Why We Don’t Trust Politicians: the Case of Healthcare

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Stephen M.R. Covey, in his recent Trust Matters interview, notes that politicians rank lowest in trust among all professions. He identifies counterfeit behavior as the underlying cause.

He’s right; and of all the high-visibility disagreements today – wars, abortion, debt – none has inspired more flagrant counterfeit behavior than health care. It’s a polarizing issue in itself – and its abuse by politicians puts added stress on the social compact.

A Massive Inconvenient Truth

Never mind climate change. Here are a few far greater inconvenient truths that everyone knows, but no one will admit:

  • Only a very small portion of the US population could afford to pay for the health care they have come to expect
  • The health care system as it exists could not survive without massive government subsidies
  • Health care is an economic good – as with housing, food and consumer goods, what you get is what you can afford.

Our collective inability to admit these truths in a socially useful manner means that the cost of health care is killing jobs and crippling American competitiveness.  Like parasites choking their host, the politicians are too tied up with reality-as-we-like-to-pretend to speak the truth – even though we all know it.

Result: bad health care, bad economics – and bad social trust.

How We Got Here

Albeit with the best of motives, Medicare, ERISA, and subsequent regulations greatly expanded the proportion of the population who could seek health care. Health care usage exploded as people took advantage of a service seen as low cost and already paid-for. With that expansion, hospitals, insurance carriers, drug companies, device makers and health care providers were able to train doctors, fund research and invest in marketing programs; all paid for with government and employer dollars.

Laudable though the goals were, the legislation also forced mid-sized and large employers to devote an ever-increasing proportion of their compensation expense to employee benefits – with a resultant decline in real wages. Until the Affordable Care Act, small employers could avoid the non-discrimination rules through the purchase of insured health plans.

The inconvenient (again) truth is: this tangled web of intertwined interests has become so pervasive that the “private” health care industry would implode without the government.  Health care in the US has become an entitlement program for both individuals and for industry – and no longer perceived by most Americans as an economic good paid for with wages or profits.

Where We Stand Now

Health care contributes to both our slow job growth and our growing income inequality. When health care costs grow as a proportion of compensation, rising lower-wage employee costs begin to overwhelm the value they can add. Naturally, employers then shift to exempt part-timers and contractors. Small employers, once exempt from the rules, now simply avoid adding workers.

The experience of every other nation is that health care rationing is an essential element of any solution; we can’t outrun it. We have not faced up to that inconvenient (yet again) truth in the US.

Enter: the Politicians

Health care is a fault line around which our two primary political parties have entrenched themselves. The GOP has the problem in its sights – but can’t stomach the solution. Democrats misstate the problem – and thus propose ever more expensive solutions. Both are hostage to ideologies.

Republicans look knee-jerk to the private sector, touting doctor choice and the doctor/patient relationship as a panacea. Their inconvenient truth is that the system will fail without the government – and that most of their voters will be unable to afford coverage.

Democrats insist on universal coverage with equal benefits for all, and the right to sue if things don’t go well.  Their inconvenient truth is that the system is unsustainable – and that their children will have to disavow it.

Neither solution is viable.  We all know it, but bury our head in ideological sands.  And yet the same time – because we really do know the truth – we don’t trust our leaders because we know they are lying to us. They refuse to speak the truth.

Getting to the Solution

Our politicians give only the answers we want to hear.  We know they aren’t true, but we fear the other side’s answers more, so we cheer for the answers we fear less.  We don’t want to “lose.”  Which means we all don’t trust anyone – and we all lose.

The strongest force against trust is the willingness to leave the truth unspoken.

Is there any candidate, anywhere, willing to say simply that not everyone can have the same health care? Can any candidate achieve escape velocity from our debilitating ideological prison? And would the rest of us be willing to acknowledge the truth if someone had the courage to speak it?

In a following post, we’ll discuss one potential solution and why our politicians will give up our trust in order to avoid it.

Stupid Crazy Trust

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Sometimes I get annoyed. Usually, that means I’m thinking like an idiot. Sometimes, however, it produces useful ideas.

Lately I’m annoyed by the constant repetition of a myth about trust. You know this one: “Trust takes a long time to create, but only a moment to destroy.” There’s no need to name names here, but you can see examples of it here and here and here and here.

This time, my annoyance produced some good: I can now explain why that myth isn’t merely annoying, but positively harmful as well. Here goes.

The Truth.

