Think Before Sending

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What would you do?

That’s what my daughter’s 8th grade class was asked last year. The subject: texting secrets.

One girl had texted to a friend another friend’s embarrassing secret. But she didn’t just send it to one BFF— the text went out to everyone in the class—including, of course, the hapless girl whose secret was no longer.

Sound familiar? I recently received a message sent from one educator to a couple of colleagues regarding a student.  It also went to the institution’s entire mailing list.  This happens a lot in business too.  “Reply all” inadvertently pressed sends messages to the wrong person or people, or to entire lists.  Sometimes those slipped messages lead to a career and/or personal life hurt or destroyed.

The cause: carelessness, haste, anger? Doesn’t really matter. Who would think a simple button on a screen marked “send” could cause so much havoc?

Not Just Another Reply-All Horror Story

We could talk about how to recover from the gaffe via an apology. We could talk about how to use email properly.

Or–we could discuss how these types of issues affect trust.  And they do.  Think of this from the perspective of the Trust Equation.  Sending to the wrong person or group of people reduces Credibility and Reliability.  What gets inadvertently shared decreases Intimacy–after all sharing a secret shows a lack of discretion, even if done by mistake.

Here’s what my daughter learned as a result of this exercise with her class:

  • Double check everything before sending any electronic message (email, text, Facebook, IM)
  • Consider the medium–should the message be sent electronically, or is it better delivered in person or by phone
  • Should it be sent at all, by any medium (is it gossip or otherwise inappropriate to share)
  • Be prepared to do the right thing in the event things don’t work out.

The Big Lesson—Less Is More

As I thought about it, I think the third point—“should it be sent at all”—is by far the more powerful lesson my daughter learned that day.  Think it through.  Take a deep breath.  Count to ten. What’s your role in the situation?  What will the consequences be? Will saying anything really matter in a positive way?

These are profound lessons for all of us.  Adults suffer all the time from not having learned these lessons earlier in life.  How often do we act out and regret later?  How often do we say hurtful things even when we don’t mean to and suffer remorse?  How often do we hurt those we love?

Some time ago I learned from a lawyer colleague I respect and trust, that when it comes to the written and spoken word, less is more.  Shouldn’t we at least think about this before we hit Send?

I think my daughter learned a few rules of email etiquette that day—and one massive lesson about living life as a human being.

I’m pleased it was a topic for an 8th grade class, and it’s not the first time her school addressed real world issues.  I just hope we don’t have to wait for this generation to grow up before these valuable lessons are commonly used in the business community.

The July Trust Matters Review

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Trust Equation

Mary C Shaeffer reminds us that feeling uncomfortable when you give an employee bad news is about you, and that what they need is what you should be focused on.  Which is to say, it’s not about you.  Read for some very practical advice and a good head-straightening.

Ian Brodie walks us step by step through what is required to become a trusted adviser, starting with doing a good job at whatever you were initially hired to do, but moving far beyond basic competence.

Joel Spolsky meditates on who employees eat their lunch with, and how cafeterias encourage or discourage people to eat together.  Think it might have trust implications?

Burson-Marsteller’s pan-European trust survey finds, unsurprisingly, that trust in business government has crashed since the financial crisis.  Guess by how much for CEO’s, multinationals and government and then head on over and see if you got it right.

An interview with Microsoft’s Ross Smith keeps circling back on trust.  How do you get the most out of  your team?

Research shows that staying loyal is good for your health, your creativity and your pocketbook.  Read the ways, and why.  And then note the caveat—when society lets you.

J. Keith Murnighan and Li Huang ran an experiment called the trust game to try and figure out why we trust some strangers, like Bernie Madoff, virtually instantly.  The conclusions from their trust game aren’t startling, but they are interesting.

Does medical school make doctors less empathic? If so, does that mean we can trust them more, or less?  Does objectivity trump empathy and caring?

