the loathing of self, the stronger the resolutions—and the more they hurt when they go unfulfilled. It can be a very vicious circle.

Second, happy people do better. This has some verification in science, and it’s a common point of view in religion and psychology—and in common sense.

People who are slightly optimistic do better in life. People who are happy are more attractive to other people. In a very real sense, you empower what you fear—and attract what you put out.

Ergo, replace resolutions with gratitude. The best way to improve oneself is paradoxical—start by being grateful for what you already have. That turns your aspirations from negative (fixing a bad situation) to positive (making a fine situation even better).

Gratitude forces our attention outwards, to others—a common recommendation of almost all spiritual programs.

Finally, gratitude calms us. We worry less. We don’t obsess. We attract others by our calm, which makes our lives connected and meaningful. And before long, we tend to smoke less, drink less, exercise more, gossip less, and so on. Which of course is what we thought we wanted in the first place.

But the real truth is—it wasn’t the resolutions we wanted in the first place. It was the peace that comes with gratitude. We mistook cause for effect.

Go for an attitude of gratitude. The rest are positive side-effects.

 

Trust and The Future of Work: A Podcast With Jacob Morgan

Trust has been a main discussion point for most of my career. Trust in business, trust in selling, trust in relationships. Increasingly, people are discussing how trust in business and in organizations (or the lack thereof) is starting to affect how we all do business and people are starting to wonder how it will affect the future of work life.

I recently interviewed  Jacob Morgan, author of “The Future of Work” (Wiley 2014), about his book in my Books We Trust blog series. In turn, he recently interviewed me for his own podcast series,on issues of trust including why modern businesses have trust issues, how technology has simplified trust with the simple click of a button, the distinction between a lack of trustworthiness and a lack of willingness to trust.

We also delve into solutions on to how to better build trust in the future’s work environment including building trust with your employees, increasing loyalty of your employees and thereby raising employee retention, utilizing collaboration platforms to increase trust and even how to gain a better understanding of millennials and job-hopping–and how it might not be a bad thing.

Take a listen here. I think this just may be my best podcast yet.

http://hwcdn.libsyn.com/p/6/e/e/6ee2fa3fa84eb99e/Charliepodcastmp3.mp3?c_id=7607942&expiration=1410704130&hwt=34c156d5106fbb20a6280bc8bca7c5f0

 

 

A Successful 7th Generation Family Company

This is a guest post from old friend Jim Monk. Jim is a Texan by way of MIT who now grows coffee in Hawaii. H also writes great travelogues. He sent me this, about a tour of the Crane Paper Company. I just had to share it.

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Once in a while you get a chance to see something different.  Yesterday was one of those.  I am on a week long tour of New England – the home of the American Industrial Revolution.

We started out in Lowell, Massachusetts, where the American textile industry took a major leap forward.  There we looked at the canal system that powered up to 175 mills at one time and where employment was up over 80,000 at its peak in the late 1800’s.  From there we have visited an iron works, a shipyard, a museum dedicated to precision machine tools that enabled companies to manufacture products with interchangeable parts and, yesterday afternoon, a special paper company.

You may have used some Crane Paper company products when you have written nice notes to someone – Crane paper has been synonymous with quality and upscale for a long time.  But the reality is you probably use a Crane Paper product every day, without even thinking about it.

Crane Paper

Since 1871, the Crane Paper Company has been the sole supplier of the paper for the US currency.  However, “paper” is not quite correct.  What the company supplies to the government doesn’t contain an ounce of tree in it – it is all cotton and linen, with nowadays a slight admixture of very special fibers made by the government in a special laboratory and handed to Crane to be poured into the batches of material that will be made into greenbacks.

Greenbacks first got their name in the early 1800’s when the federal government finally started producing bills to replace the banknotes then in circulation.  “Banknotes” had been made by individual banks in various cities and states – hence the term banknote.

What we use now are no longer “banknotes”, even though we call them that.  The federal government made its first notes with the backside of them all in green ink – at that time green was difficult to photograph well and was hard to obtain, so the government felt the green would help to keep the bills from being counterfeited.

Today, thanks to North Korea, our bills are a whole lot more sophisticated.  It seems North Korea has been working on producing counterfeit $100 bills for some time to disrupt the American currency situation.  An observant teller at a federal reserve bank noticed one bill that had a different feel than the others – and that was the first time the government knew about the new counterfeit bills.  Eventually they traced them to North Korea, who then seems to have moved operations to Canada, where the percentage of counterfeit bills in circulation is far higher than in the US.