Let’s start with the truth. Most human relationships, like most emotions, take roughly as long to get over as they took to develop. Marriages or friendships don’t end overnight. There may be a flash point, a straw that breaks the camel’s back. But we cut slack for people we trust. We don’t dump them abruptly.

If trust were lost in a minute, battered women wouldn’t stay with the men who beat them; things are a little more complicated than that.

If trust died quickly, the SEC would have investigated Bernie Madoff when Harry Markopolos first lodged charges against him. If trust died quickly, the steady drip drip drip of evidence at Penn State, Enron, Toyota, and Johnson & Johnson would have ended at the first drip.

Most examples of “trust lost quickly” turn out to be either just the last drip in a long series of drips or a delusion about trust’s existence in the first place. You don’t “violate the trust” of a subscriber to your email list by sending them a worthless referral. The relationship you have with a name on your email list may be many things, but “trust-based” is probably a stretch.

Trust formed quickly can be lost quickly. Trust formed at a shallow level can be lost at the same level; trust formed deeply, or over time, takes deeper violations, or a longer time, to be lost. The pattern looks more like a standard bell curve than a cliff.

But, you might say, so what? Why are you annoyed? Why is that harmful? 

The Harm

If you believe that trust can be lost in a moment, then you likely believe you must be cautious and careful about protecting it. You are likely to think about trust as a precious resource to be guarded against being tarnished. You are inclined to institute rules and procedures to protect it and to give cautionary lectures about the risk of losing trust.

Yet these are precisely the kinds of behavior that result in trust lost.

I don’t trust the man who talks with me while pointing a gun at me‬—partly because he looks threatening to me, but also because he clearly does not trust me.

Trust, at a personal level, is like love and hate: you tend to get back what you put out. You empower what you fear. Those afraid of getting burned are the most likely to get burned.

This totally works at a corporate level too. I remember vividly the convenience store chain that gave monthly lie detector tests to store managers to prevent theft—and then wondered why the theft kept on happening.

Trust is a Muscle

Thinking of trust as something you can lose in a minute makes you cautious and unlikely to take risks. But the absence of risk is what starves trust. There simply is no trust without risk—that’s why they call it trust.

If your people aren’t empowered, if they’re always afraid of being second-guessed, then they will always operate from fear and never take a risk—and as a result, will never be trusted.

Trust is a muscle—it atrophies without use. And the repetition of the mantra “trust can be lost in a moment” just tells people not to use it.

Turns out the stupidest, craziest trust is the trust you never engaged in because you were too afraid of losing it. The smartest trust is the trust you get by taking a risk.

Book and Speech Reviews from the Twin Cities

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Last week I had the pleasure of speaking in Minneapolis at the annual meeting of the Twin Cities Compensation Network about trust-based relationships from an HR perspective. They were also kind enough to buy a few copies of The Trusted Advisor Fieldbook.

Today Ann Bares has a blogpost – Trust and the Compensation Professional –  about that subject, that talk, and that book.

Ann is a true professional in the field. In addition to years of work contributing to the TCCN, she is also founder and editor of The Compensation Café, a collaborative blog in the compensation field.

Pop on over to Compensation Force to read Ann’s review and commentary, I think you’ll enjoy it.  And thanks, Ann, for the kind writeup.

Real People, Real Trust: An Entrepreneur Wins with Partnership

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John Dunn has worn many hats in his 25 years as a professional including consultant, change management expert, bed and breakfast owner, and most recently, screenwriter. Find out how John used the principles of trust-building to create a wildly successful business venture—strategies anyone can use to win business while making a difference for a community.

It Starts with a Mindset

John and I met a few months ago while working for a mutual client. Over lunch one day, I learned about his business ventures including the bed and breakfast he launched and ran from 2001 to 2006. I was immediately struck by his out-of-the-box approaches to developing a successful business—starting with a mindset of collaboration not competition.

“There were five B&Bs in the town we were serving, including mine. I suppose I could have looked at the other four as competition, but I believed there were an abundant number of customers and no way to accommodate all of them 365 days a year without leaving business on the table. I knew that the only thing preventing us from tapping into the full potential of the market was letting the public know about all of us. And I knew the best thing to do would be to have all five inns working together, viewing ourselves as a unit and viewing the hotels in town as our collective competition.

“My life philosophy is there’s plenty of everything—customers, money, everything. You just have to direct it to you.

“I’ve also been in business long enough that I know some people prefer data over a philosophy. So, I researched the number of people who came to our town and determined what we were missing in the market. The numbers showed clearly that if we created a strategic alliance and pooled our resources, we’d then have a competitive advantage over large hotels with big marketing budgets.”