Cary Berglund and Julie Brayton report on a Pew study of Facebook and Trust.  Quick, are Facebook users more or less trusting than the general population?

Eric D. Brown writes on the corporate culture at RIM, maker of the Blackberry, who is currently having severe business problems.  The first quote, from an insider, makes me think the problem is a culture where no one trusts anyone else.

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

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

For more links to outstanding articles on trust, see:

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

Zooming In on 9 New Trust Tips

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We’re lighting up the twittersphere with a series of daily Trust Tips, counting down the work days until our upcoming book, “The Trusted Advisor Fieldbook: A Comprehensive Toolkit for Leading with Trust” is released–October 31, by Wylie Books.

The Trust Tips are concise, practical, and free. They’re published every Monday through Friday, providing easy-to-implement ways to increase your trustworthiness and build better relationships.

Find snippets of insight on Twitter by using the hashtag, a.k.a. pound sign, followed by TrustTip, like this: #TrustTip.  Or go straight to the source by finding us on Twitter at @AndreaPHowe and @CharlesHGreen. We’ve had some good discussions on Twitter and would love to hear from you. We also keep a running tab of all the Trust Tips right here on our site.

See our prior Trust Tips recaps:

Trust Tips Recap: #89-81

#TrustTip 89: Extend yourself—e.g. invite your client to meet you outside of work, share a meal.

#TrustTip 88: Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken.

#TrustTip 87: Find out how your project team defines success & how you can help them achieve it.

#TrustTip 86: Don’t jump to problem-solving–slow yourself down by counting, taking notes, vocalizing expectations.

#TrustTip 85: Humility isn’t thinking less of yourself; it’s thinking of yourself less. Be humble.

#TrustTip 84: Being right is vastly over-rated; we don’t care if you’re right unless you’ve first heard us.

#TrustTip 83: Be self-deprecating, it is a form of graciousness.

#TrustTip 82: Confront issues as they arise—being preoccupied w/ them keeps your attention on your own preoccupation.

#TrustTip 81: Answer direct questions with direct answers.

Closeup on Three Favorites

#TrustTip 89: Extend yourself—e.g. invite your client to meet you outside of work, share a meal. A lot of people confuse intimacy in business relationships with being social, when they’re not the same thing. This tip is less about the meal and more about expanding the scope of your relationship beyond typical professional boundaries. It’s easier for someone to trust you when they can relate to you. Let others in. Talk about something other than what’s on the work agenda. Be a person, not just a pro.

Jim Peterson (@rebalancejim) had an interesting take on this Trust Tip. His suggestion: “Do better–invite your adversary.” There’s a boundary-breaking idea!

#TrustTip 88: Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken. I borrowed this from a heading in Charlie’s second book, Trust-Based Selling. It’s one of my very favorite lines. Often we mistake being trustworthy with being perfect, or with doing and getting things right most of the time. While it’s certainly important to be competent for people to trust you, it’s equally if not more important to be trustworthy by being authentic. I know I’m more likely to trust someone who’s genuinely flawed—with the confidence and humility to admit it—than someone who comes across as faultless, or who tries too hard.

Consider the business value of integrity—being who you claim to be at all times to all people.

#TrustTip 84: Being right is vastly over-rated; we don’t care if you’re right unless you’ve first heard us. Trust and influence go hand-in-hand. The more someone trusts you, the more likely he is to be influenced by you. In the business of advice-giving, it is not enough to be right—you have to earn the right to be right. The key to getting your advice taken has little to do with the content of the advice you give and everything to do with the context of how you listen to others. Fundamentally, you earn the right to be right by listening first. The act of listening itself creates relationship and trust.

That’s my take, anyway. What’s yours?

Share the wealth; tell others about #TrustTip—new tips posted every weekday at 8:30AM, every week until book publication.

