Lake Wobegon Syndrome: Believing We’re All Above Average

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Garrison Keillor’s fictional Lake Wobegon is that Midwestern enclave where:

…the women are strong, the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.

Lately, there are curious signs of incipient Wobegonism – at least the part about the kids. On average, we’re all looking just a little too above-average.

Unconditional Positive Self-Regard

I once watched Marshall Goldsmith ask a room of conference participants to lower their heads, then raise their hands if they thought they were in the top 50% of performers in the room. Then, to keep their hands up if they were in the top 25%; then, the top 10%.

When he finally asked people to raise their heads, all could plainly see that over half the room had indicated they were in the top 10%.

The concept of unconditional positive regard is well-known among therapists. There’s something to be said about positive self-regard as well, in the simple sense that if you can’t accept yourself you’re going to have trouble dealing with other people.

But what happens if your sense of self-regard begins to diverge from reality? What happens if you begin to believe you’re All That – and honestly, you’re not?

Reality Bites

Generation Y, famously raised on a sense of entitlement, is having a tough time confronting today’s horrific economic environment. 60% think they have the right to work remotely, with flexible schedules, despite the economy.

Worse, Gen Y’s much-vaunted computer skills may have been overstated; social media savvy doesn’t translate well to spreadsheets, or even to navigating hierarchical menu structures.

Perhaps recognizing an inflection point, the Wellesley High School graduating class recently made news for being told in a commencement speech that “You are not special…you are not exceptional.”

But it’s not just about Gen Y – not by a long shot. Here at Trusted Advisor Associates, we’ve noticed a distinct case of “grade inflation.” Scores on our Trust Quotient (TQ) self-assessment, have been creeping up over the past year or two. There are several possible explanations, including:

  1. people are becoming more trustworthy,
  2. people think they are becoming more trustworthy.

I have a sneaking suspicion it’s the latter.  Stay tuned.

Overstating our importance is a natural consequence of ignorance. Believing the world is flat was understandable in a world without airplanes or telescopes. But when a modern nation like the US has 46% of its population who believe in creationism, some cognitive dysfunction is afoot.

Politicians bear some blame.  The Speaker of the House declares that the US has “the best healthcare system in the world,” which defies logic unless you exclude the other developed economies.

Many pols publicly support the fiction that balancing the national budget is fundamentally the same as balancing a household budget. Any undergrad econ major can tell you the rules of national economies and households are precisely the opposite. It’s hard to tell if this statement lie is cynical, or just grossly ignorant, much less which is worse.

In our social haste to abandon low self-esteem, we have overplayed the power of a positive attitude. We once heard phrases like “you make your own luck,” “smile before you dial,” and, “the glass is half full.” Corporate training once taught that you could act your way into right thinking.

Somehow, those morphed into, “Hold fast to your dream and it will come true,” saying affirmations until they “manifest,” and best sellers like The Secret. We’ve gone way past “thinking your way into right action,” all the way to “envision reality until reality changes to fit our thinking!”

One of the biggest instances of hubris in our time has to be finance. Efficient market theory, the agency theory that led to private equity, and the various financial engineering “innovations” we have seen in recent decades – all are testimony to a belief that we have found revealed (financial) truth. Yet time and again, it seems we have not.

Two Flavors of Humility

There are two kinds of humility. One consists “not in thinking less of ourselves, but in thinking of ourselves less.” The other amounts to, well, thinking less of ourselves – realizing that we’re not, in fact, All That.

We need a little of both.

Thinking of ourselves less drives relationship thinking; it civilizes us, focuses us on other people. It is the root of social behavior, charity, and most of the higher virtues.

Thinking of ourselves less drives other-focus, collaboration, and connection. It enables client focus, allows us to see value adding potential, and creates the basis for reciprocity and customer loyalty.

Thinking less of ourselves is neither sin nor virtue except insofar as our starting point is delusional. Thinking we know it all is a cyclical affectation, a very human failing we are nonetheless good at forgetting.

Until once again things blow up, revert to the mean, and we get our comeuppance, or our karmic smackdown, or our luck runs out.  What we call it depends on how much we still believe we understand what just happened.

Here’s what we need a whole lot more of:

“I really am not sure; what do you think?”

Intimacy: If You Can’t Say the I-Word, You Have the I-Problem

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Many of you know about the Trust Equation – (Credibility + Reliability + Intimacy) / Self-Orientation. Trust research has shown that of the four factors, the one most associated with high trust scores is – Intimacy.