An Offer to Help

John took a systematic approach to convincing each B&B to adopt his mindset and approach—first, he built trust individually, then he approached the group as a collective.

“Of the other four B&Bs, two were already established and the other two were in the process of opening. I took time to introduce myself to all the other owners and talked to each of them about what I believed was unique about my inn. I shared information readily and freely. Then I offered my help with anything they needed. For example, I had relationships with the city that could help the new businesses figure out how to comply with city codes. Once all the B&Bs were open and running, I went back and proposed my idea of working together to be stronger in the marketplace.”

Team Agreements

I asked John if he got push-back. “There was some resistance at first, and we had to have the conversation about how we could really collaborate rather than compete. One critical success factor was agreeing to be transparent. When we were upfront with each other we found we were able to make it work. We also decided we all had to be in full agreement to do something, and that we were all responsible for ideas on how to execute. For example, we decided that everyone would decorate for the holidays. Then someone came up with the idea of having a local florist put a uniquely decorated tree in every inn. One tree was raffled off and the others were available for sale. A lot of people benefited from the creative ideas that came out of our partnership—not just us.”

Systems Thinking

John says another key was in thinking of all the B&Bs as a whole.

“I’m a big believer in win/win. Sure, I would’ve loved it if my B&B filled first. But my over-riding belief was if we had 35 rooms and 50 people looking for rooms, even if mine were the last ones filled they’d still be filled.

“I kept reminding myself that the way you get more done is through leverage. For example, we could leverage money by collectively pooling our marketing budgets. So when the Chamber of Commerce held an event and wanted tables for all the inns, we had a joint table marketing all of us. That meant we could take turns at the event so we could all be at our inns keeping our customers happy. We instantly had 12 to 16 staff members to do marketing instead of two or three.”

Putting the Customer First—For Real

John and the other B&B owners consistently put customer needs ahead of any one B&Bs’ needs.

“We agreed that the primary way to differentiate from the bigger hotels in town was through our personal connections with customers and through exceptional customer service. So if a customer called my B&B and I didn’t have what they needed, I’d put him on hold and call each B&B until I found what he was looking for. Others did the same. We all viewed the entire inventory as our own, we knew it well, and we were committed to doing whatever it took to help our customers out.”

John’s mindset of “customer” extended to the community as well.

“I knew another way we could all differentiate was by promoting our historical buildings. So twice a year, in the spring and near the December holidays, we rented a trolley and opened up all the B&Bs to the public so they could take historical tours. I established a relationship with the historical neighborhood association for a nearby neighborhood so that our tours were timed to align with theirs, giving people more opportunities to see historical properties. And I partnered with the local historical museum by including admission into the museum as part of the tour ticket. All the pieces worked together and everyone gained something.”

“Real World” Application

The results John got speak for themselves: a 25% increase in occupancy rate over a year (which is a big number in the hotel business) and double the number of advertising impressions without any additional investment.

I asked John if he thought his approaches could create a similar return in the corporate world. His answer was a resounding, “Yes.”

“When you think about it, what we did was actually quite simple: we looked at ourselves as a unique product and created strategic partnerships that would create leverage so we could all grow and be better. Companies have been doing this for years. Take ERP implementations. I worked for a global consulting firm that had the capacity to build their own product, but instead joined forces with SAP. That partnership created a much more compelling value proposition for the customer. The key is to maximize opportunity with as few resources as possible.”

John emphasizes that the strategy isn’t viable without the mindset that goes along with it.

“I do a lot of consulting with nonprofits and the hardest thing to get through their heads is the notion of leveraging their values and products with others’ values and products. They have trouble with it because their organizations are built on a mentality of scarcity—they’re always fighting for budget, asking for money, and have a perception there’s never enough. So they naturally think, ‘I can’t partner with another because they might steal my donor list.’

“If nonprofits believed there was an abundance of money out there for everyone, then every single one of them would be successful. It really comes down to mindset, mental models and belief systems. That’s what I spend time on when I’m consulting with them.”

Dream Big, Win Big

There’s a unifying theme in all John’s endeavors: how to manifest the impossible with the possible. He’s jazzed about his new career as a screenwriter―three of his scripts have been optioned by known producers. John says, “Making movies is a way to interact with bigger and bigger audiences and change lives on a much grander scale.”

Here’s to big dreams with big results.

Connect with John on LinkedIn .