Creating a Culture of Trust: Virtues and Values

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This post comes from our upcoming book, The Trusted Advisor Fieldbook: A Comprehensive Toolkit for Leading With Trust, from the chapter on Implementing a Culture of Trust. Tools for trust initiatives include principles, or values, at the organizational level, and personal attributes, or virtues, at the individual level. The chapter explores five tools for implementing trust change initiatives: leading by example, stories, vocabulary, and managing with wisdom. This post explores two diagnostic tools: the Trust Temperament™ and the Trust Roadmap™.

We will be sharing selected portions of the book with our readers leading up to the publication date. The Trusted Advisor Fieldbook will be available from Wiley Books on October 31, 2011, or you can pre-order The Trusted Advisor Fieldbook today.

What Is a High-trust Organization?

Our definition: an organization of people who are trustworthy, and appropriately trusting, working together in an environment that actively encourages those behaviors in employees as well as stakeholders.

Creating a culture of trust requires a different emphasis than do most change initiatives. What works to reduce accident rates, increase customer-centricity, or become ISO-9000 compliant isn’t the same as what’s needed to create a high-trust organization.

Trust is about interpersonal relations. For people to trust and be trusted by others, they must take personal risks and face personal fears in ways that cannot, by their nature, be fully planned and structured in ways that typical change initiatives can rely on.

That suggests a different emphasis: an initiative built around personal change.

Two Keys to Trust Culture Change: Virtues and Values

Creating a high-trust culture boils down to two main thrusts: virtues and values. “Virtues” are the personal qualities that high-trust people embody, and “values” are what guide the organizations they work in. In trust-based organizations, virtues and values are consistent and mutually reinforcing.

We use these words very intentionally, because they’re commonly understood–and common language matters. Each deserves its own word and understanding, and both are required for trust culture change. In our experience, some companies rightly focus on organizational values, but few focus enough on personal virtues.

 

The virtues of trust are personal, and involve your level of trustworthiness and your ability to trust. The virtues of trust are contained in the trust equation: credibility, reliability, intimacy, and self-orientation.

It is virtuous for someone to tell the truth, to behave dependably, to keep confidences, and to be mindful of the needs of others. Unless people take personal responsibility for their own behavior around trust, the organization will never be a trust-based organization.

 

The values of trust are institutional, and drive the organization’s external relationships, leadership, structure, rewards, and key processes. The values of a trust-based organization are reflected in the four trust principles: other-focus, collaboration, medium- to long-term perspective, and transparency. An organization that espouses these values treats others with respect, has an inclination to partner, has a bias toward a longer timeframe, and shares information.

Trust-based organizations take values very seriously. If your organization has never fired someone for a values violation, then either you’ve been astoundingly successful in your hiring and development efforts, or you’re not a strongly values-driven organization.

Diagnosing Trust

To improve virtues and values, it’s helpful to know where you’re starting from—to have some kind of diagnostic. For virtues, there is the trust quotient: for values, there is the Trust Roadmap™.

Virtues.

The trust quotient is a self-diagnostic taken at the individual level, based on the four values of the trust equation.   With individual data aggregated anonymously at the group level, you can profile the organization in terms of Trust Temperaments (the pair of highest-scoring values in the trust equation for an individual), as follows:

Trust Temperament™ Highest Ranked Attributes Motto
The Expert C, R “Lead, follow, or get out of the way.”– Anonymous
The Doer R, I “As for accomplishments, I just did what I had to do as things came along.”– Eleanor Roosevelt
The Catalyst C, I “A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus.”– Martin Luther King, Jr.
The Professor C, S “The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.”– Albert Einstein
The Steward R, S “My goal wasn’t to make a ton of money. It was to build good computers.” – Steve Wozniak
The Connector I, S “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.”– Anonymous

 

Values.