But American bills now have a nanotechnology woven into them as the latest round against counterfeiting – a whole concept that Crane developed.  Our speaker said they have some 40 patents on the technology but they have withheld lots of information on how the technology is used – “tradecraft”  — so no one else has been able to duplicate the new measures yet.

A special tape runs down the bills and has the interesting property that when you tilt the bill back and forth, you will see the image in the tape section move from side to side.  Rotate the bill side to side, and the image will move up and down!  And the image changes from a liberty bell to a “100” if the bill is a hundred dollar bill or the number of any other denomination it might happen to be.  This is done with a whole series of 2 micron wide lenses that are looking at images down below them.  The image you see is formed from hundreds of the lenses collecting bits of the images below them and compositing them towards your eyes.

The Present Mr. Crane

Now all of this was interesting, but for me the most interesting part of the presentation was the presenter, Doug Crane.  He’s in his early 50’s, judging from appearances, has children in high school and college and has already retired.  He came in to talk to us because he, too, went to MIT and just felt like talking to a bunch of MIT folks.

He said he is the seventh generation of his family to be involved (!) with the Crane Paper Company.  It is a privately held company – his family are the sole owners of the only company that has made our currency paper for over 140 years.

Towards the end of his talk his cell phone started ringing where it had been placed next to the computer that was controlling his presentation images.  He looked at it, looked sheepish and said, “Sorry, I have to take this one.”  We heard him arrange that the person would come to the place where we were to pick him up.

When he hung up, he said that was his Dad, who was coming to take him out to dinner because it was his birthday that day.

Now just how many seventh generation, successful company owners do you know?  Especially who seem quite modest, clearly knowledgeable about their business, plainly dressed and being picked up by their father that evening after coming in to give a talk to some strangers on their birthday?

When he left, he slung a back pack over his shoulder on his way out.  If America had more companies run by folks like that, we would be doing very well.

My tour is a success.  I hope your day is as well, Jim.

————————–

It is now, Jim, many thanks.

Why Some Men Don’t Trust Women In The Workplace

(And Why Some Women Don’t Trust Men, And How to Break The Vicious Cycle)

Why Some Men Don't Trust Women in the Workplace 23-Feb-2014Nobody, it seems, wants to talk about one of the most important dynamics of the modern workplace: Men quite often don’t trust women, and women with comparable frequency don’t trust men. The breakdown of trust is especially common when the male is a manager and the female is his subordinate. Burdened by stereotypes, myths and other hidden assumptions about female employees, he doesn’t trust her to get the job done. Having repeatedly been marginalized by her male bosses and male co-workers, she adapts in ways that exacerbate the breakdown in trust.

This reciprocal breakdown in trust can torpedo not just one, but two careers. Still, all is not lost. There are ways to sever the dual ring of vicious cycles and reestablish trust between men and women in the workplace.

Cycle 1: Why men don’t trust women

Let’s start with the stereotypes about women as employees. Women always put family and children above their jobs. If there’s a ballet lesson or if school gets out early, the callback to a key client will have to wait until tomorrow. Women always get pregnant and take maternity leave just when a new office is opening. Women take Family Medical Leave to care for an elderly parent with a stroke or a teenage child with mononucleosis just when a new computer operating system is being installed. Women are always on the verge of quitting when child-care responsibilities become overwhelming, and they will no doubt quit right before a crucial deadline.

We move on to another unstated but critical myth. Women are emotional and not analytical. Women will make workplace decisions based on feelings rather than facts. Women worry more about their co-workers’ comfort level than about getting the work done.

Then there’s the hidden assumption that a female employee is not really committed to the business. In the minds of many male managers, this assumption is reinforced every time a woman requests flexible work accommodations. Working from home means less “face time” with her male manager, and when a woman is out of sight, she must not really be working for the company.

Sometimes a male manager assumes that his female subordinate has gotten her job solely because the company had to comply with affirmative action guidelines. He feels that the pressure from higher-ups to diversity the workforce has lowered the quality of new hires. He looks at the top echelons of the company, sees very few female executives, and concludes that investing in a junior woman is a waste of his time. Better to not trust her to do important assignments. Just let her wither on the vine.