——–

The Real People, Real Trust series offers an insider view into the challenges, successes, and make-it-or-break-it moments of people from all corners of the world who are leading with trust. Check out our prior posts: read about:

Chip Grizzard: A CEO You Should Know;

Ralph Catillo: How One Account Executive Stands Apart;

Anna Dutton: A Fresh Perspective on Sales Operations;

Heber Sambucetti: A Learning Consultant’s Approach to Leadership;

and Janet Andrews: What Trust-based Strategy Consulting Looks, Feels, and Sounds Like.

The November Trust Matters Review

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Trust Equation Michael Kitces asks which is more important: authenticity vs credibility? Should financial planners admit to their mistakes (to be authentic), or keep their mouths shut (to maintain credibility)?

Robert Cialdini writes about Bernie Madoff  — the fox who bamboozled other foxes (pdf).

In the Wall Street Journal, Robert Hurley lists 5 principles leaders can adopt to demonstrate trustworthiness and embed it in their companies.  The section on alignment of interest is particularly important.

Rachel Ehrenberg discusses H. Eugene Stanley‘s research into the problems with standard financial risk models.  If you don’t trust the assumptions underlying a mathematical model, expect the model to fail.  And you don’t need a degree in math, instead ask one simple question: do bankruptcies tend to cluster in time and space, or not?

Dave Brock discusses rule #1 of HR problems: if your employees are all bad, the problem doesn’t start with the employees.

John Gies discusses the immeasurable things that makes salespeople feel trustworthy.

Perhaps a case of “department of the obvious”, but research confirms that powerful people don’t take advice well.  There is a camp that says that’s good.  Warren Buffett and Steve Jobs are and were members, but is it good for most leaders?  Read and find out.

Penny Sarchet discusses the nocebo effect: do a patient’s negative expectations have the power to undermine the effectiveness of a treatment? And what is the responsibility of a doctor as a trusted advisor? Seems to me the implications of the nocebo effect are applicable outside medicine.

A war of all against all?  Not so fast, says neuroscientist Eric Fortune: brains are wired for cooperation.

In the department of “perhaps not what you’d expect”, Deborah Linville researches how men hire and promote women based on the perceived sexiness of their names.  Who do you think got ahead faster?

The Trust Matters Review highlights the best articles and posts on trust our research has turned up in the last month.

For a live stream of our trust research, follow our team on Twitter: @CharlesHGreen, @AndreaPHowe, @StewartMHirsch, and @SandyStyer.

If you’d like to share a great article about trust, let us know on Twitter or in the comments here.

For more links to outstanding articles on trust, see:

What the Paterno Scandal Tells Us About Trust

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Joe Paterno was the de facto leader of a powerful movement. He thought he could outrun an ethical blemish in his movement, while still preaching the gospel of high values.

Where have we heard this before? Try Watergate. The Catholic Church. The SEC.

We keep replaying Captain Renault – shocked, shocked to find that something has been going on.

The Myth of Trust Shattered

One of the more common myths about trust is that “it takes a long time to create, and only a moment to destroy.”

If that were true, Bernie Madoff would have been destroyed when Harry Markopolis first blew the whistle way back in 2000.  But the SEC wasn’t in a listening mood. It takes a lot more than a moment to destroy trust when you’re dealing with a former NASDAQ Chairman.

If it were true that trust takes only a moment to destroy, then the Catholic Church would have taken decisive action back in 1984 when charges were made against priests and hushed by the bureaucracy at the cardinal level. But it takes more than a priest defending NAMBLA to destroy trust in a hubristic institution.

If it were true that trust could be destroyed in an instant, then Paterno’s non-response way back in 2002 to a first-hand witness account and the complaint of a mother would have been fatal to his following. But trust isn’t destroyed in an instant, not to an institutional network highly dependent on the leader.

In truth, trust dies a very slow death; ask any counselor to battered women.

Trusting the Hubristic

I use the Trust Equation as a deconstructive tool for analyzing trustworthiness.  It points to credibility, reliability, intimacy, and low self-orientation as drivers of trustworthiness.

Most businesspeople think credibility and reliability are the main drivers of trustworthiness.  They focus on credentials, track records, and reputation. “Madoff was the chairman of NASDAQ; Elie Wiesel invested with him. He must be trustworthy.”

Sadly, that’s what fosters hubris. Paterno breathed his own exhaust long enough to be shocked that others could consider child abuse and hypocrisy important enough to keep him from one more Saturday. Nixon could never come to grips with the essential lesson of Watergate – the coverup is always ethically worse than the crime.