The Trust Roadmap is a diagnostic tool that surveys the Trust Values across components of organizations, as below:

Collaboration Medium- to Long-Term Perspective Transparency Other Focus
External Relationships
Leadership
Structure
Rewards
Processes

 

Generic and organization-specific questions are developed for each of the 20 cells, and the survey administered to groups of stakeholders: customers, employees, managers, for example.   For example, the question for Leadership and Medium-to-Long Term Perspective might be “Your leaders are willing to sacrifice short-term gains for the long-term benefit of the organization.”

The survey results allow a management team to assess, in a structured manner, where the organizational values that drive trust are being implemented, and where they’re not; how those patterns vary across constituencies; and what they feel the priority should be in addressing the issues.  In short, a Trust Roadmap.

The Trusted Advisor Fieldbook: A Comprehensive Toolkit for Leading With Trust will be published by Wiley Books on October 31, 2011.  Pre-order your copy of The Trusted Advisor Fieldbook today.

Upcoming Events and Appearances: Trusted Advisor Associates

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Join us at one or more upcoming Trusted Advisor Associates events.  This Summer, we’ll be hosting and participating in events in Washington DC and through globally accessed webinars.

And a word about the Trusted Advisor Mastery Program.

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Wed. July 20th          Washington, DC          Andrea Howe
(Rescheduled) Andrea will be speaking at the Washington DC Chapter of the Project Management Institute (Reston Luncheon) on “Trust and Influence: What Every Successful Project Manager Needs to Know.” 11:30am. To register or for more information, click here. PDUs will be available for Project Management Professionals (PMPs).

 

Wed. July 20th         Global         Sandy Styer
Leaders, coaches, consultants: Do you want to add new knowledge to your practice, and a new tool to your toolbox?  Through Trusted Advisor Associates is now offering TQ Assessment Authorization! You can become an expert in administering and working with our Trust Quotient Assessment – taken by over 15,000 people to date – and Trust 360 ™.  First class is July 20th via webinar.  Contact Sandy Styer to learn more.

 

Wed. Aug. 24th         Washington, DC      Andrea Howe
Andrea will be speaking at the Washington DC Chapter of the Project Management Institute (Washington Circle Luncheon) on “Trust and Influence: What Every Successful Project Manager Needs to Know.” 2101 L Street NW, Suite 200, Washington, DC.  11:30am. To register or for more information, click here. PDUs will be available for Project Management Professionals (PMPs).

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The Trusted Advisor Mastery Program just began a new group this past month. This 90 day program includes 19 e-learning modules, 4 one-on-one coaching calls, 4 group coaching calls, a lively interactive discussion forum readings, tips and exercises.

Here’s what one participant has to say about the Program so far:

“The Trust Mastery Program is a great mix of online modules, background reading, exercises, group discussion and coaching–all of which reinforce the development of personal trustworthiness. I love the way the program is designed.  I have been able to go through the material at my own pace, learn from the experiences of my cohorts on the online forum, assess my behavior and set short term doable goals.” (Tina Beranbaum, Principal, Centauric Consulting, La Jolla, CA/Toronto, Canada)

For more information on the next available program, email us at: [email protected].

Books We Trust: Selling to Big Companies

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The first thing that struck me about Jill Konrath’s best-selling book Selling to Big Companies was the voice.  It is plain-spoken, direct, commonsensical, no-BS.  And it is completely guileless.

When I first met Jill, it was immediately apparent that these are personal traits.  She is a Minnesotan—a Midwesterner of the old school. My grandparents and parents were from Nebraska; I knew exactly who Jill the person was, and why the book was an extension of her.

But Jill knew something I didn’t know. I came to selling from consulting. Jill came to selling from selling.  For me it was an extrapolation from a related field; for her it was a version update, a call to the profession.  To my surprise and delight, we ended up in the same place.

Her book is not just about moving from small-time selling to Big Company selling.  It is also about moving from the “that was then” to the “this is now” world of the corporate buyer. She is an astute psychological observer, along with Scott Adams of Dilbert fame.  She knows what it means to work in a downsized world with out-of-date corporate-purchased Blackberries, defined contribution plans, and 10PM phone calls with other time zones–and what that all does to the buyer.