Cycle 2: How women reinforce the mistrust

Let’s start with the natural inclination to trust those who are like us. A male manager may perceive that his female subordinate is just different. She has had different experiences. Perhaps she didn’t play on the high school basketball team. Maybe she could care less about the lack of good relievers in the bullpen or the dubious wisdom of a first-round draft pick. Having experienced harassment or bullying in the workplace, a woman may have her guard up. She may be disinclined to engage in backslapping, deprecating humor. When it’s time to remind a co-worker about an upcoming meeting, she may not tell him to “get your butt over here pronto.”

Let’s move on to the false inferences that male managers draw from women’s inferior salaries. Many women find it difficult to demand higher starting salaries and to negotiate raises. As a result, they end up doing the same work as their male peers for less. Managers are privy to salary information. A male manager may interpret a woman’s lower salary not as evidence of inequity, but as a sign of weakness, as an indicator that she does not really have a long-range commitment to the company.

A male manager may find himself excluding his female subordinate from informal get-togethers where co-workers can bond with each other. He may believe that women don’t want to go out for drinks, take advantage of free tickets to the season opener, or attend industry conferences. He may worry that close familiarity will be interpreted as sex discrimination or sexual harassment. When his female subordinate is excluded from these bonding events, he doesn’t get to know her. Feeling excluded, she lacks the motivation to go the extra mile for the company, and the gap in trust just widens.

Finally – and perhaps most important – you cannot trust an employee if you feel her behavior is unpredictable. A male manager may find it difficult to give critical assignments to a female employee because he’s not sure how she will interact with her co-workers or with customers. He’s not sure how she will handle a crisis. He doesn’t feel confident that she will put in the extra hours when the deadline approaches.

This sense of unpredictability is exacerbated by what I’ll call the toggling strategy that many women are forced to adopt. Having received conflicting signals about how to act in the workplace, she toggles back and forth between the traditional male mode – decisive, aggressive, demanding, career-focused – and the more sex-neutral collegial mode – collaborative, inclusive, less dictatorial. This toggling frustrates her manager, who perceives her as alternately antagonistic and ineffective.

Trust has become a key competency

There’s no need to dwell here on the adverse consequences of this lack of trust for the woman’s career. Nor does it require an in-depth analysis to see the enormous waste of talent and corporate resources. The critical point is that trusting co-workers of the opposite sex has become a key competency for assuming a position of leadership. A breakdown in trust can sidetrack a man’s career as well as a woman’s.

The business world has become increasingly diverse and globalized. A male manager who cannot look beyond the stereotypes of his female employees may be similarly unable to develop trusting relationships with peers and clients of different races, ethnic groups, religions and nationalities. The same goes for a female who has developed self-protective behaviors that exacerbate the breach in trust. Failure to trust will translate into failure to advance to the top ranks of the organization.

Breaking the cycles of mistrust

So how can a male manager resist his stereotypes about women in the workplace? And how can a woman steer clear of the safety strategies that exacerbate the mistrust?

First, he needs to accept as fact that women as a group are no less committed to their careers than men. Take it at face value that a woman who gets an education, shows up every day for work, completes her assignments and is receptive to feedback is, in fact, serious about her job. Understand that everyone has some family responsibilities and that a good manager can incorporate absences into his planning, whether they’re due to pregnancy, tennis elbow or a heart attack. If a woman is taking advantage of some form of flexible work arrangement, focus on the work performed, and not on how often you see her face.

He needs to persist in his efforts to include his female subordinates in the entire range of work-related activities. That means water-cooler conversations, after-work drinks, sports events and industry-wide meetings. She needs to break the habit of refusing any such overtures, to entertain the possibility of loyalty and respect for him as a manager. She needs to recognize that through his efforts at inclusiveness, she will get to know about the business. She will get to know him and his peers. She will trust him.

He needs to avoid pat assumptions about how she will react to others, as these assumptions rarely hold up in practice. He needs to make a genuine effort to get to know her, to understand why she acts the way she does, and she needs to allow him to understand her. She needs to send him the message that he can be confident about her reactions to future deadlines, mishaps and crises at work.

She needs to tell him straightaway when an assignment is unclear or when his expectations about her performance are fuzzy. He needs to tell her if she is acting in ways that make him uncomfortable.