Recently I’ve spoken with two organizations – one in financial services, the other in professional services – that are uncomfortable using the word “intimacy” in a business context. They’d prefer something a little more, you know – business-ey.

Intimacy, they feel, is, you know, that other stuff…not appropriate…uncomfortable…you know…

The Intimacy Chicken and Egg Problem

This is not new. People and firms from those industries in particular tend to score high on Credibility and Reliability, with their lowest scores often in Intimacy. Still, I hadn’t put left and right together until recently. Here it is:

The ones who score low on intimacy are the ones who do not like using the term “intimacy.”

Which on the one hand is perfectly reasonable: after all, discussion of intimacy feels kind of intimate.

But on the other hand, it raises this question:

If you can’t talk about the I-word ­– how are you ever going to get better at it?

Intimacy: Not Just a Girlie-Man Thing

Intimacy, as defined in the trust equation, is related to empathy. The client of someone with great intimacy skills will feel secure, understood, and comfortable sharing sensitive information with the advisor.

By contrast, a professional with poor intimacy skills is not likely to get invited to the meeting in the first place – rendering the rest moot.

Way back in 1993, Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema wrote in Harvard Business Review about Customer Intimacy. Since then, a great many companies talk about “customer intimacy” as a very viable business strategy. Companies from such wussy industries as defense contracting and oil have focused on this concept.

Which raises the question: if the he-men who sell to the Marines and who work in the Awl Patch can talk about “intimacy” – then why can’t lawyers, accountants and Wall Streeters?

Fear of Intimacy

There’s no need to get all Freudian about this. I think the biggest reason for our fear of intimacy in the business world is related to our increasingly dysfunctional idea of shareholder capitalism. The common thread? It’s all not personal.

We have become enamored of Schumpeterian creative destruction – but really don’t care to look at the nuts and bolts of structural unemployment.  That’s a little too, you know, personal.

What’s the purpose of a company? You know, to make money. And what are people to the company? Resources. Human resources. Better yet, human capital. That’s what we’ve come to believe: the word “human” is the adjective, “capital” the noun it modifies. It’s not, you know, personal.

Why is intimacy a no-no for so many in business, while “customer intimacy” gets accepted? Because it’s not so personal, that’s why. “Customers” are collective abstractions, not unlike Mitt Romney’s curious assertion that corporations are people. We talk about “the” customer – but never about a customer.

When we can turn people into abstractions, treat them as categories suitable to be measured and analyzed, then we don’t have to treat them as personal. They can be “customers,” or “human resources,” or “strategic partners” – just not as individuals. Our ideology has let us conveniently dehumanize business.

——

The inability to deal with intimacy in business is tied to the inability to see business as personal. It’s the same cloth. The day we can look at a customer or an employee and see a human being – that’s the day we can begin to deal with intimacy in business.

Until then, if you continue seeing “intimacy” as socially inappropriate, you are willfully relegating yourself to less trustworthy status.

SEO and Content-free Content

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I had a delightful Notting Hill lunch this spring with Sonja Jefferson, of Valuable Content fame. I suggested the word “content” itself, in an era of content farms, sounds content-neutral, even content-free. Hence the challenge:

How to think about quality content in a content-challenging age?

Sonja herself offers insights in Are You Content With the Word ‘Content?’

Harvesting Content in an Age of Content Farms

First, some background. We all like to believe quality (or art, truth, beauty, love) is its own reward.  Unfortunately, living costs money.  And it’s nice if your labor of love can pay the rent. Enter SEO (Search Engine Optimization), a way to have your baby pay for itself.

If you think search doesn’t drive buying behavior big time, think again. Your fantastic content will only attract buyers if they can find it. Hence the classic tug of war between art and advertising, pathos and product placement, literature and mailing lists.

Google et al are not stupid; they won’t let you just pile key words onto a blog and earn high ratings. But the robo-marketers are no dummies either.

Richard MacManus wrote two years ago in The Age of Mega-Content Sites:

…to succeed in the content business on the Web, you should pump out hundreds of pages of content every day – preferably thousands.

The two main players in what became known as the “content farm” business—Answers.com and Demand Media—used either user-generated content or cheap free-lancers.  Basically, they wrote vacuous “articles” containing key words that then increased the search ranking of sites using those words.  (Remember those ads on CNBC and Bloomberg offering to raise your search results, “without paying a penny for clicks?”  Content farms).