Jill Konrath Interview

Charles H. Green: Jill, thanks so much for doing this.  I wanted to honor your work, starting with Selling to Big Companies, and moving on to your more recent book, SNAP Selling.  But let’s start back in time.  When and how did you first get into selling?

Jill Konrath: Let me start out by saying that I never, ever wanted to be a salesperson. I viewed it as a despicable profession filled with slimy, schmoozing, manipulative hucksters.

But some friends and I had come up with a business concept that we thought was pretty good. SCORE (Service Corp of Retired Execs) liked it too. At the end of our meeting, our advisor said, “Now which one of you is going to be in sales?”

I answered, “If it’s such a good idea, shouldn’t it sell itself?” He laughed at me and told us someone had to learn to sell.

So, I got into sales by default. My friends refused, so if I wanted to start the company I had to learn how to do it myself.

CHG: So where did you get your start? And, was it what you thought it was?

JK: I was fortunate to get hired by Xerox, a company that literally had the best training program in the country. And, I discovered it was entirely different from what I thought. My image of a salesperson was based on the worst of the profession. At Xerox, I learned how to be customer focused in everything I did. I found out that I could be successful only if my customers were able to achieve their goals. From there, I sold technology systems for three years before starting my own company.

CHG: So, you didn’t go back to SCORE?

JK: Funny thing, but after working at Xerox, I totally abandoned my initial entrepreneurial dreams. Being in sales was just too interesting and challenging.

CHG: So, then you progressed through your sales career, you came to have a different view of sales; you realized that Big Company people were no different, really, than any others. What was the core realization you came to as you came to write SBC?

JK: Charlie, I actually wrote Selling to Big Companies for my friends and colleagues who worked for small businesses or owned their own firms. They were such talented people, but were really struggling financially. Many of them felt they had to prove their worth by working with small companies before they tackled larger firms.

So I wrote my book to show them how to get corporate clients who had budget allotted for their services and who appreciated their value. And yes, I knew that corporate decision makers were normal human beings because I worked for a big company and I sold to them as well.

CHG: What’s wrong with sales today? Is there a “single biggest problem” that you can point to? One “biggest opportunity” that salespeople can work on?

JK: Good question. I think there are a couple things wrong. First, people are still operating under the old sales paradigm that says make lots of calls and have a good pitch. Personally, I don’t think that’s ever effective in the corporate market, but it’s what most people consider “selling.”

Second, and very related to #1, is that our prospects/clients don’t care about the product/service. Nada. Not even one little bit. All they care about is their ability to achieve their objectives. I am continually appalled at the sheer lack of knowledge most sellers have about their customer’s business, market trends, key issues, strategic initiatives, and key success factors.

Without this business acumen and customer insight, sellers are functionally unable to plan an effective account entry campaign, help a company change from the status quo or win business from competitors.

CHG: Let’s not forget to talk about your latest book, SNAP Selling; how do you see it in the sequence of your evolving thinking? What’s that book about in the big context?

JK: SNAP Selling is all about selling to crazy-busy people – which I happen to think is most everyone today. They’re overwhelmed with work, have fewer resources at their disposal and impossible deadlines. Plus, they find it much easier to go online to research their issues, challenges and possible solutions. In short, they have no time for salespeople who waste their valuable time.

It’s having a huge impact on sellers. It’s nearly impossible to set up meetings. Getting companies to move off the status quo can take forever. And, differentiating is sometimes impossible.

In short, we’ve entered a whole new world of selling which requires us to use fresh strategies – or risk irrelevance. In SNAP Selling, I cover the new rules of selling and share multiple examples of how to implement these strategies for dealing with frazzled decision makers.

CHG: I should also mention to readers about your most excellent blog, also called Selling to Big Companies.  I’m a frequent, almost-daily, reader.