He needs to realize that most women suffer from lack of adequate feedback, and not from poor motivation or bad intentions. He needs to tell her when she’s erred, to suggest mentors and coaches, and to model behavior. When there is a problem, he needs to no longer be reluctant to address it. And she needs to accept his advice. Don’t write her off. And welcome him into the bargain.

 

 

 

A Better New Year’s Resolution

Happy New Year! New Year card with folded colored paperI wrote a good blog post at this time seven years ago, and haven’t improved on it yet. Here it is again.

Happy New Year.

—————–

My unscientific sampling says many people make New Years resolutions, but few follow through. Net result—unhappiness.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

You could, of course, just try harder, stiffen your resolve, etc. But you’ve been there, tried that.

You could also ditch the whole idea and just stop making resolutions. Avoid goal-failure by eliminating goal-setting. Effective, but at the cost of giving up on aspirations.

I heard another idea: replace the New Year’s Resolution List with a New Year’s Gratitude List. Here’s why it makes sense.

First, most resolutions are about self-improvement—this year I resolve to: quit smoking, lose weight, cut the gossip, drink less, exercise more, and so on.

All those resolutions are rooted in a dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs—or with oneself.

In other words: resolutions often have a component of dissatisfaction with self. For many, it isn’t just dissatisfaction—it’s self-hatred. And the stronger the loathing of self, the stronger the resolutions—and the more they hurt when they go unfulfilled. It can be a very vicious circle.

Second, happy people do better. This has some verification in science, and it’s a common point of view in religion and psychology—and in common sense.

People who are slightly optimistic do better in life. People who are happy are more attractive to other people. In a very real sense, you empower what you fear—and attract what you put out.

Ergo, replace resolutions with gratitude. The best way to improve oneself is paradoxical—start by being grateful for what you already have. That turns your aspirations from negative (fixing a bad situation) to positive (making a fine situation even better).

Gratitude forces our attention outwards, to others—a common recommendation of almost all spiritual programs.

Finally, gratitude calms us. We worry less. We don’t obsess. We attract others by our calm, which makes our lives connected and meaningful. And before long, we tend to smoke less, drink less, exercise more, gossip less, and so on. Which of course is what we thought we wanted in the first place.

But the real truth is—it wasn’t the resolutions we wanted in the first place. It was the peace that comes with gratitude. We mistook cause for effect.

Go for an attitude of gratitude. The rest are positive side-effects.

 

DON’T Always Exceed Expectations

Many of us go around repeating a mantra that we think is self-evidently correct: Under-promise and over-deliver, we say. Always exceed expectations.

There is a website ExceedAllExpectations.  Another website, HowTo.gov, tells governmental agencies to use metrics to exceed expectations. And as you well know, it’s a common mantra in business.

Not so fast.

Why Always Exceeding Expectations is a Bad Idea

Think this through. If you intentionally exceed a customer’s expectations, then you intentionally misled your customer about what to expect. If you make that a habit, then frankly, you’re a habitual liar.

Think that’s too strong? Think it through the next step. When a customer habitually gets more than they were promised, what’s such a customer to think?  That’s easy – that you’re constantly sandbagging the quote to make yourself look good. And they will naturally start to bargain with you about the expected results and/or the price.

When you make a habit of exceeding expectations, you are training your customers. You are training them to expect you to under-promise and over-deliver. And they are not dumb, they learn quickly.

You have trained them to doubt you, to suspect your motives, and to disbelieve what you tell them in the future.

Proof from the Market

In yesterday’s bi-weekly newsletter TrustedAdvice, I included a link to a video clip about this idea. (By the way, if you’d like to get TrustedAdvice via email, click here to subscribe).

Within minutes, I heard from two readers, with very interesting comments.

From Reader 1
I have learned this time and time again, but I want to please my clients, so I repeatedly try to exceed client expectations – only to find the clients coming back and demanding more and more.  The fact is, I set myself up for failure, as you cannot give more than 100%. I end up getting frustrated because then clients generally speaking don’t appreciate it when you do give them 100%, they just expect more and more of you and your time.

and Reader 2 adds another wrinkle
My company has exceeding expectations built into its DNA, a by-product of yours truly (though I am so much better now than I used to be). It has created more damage than you’d ever think. Not just in terms of clients expecting more for less, but in a shop that can never truly feel good about itself just for doing a good job, always feeling we could/should have done more.