It’s easier to trust people who truly believe in their own trustworthiness – even if that trustworthiness has been, by any objective standard, destroyed.

The Checks and Balances of Trust

Resumes can be forged; track records can be altered. Reputations based solely on hearsay can be abused.

Reputation is based on the assumption that the past is what it appears to be, that the future will look like the past, and that if X million other people say it’s so, it must be so.

Usually that works. Occasionally it doesn’t.  That’s why reliance on any one aspect of the trust equation is inadequate.

It’s not like the other factors of the trust equation (intimacy, low self-orientation) can’t be faked either. Intimacy is the most powerful factor, and the preferred vehicle of the con man. Again, don’t trust any one variable.

But today’s lesson is about over-trusting institutional hubris.

Consider some words: Paterno, Papa, JoePa, il Papa, Godfather, paternal. As children, we all want the benevolent and powerful protection of the father figure. And so when our institutions’ leaders garb themselves in that kind of imagery, we all too often react as kids.

As adults, we need to be adult about our institutions. The blind adulation of a million is not ten times better than the adulation of a hundred thousand. If the adulation is unfounded, then it’s just ten times stupider and more tragic.

Paterno was a great coach whose greatness was decidedly on the decline. His legacy wasn’t unhinged by a moment, but by a steady erosion in his trustworthiness. The fact that he was among the last to know is a testament to how profoundly we can fool even ourselves.

The value of a second opinion looks mighty high today.

 

“Consult This” Consults Us

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Charlie and I recently recorded a podcast interview with Mike McLaughlin on the subject of trust and professional services. We covered a lot of ground in 16 minutes, including the one piece of advice we’d each give consultants about building trust with clients.

Consult This

Mike is an accomplished thought leader in the world of professional services. A former partner with Deloitte Consulting, he’s the author of two books (Winning the Professional Services Sale and Guerrilla Marketing for Consultants, in collaboration with Jay Conrad Levinson), the founder of MindShare Consulting LLC, and the publisher of Management Consulting News, a monthly newsletter that delivers practical ideas to thousands of professionals around the world. He also writes another monthly newsletter, The Guerrilla Consultant, which extends the concepts and strategies in his first book.

Mike regularly taps into experts on a variety of relevant topics, and posts his own insightful content on his blog, Consult This. Some examples include:

  • Let Them Take Credit. How, by giving up the credit, you actually earn credit (and more business).
  • What’s in a Name? How the job titles we use on business cards, email signature lines, and web sites convey a world of meaning to others, some of which isn’t helpful.
  • When it All Hits the Fan. Why we should consider ourselves lucky when a client calls us on the carpet for a customer service failure.

We were honored to be among the likes of Peter Block and Peter Bregman, whom Mike has interviewed in the past, among others.

Q & A

Mike asked us some interesting questions. He wanted to know:

  • Do buyers trust professional service providers more, less, or about the same as they did when The Trusted Advisor was published?
  • If you’re meeting a client for the first time, what are the best steps to take to begin to build trust?
  • On the flip side of the coin, what common behaviors do you see that detract from building trust?
  • What do you say to the pushy sales manager who wants you to “accelerate” the sale before trust is established?
  • If you’ve lost trust with a client, what can you do to regain it?
  • If you could give a consultant just one piece of advice about building trust with clients, what would it be? (Charlie and I had different answers for this one.)

Check out his blog post today to find out how we answered.

Connect with Mike on LinkedIn and Twitter.

A Certified Trusted Traveler

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As of October 23, 2011, I have been declared by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection to be a “Trusted Traveler” through their Global Entry program. Let’s examine what the CBP means by “trusted.”

The Experience

If you fly internationally, you may have seen the “Global Entry” line or kiosk off to the side as you approach passport control. The line looks shorter―that’s the appeal of the program.

And it is shorter―an attractive proposition after a transatlantic or transpacific flight, or even one from Canada. The online application process is heavy-handed and slow, and you have to actually schedule an interview either at a federal office or an airport.

Oddly, the experience reminds me of dealing with JPMorganChase; very nice people, but you have to navigate through frustrating processes and systems to get to them.

But now that I’m “trusted”―what does that mean?

Customs and the Trust Equation

In the video they show you at the interview, several points are made. They welcome you as “low-risk,” though they also make a point of saying that continued membership is subject to good behavior, and that, in turn, is subject to occasional random audit. Sort of like Reagan’s “trust but verify,” I think.