JK: Thanks for the plug!

CHG: What’s your advice to someone going into sales these days?  What should they focus on?

JK: Understanding their customer first and foremost – and then aligning everything they do with their customer’s business objectives and priorities.

CHG: How about someone who’s further along in their career; what’s the One Big Thing they can learn to do better?

JK: Becoming an invaluable resource. They should develop deep expertise in their niche, market segment, process – or some arena that is of high value to their target market. Also, they should continually be sharing ideas and insights to help their clients be more successful, as well as connecting them to other valuable resources.

Our crazy-busy prospects are desperately looking for people they can count on – and when they find them, they are extremely loyal.

CHG: I don’t know about you, but I always get people asking me for “tips and tricks.” I don’t know what they think they’re going to get; there are a few, but “tips and tricks” are not where it’s at, I don’t think—it’s mindsets.  But what about you?  How do you answer those people?  Have you got some?

JK: I have this special fairy dust that I sell to all my clients. It magically transforms them from self-serving salespeople into invaluable resources. Just kidding. Honestly, I tell people to do a “mind meld.” It’s imperative for them to look at their own behaviors from their client’s perspective.

For example, if they’re going to leave a voicemail message, they should call themselves first and see out it sounds. Most people are appalled at how bad they are and would delete their own messages.

This same practice can be applied to presentations (boring!), proposals (unending!), meeting plans (one-sided). It’s amazing what they can learn when the see their own behavior from another perspective.

After you learn to do this, it totally changes all your client interactions.

CHG: Can you step back and envision sales 15 years from now?  That would be, umm, the year 2026.  Whew.  What will be the state of Sales in the future?

JK: Yikes.  Well, first I see a major reduction in the number of salespeople. The ones who are eliminated will be the old style sellers who think it’s all about schmoozing and pitching. Since they personally add no value to the sales process, their prospects would prefer to buy online.

For those who remain in sales? I think the future is brighter than bright! In fact, these smart, business-savvy individuals will be well respected and in great demand. Plus, they’ll be highly paid because of the tremendous value they bring their organization and their clients.

CHG: Jill Konrath, thank you so very much for taking the time to talk with us, this has been a delight.

JK: My pleasure. It’s been fun talking with you.

Books We Trust: Selling to Big Companies is the second installment in our Books We Trust series.  The first was You’re Working Too Hard to Make the Sale, by Bill Brooks and Tom Travisano.

Trust, Innovation and Minimalist Management: Ross Smith Redux

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Ross Smith of Microsoft is a pioneer in applying trust to real-world management issues—particularly creativity, innovation and employee engagement.  I first interviewed him in the inaugural issue of Trust Quotes, Trust and Innovation.

Ross first ran Windows Security team for Microsoft and wrote The Practical Guide to Defect Prevention. He recognized the critical need for innovation, and discovered trust as an enabler for getting there—and in turn, the value of games in creating trust.

Since then he’s moved on to Microsoft’s Office Communicator product line, and is working his team magic again.  I saw him in Newark Airport a few months ago, off on one of several global speaking engagements. He’s been cited by Gary Hamel, and just a few days ago agreed to do an ongoing blog for the good folks at SHRM.

To start things off, SHRM interviewed Ross, and included not only great dialogue but a bunch of cool links. Here are the opening lines:

SHRM: What keeps you up at night?

Smith: Nothing. If your work keeps you awake at night, you might have the wrong job.

Enjoy SHRM’s  interview with Ross Smith on innovation, games and minimalist management.

How I Quit Smoking

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I smoked cigarettes until I was in my mid-forties. I smoked pretty heavily–more than two packs a day–and had done so pretty much forever (despite running the Montreal Marathon back in 1982, when I quit for several days).

It wasn’t that I didn’t know how stupid smoking was. I could feel it myself. But as David Maister wrote in Strategy and the Fat Smoker, the problem is not knowledge; the problem is implementation.