“Always exceed expectations,” despite frequently coming from good motives, actually succeeds in destroying trust, with customers and employees alike.

So – don’t do that.

Instead, do what builds trust. Tell people exactly what to expect, and then deliver that. Period. After all, that’s how you develop a track record or being credible and reliable. That way your motives are never in doubt. That way you get known for being not only a straight shooter, but a particularly good estimator.

Basically, tell the truth. It’s always a better policy.

How to Increase Trust in Organizations

Increasing Trust Within Your OrganizationI was grocery shopping Saturday. It was 2PM, 96 degrees out – pretty hot for New Jersey – and I was in the checkout line. The cashier had started sliding my purchases through the register, when suddenly I noticed a bag left over from the customer before me. She had left and gone to her car.

The woman doing the bagging noticed it at the same time. She grabbed the lady’s bag and dashed out into the heat. She was making pretty good time for a woman in her 60s, and we all could see her out the window as she finally caught up, handed over the bag, and started back.

Then the cashier suddenly exclaimed, “Omigosh, she left two other bags as well!” Looking quickly at me and the woman behind me in line, she said, “Will you two please excuse me for just a minute? I’ll be right back.” And she too took off after the forgetful lady, with two bags in tow. She was in her 20s, and made very good time.

It occurred to me I could slide a few groceries over the line and into my bag and escape without paying. (I don’t do such things, but the idea did show up in my mind). Then the elderly woman behind me in line said, “You know, I don’t mind one little bit waiting for someone who’s doing a good deed like that.”  Neither did I, I said, neither did I.

When the cashier and the bagging lady came back, we both complimented them, and they blushed a bit and said thank you. (I sent a complimentary email to ShopRite’s HQ later that night with the store number, employee name and cash register number, all of which were on the receipt).

So my question is: how do you get employees to behave like that? I mean generously, based on principle, willing to take certain risks, confident to act in the moment. How do you keep from getting sullen employees who talk about “career-limiting moves,” who won’t lift a hand or take a risk to help another?

How Do You Induce Values-based Behavior in an Organization?

Earlier that same day, I had the opportunity to briefly visit a Sears store, a Macy’s store, and a Bed Bath and Beyond unit. Sears was awful – employees keeping their distance from customers, 100 feet away, pretending not to notice. Macy’s was a little better, but still sullen, under-staffed, and radiating not-helpfulness.

BB&B was a huge contrast. Several employees, busy doing other things, asked me if they could help. I asked two for help, and they both went out of their way to do so.

How does this happen?

The standard answer in most businesses, I’m afraid, is to focus on the wrong things: typically  incentives, communications, and procedures.

The more I see of business, the more convinced I become that the single most powerful way to create values-based behavior is none of the above – it is to do it yourself, and to talk about it with others.

The Usual Suspects

Incentives appeal to the individual’s rational economic or ego-satisfying needs. Fine and dandy, but if you’re trying to incent selfless behavior, the concept of rewards is just a tad self-contradictory.

There is probably (I’m guessing) more money spent on communications than on any other “solution” to issues of trust, ethical behavior, and customer-focus. Companies love to pronounce their values to their customers, and reinforce them internally in posters, newsletters, and blogs. The problem is, impersonal companies communicating about personal relationships is some kind of category mistake.

And procedures? The whole point of values-based behavior is that the employee extrapolates from principles in the moment. Rehearsing and drilling doesn’t help extrapolate values, it replaces that process with rote memory.

Role Modeling

Think of how we learn from our parents. Think of the sports or public figures we admire (there are still a few). In all cases, we are influenced by what they do – not by what they say they will do, or did do, or wish they’d done.

When it comes to values, I suspect BB&B has leaders in their operations organization who both walk the talk, and talk it too. People who lead by example, and who are convinced that values like customer assistance are valid only if kept sharpened by use.

I suspect Angie the cashier at ShopRite was hired partly because she exhibited values. I suspect that the folks managing her store make a point of being helpful and customer-focused, and engage customers about values like that. I suspect it didn’t occur to her that she shouldn’t take the risk of leaving her cash drawer and my groceries unattended – because her leadership would have trusted their customers and done the same thing – and she knew it.

We have overdone the behavioral, incentives-based, needs-maximizing best practices model of human resources. We have under-estimated the human power of changing humans. After all, the business of relating to other people is personal.