The CBP is obviously trying to certify my trustworthiness, not my propensity to trust others. This is precisely what the Trust Equation was meant to do―to define, quantify, and evaluate the level of trustworthiness of an individual. So, let’s use it to examine what the CBP means by trusted traveler.

As far as I can tell, they use four critical elements in granting status. They demand to see a passport (I have no idea what scrutiny it’s given) and of course require it on entry; they take fingerprints and use them to verify on entry; on entry they match up travel plans with airline records; and they take a photo.

It seems to me the CBP is looking to establish two things: first, that I am who I say I am, both at the time of application and at subsequent times of entry; and second, that who I am is someone who does not currently present any security risk to the country.

Whereas the Trust Equation identifies four elements: credibility, reliability, intimacy, and self-orientation, the CBP Trusted Traveler Program focuses entirely on the first two attributes: credibility and reliability.

First, the various cross-checks (passport, fingerprints, travel plans, photo ID) are attempts to establish an ongoing identity. They all assess the truthfulness of my assertion that I am Charles H. Green, an individual with a particular history.

Second, the process certifies my reliability as a citizen in the past. It doesn’t extrapolate my past reliability into the future, i.e. as I prove further reliability the checks don’t get more beneficial or less onerous. It’s a one-step, one-off promotion.

And I think that’s it. It doesn’t have a thing to do with intimacy or low self-orientation. There’s no room in it for me to plead for leniency or for the government to be focused on my particular needs―nor the other way around. Which is for the most part as it should be.

The Benefits―and Shortfalls―of Trusted Travelers

The Trusted Traveler Program is a straightforward, mutually beneficial way of expediting some processing within an enormously expensive mass exercise in distrust. In a country obsessively reluctant to be seen as “profiling,” this approach is at least a step toward socially acceptable differential risk-taking—which is what trusting is about, after all.

This sort of trust—exclusively based on certification, credibility, and reliability—has an important place in society. The privacy-niks will always police the boundaries of certification in service to another form of trust—the trust that we can live free of Big Brother—but this trust lets us use things like credit cards, online payment systems, even currency. We absolutely need it.

But it is a narrow form of trust nonetheless. Trust-as-certified-identity can be used for bad ends as well. By itself, it doesn’t add to the richness of the human condition. It is a necessary, not a sufficient, condition for the living of life.

For trust to affect quality of life, we need those other trust elements—the security that permits intimacies and the ability to show other-orientation.

Meanwhile, you can trust that I’ll move more freely about the airports.

How to Create a Culture of Trust

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We’re pleased to announce the release of our latest eBook: How to Create a Culture of Trust.

It’s the sixth in the new Trusted Advisor Fieldbook series by Charles H. Green and Andrea P. Howe.

Each eBook provides a snapshot of content from The Trusted Advisor Fieldbook, which is jam-packed with practical, hands-on strategies to dramatically improve your results in sales, relationship management, and organizational performance.

How to Create a Culture of Trust reveals:

  • Two key levers: virtues and values
  • The difference that leading from principles makes
  • The biggest trust-destroyer in an organization

P.S. Did you miss out on Volumes 1 through 5 of The Fieldbook eBook series? Get them while they’re still available:

    1. 15 Ways to Build Trust…Fast!
    2. How to Sell to the C-Suite
    3. Six Risks You Should Take to Build Trust
    4. How YOU Can Raise Trust in Your Organization
    5. The Dos and Don’ts of Trust-Based Networking

Take a look and let us know what you think.

Win a Free Copy of The Trusted Advisor Fieldbook

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Over the past few months we’ve counted down 144 daily #TrustTips on Twitter.  Each tip aimed to help you improve your trustworthiness and trusted relationships within your professional and personal lives.  We collected them all here.

Now that our new book, “The Trusted Advisor Fieldbook,” nears its release date, we are looking to hear from you, oh avid readers, which tips you felt were the most useful, profound or just plain interesting.

You Be the Judge

We listed a few of our favorites – now it’s your turn. We’d like to share, right here on Trust Matters, a few of yours.

So go ahead and tell us which #TrustTip was your favorite and why (no more than a few sentences). We’ll enter each submission into a drawing to win a copy of the new book autographed by both of us, as well as the opportunity to be singled out on our site (eternal fame, in other words).

Enter Now! Just go ahead and list your favorite #TrustTip in the comment section below or, email us at: [email protected].  Once again, here’s the full list of #TrustTips.

We can’t wait to hear which tips you choose!