Here’s what happened to me. I can’t say it’ll help you; but it does say something about how people change.

Why I Smoked

I don’t know why I smoked. But I know one reason I kept smoking. Because everyone kept telling me to quit.

I’m not proud of that, but it’s the truth. Quitting itself isn’t all that hard (as Mark Twain said, I’d done it many times). But my life has been in many ways a struggle to get over being stubborn. I just Don’t. Like. Being. Told. What. To. Do.

I had recently remarried. My wife was a reformed smoker herself, and never made an issue of it with me, for which I was grateful.

One day the subject came up; I think I raised it. Here’s what she said:

Dear, I want you to know that smoking is 100% your decision. I don’t want you to die early–but much, much more than that, I want you to be you. I love you for who you are, and only you decide who that is.

You can smoke in the kitchen; you can smoke in the living room; you can smoke in the bedroom—it’s all OK. I will never nag you or hound you about smoking.

I will re-route plane trips to accommodate your need to get out for a smoke. I will put ashtrays wherever you want. Smoking will never be an issue for you and me.

Because I love you, and you are who you choose to be.

Two weeks later, I quit for good.

Why I Quit Smoking

In retrospect, it’s clear why I quit. It’s because I’m an idiot, a fool who somehow needed someone else’s permission to smoke–just to have at least one person on my side to counter-balance all those who told me not to. And when I finally got that one person, I could declare victory and retreat.

Had I been a better person, I would have figured out on my own, years earlier, that I didn’t need anyone’s permission—not to smoke, not to quit, not to do, or not do, anything. As my wife put it, “you’re a free humanoid on the planet.”

But the me who smoked couldn’t have had that thought. The me who smoked could only quit the way I did.

The Bigger Gift I Got from Quitting Smoking

The gift my wife gave me was extraordinary. Quitting smoking was the least of it. All that did was protect my health. What she gave me was much bigger.

She taught me, first of all, what it means to accept another human being. (To be fair, she gave me an object example; I’m still working on learning it).

She also taught me what was within my power, and what wasn’t. I had always under-estimated the power I had–and over-estimated the power other people had over me. No matter what happens, I have the power to control my reactions to other people. And no matter what happens, if I’m upset by something, there’s something wrong with me.

Those are huge lessons. How funny that the “price” I paid to learn them was to give up something that was bad for me in the first place.

Trust Tips: A Deeper Look

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The countdown continues until “The Trusted Advisor Fieldbook: A Comprehensive Toolkit for Leading with Trust,” (from Wiley Books) hits shelves everywhere. As we eagerly await publication, my co-author, Andrea Howe, and I are posting a series of daily Trust Tips.

These brief yet insightful tips can be found on Twitter by using the hashtag #TrustTip. Or,if you prefer, you can go straight to the source by finding us on Twitter at @AndreaPHowe and @CharlesHGreen.

Not keen to leave those of you out who haven’t jumped onto the Twitter bandwagon, we keep a running tally of all the Trust Tips right here on our site.

We do recommend you take a second, or third, look at Twitter though. We’ve been having some great discussions over there about the tips and more. We’d love for you to chime in.

The Tips

The tips are published every workday as a means to give you a quick method to heighten your trustworthiness and build stronger work relationships.

If you need to catch up, see our recaps of Tips #144-135; #134-115; and #114-105.

Trust Tips #104-90

#104: “Trust but verify.” = blowing smoke. If you have to verify, it’s not trust.

#103: Acknowledge uncomfortable situations: try “I’m probably the only one wondering this, but…” You won’t be.

#102: Name and Claim the Elephant in the Room. Candor drives trust; it’s controlled risk taking.

#101: Don’t gossip or promote relationship “triangles.”

#100: Think it through: how will your client react to what you’re thinking of saying?

#99: Don’t think “I can’t trust yet, it’s too risky;” risk is what creates trust. Take the first risk.

#98: Possibly the best sales/client/relationship question is: Tell me more–please.

#97: Be the same person to all people at all times. That’s a good definition of integrity.

#96: Practice asking difficult questions or making difficult statements before you deliver them

#95: By being willing to have a Point of View, you help everyone else crystallize theirs

#94: Hold others accountable; letting others off the hook lets them live down to your expectations

#93: Write your next proposal with your client; sitting next to them; on the same side of the table

#92: Talk more with your eyes, ears & body, and less with your mouth

#91: Be empathetic: the benefit-to-cost ratio of empathy is nearly infinite.

#90: Next time something great happens, pin the credit on someone.

A Couple of My Favorites:

#93: The normal routine for writing proposals just reinforces the separation between ourselves and our clients (or customers, or partners). We say, “good meeting, I’ll get back to you with a . PDF document by Friday, and ship you hard copy as well.”

Instead, try saying, “Let’s book the conference room again this Friday, and write this proposal together, sitting on the same side of the table. We’ll each bring all our questions and data and we’ll make sure we come up between us with the best possible approached. Of course it’s still a proposal, I know we may not win–but it will be the best possible proposal the two of us can possibly produce.”
#90: We’re pretty good at pinning the blame on others. And we’re often quick to take credit. Taking responsibility is a good antidote to blaming, and ‘pinning the credit’ is the cure for hogging it all to ourselves.

Next time something good happens and you start maneuvering to look like it was your doing, stop–and pin the credit on someone else. They’ll appreciate it, and it’s a good way to practice lowering your self-orientation.

How the Mortgage Crisis Made Us Immoral

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If you own a house and I’m your neighbor, I’ll respect your property rights. It’s just the right thing to do. (Though if there’s a fire at my place, I might break in to borrow your fire extinguisher).

If you live in a nice neighborhood, you have little to fear from the more modest parts of town. (Though if your neighborhood doubles its average income, and the modest part of town doubles its unemployment rate, and you start putting gates around your community—well, you might be a little more fearful).

Which leads us to this US headline from Fannie Mae’s Quarter 1 National Housing Survey:

“Nearly twice as many Underwater Borrowers (27%) think it is okay to walk away from a mortgage if they face financial distress than in January 2010.”

Is this a moral issue? What does it mean that the frequency of the opinion has changed? That it has doubled in a year?

Economics and Morality

Most people still think it’s immoral to walk away from a debt. But those who think otherwise—that defaulting on a payment to a nameless morass of long-since-tranched, securitized asset-owners is as amoral as it gets—have grown by 100% in just over a year.

That’s pretty high growth for the amoral team.

It’s one thing to say that morality should have nothing to do with economics. And indeed, the sense of honor and justice and trust that underpins most moral behavior is socially useful. If we all acted solely in our immediate self-interest in every situation, the world would be a greedy, dangerous, Hobbesian mess.

At the same time, economic disparity writ large spells social unrest. In Greece, they riot in the streets. In Rio de Janeiro, they have a street crime problem.

In the US, we are witnessing a small version of things. People who used to feel a moral obligation to repay a debt are saying to themselves, “Heck, the big guys and companies do this all the time—if things aren’t working out, they just default, take the insurance payment, write it off, whatever. There’s nothing moral or immoral about it—it’s just dumb to do otherwise.”

Economics Can Wear Down Morality

You may think that honoring your debt is a moral issue. You may think it’s not. What’s clear, though, is that the ratio of those two views is being driven by economic changes.

The credit ratings services will take note of this, calling it a likely increase in the default rate, and a cause for downgrading securities.

But the people on the street—in both the nice and the modest neighborhoods—will experience it as a moral casualty of the economy.

It’s just one more area of human relations that will no longer be governed by the rules of “rightness,” but rather by the least common denominator, Darwinian terms of the marketplace.

And that’s not a change to be happy about.