If that formula sounds familiar, think Reality TV, term papers for sale, or even automated article-writing software. You no longer have to wait eons for a monkey to type Hamlet; a virtual monkey can concoct a simulated Hamlet, Cliff Notes version, right now.  It’s literary carpet-bombing; blitzing the world with what looks like meaningful words, which are in truth full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Last year, Google’s famed (in some circles) Panda algorithm upped the ante by taking on the most egregious offenses, aiming at extremely low levels of originality.  Suddenly, some big names got caught with their SEO pants down.

We’ve always been in a world where art and commerce coexist uncomfortably. But the tools of commerce have been so radically increased in recent years that we are now re-defining an old word: content.

Content Then, Content Now

Journey back just 9 years. I searched (Google) for the term “content” from all web sources from 9/1/2001 and 9/1/2002.  Here are the top five entries:

The Web Content Style Guide
www.gerrymcgovern.com/web_content_style_guide.html
“The Web Content Style Guide is a valuable resource for anyone involved in creating content for the Web.” …

The Model>Content Standard:Summary
www.intime.uni.edu/model/content/cont.html
The content of education is, of course, of extreme importance to the future of our society. Fortunately, in recent years, content standards have been developed for …

CityDesk – Introducing CityDesk 2.0
www.fogcreek.com/citydesk/
Usability guru Joel Spolsky and the team at Fog Creek Software have created a stunningly easy to use content management system that runs on Windows. …

Reading in the Content Areas: Strategies for Success, Education…
www.glencoe.com/sec/teachingtoday/educationupclose.phtml/12
Rather, content teachers should understand that the difference between successful and unsuccessful readers is the ability to effectively apply strategies to …

Wood Equilibrium Moisture Content Table And Calculator
www.csgnetwork.com/emctablecalc.html
Apr 1, 2002 – Wood Equilibrium Moisture Content Calculator, included is a table of data.

Here are today’s top 8, by comparison:

Content – Define Content at Dictionary.com

Content – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Content (media) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Content – definition of content by the Free Online Dictionary

Questionable Content

Content » News [Cory Doctorow]

Generated content, automatic numbering, and lists

Content Marketing in a Blink: The Content Grid v2 [Infographic …

Content Then was a term used in specific contexts: water content, web writing style, educational content.  The term “content” simply did not appear without an adjectival phrase to give it contextual meaning: the content of education, the content of a dictionary, the content of a movie (“content management system” was the exception). “Content” had no meaning absent the adjective that bounded it. Context added meaning.

Content Now is unleashed. It has become a standalone noun, needing no modifier.  The assumption—and it’s true enough—is that content is now widely transferrable across containers.

Indeed, the boundaries between books and eBooks and CDs and screenplays and movies and cellphone ads is blurred beyond recognition.  And so we need a word to describe that which remains constant across all contexts.

“Content” has become that word. It is the least common denominator of what seeps across platforms. I’m no semiotician, so I’ll say this metaphorically:

What remains as “content” is the first derivative of a symbol.

Sorry, I know that’s pretty abstract. How about this:  “content” loses something in translation when it becomes un-anchored from context.  It leaves us with zero-content content.

Zero-Content Content

Shared mass cultural references, shards of musical hooks and riffs, Kato Kaelin and Paris Hilton; these are examples of “content” freed from context. Famous for being famous; out of context; sound bites; Pavlovian triggers. Symbols which have become famous for being symbols.

Think of a Tolstoy novel moving to a made-for-TV movie, to a trivia question on a quiz show, to a re-tweet of an aggregator’s inclusion of a “Best of Talk Soup” special about quiz shows.

Repurposing content is like pinging on an old analog tape recorder—the sound signal degrades after several bounced tracks, and keeps on degrading. Except in this case, it’s the “meaning” signal.

It’s what happens when bloggers—and hey I’ll be the first to admit it’s a constant temptation—let the siren call of SEO turn a message into “content” so it can fill up an empty space, rather than make the message speak for itself.

Is it any wonder that we like the old “content” better than the new stuff? Opie on Andy Griffith had more meaning than Snookie on Jersey Shore, and we know it.

Monkeys may still have trouble writing Hamlet. But when monkeys write everything Hamlet-related that shows up on a Google search about Hamlet—and nobody cares about “the original”—well, Houston, we have a problem.  A problem of meaning.

“Alas, poor Yorick; I knew him, Horatio,” said Hamlet. You can tag “Yorick,” you can index “Horatio,” you can even hyperlink “alas,” but it won’t get you one step closer to Shakespeare’s meaning.

Content minus context means no meaning.

Content Now isn’t free–it’s loose.

Putting the Meaning back in Content

It’s not hopeless.  You yourself can help.

Sonja Jefferson’s thoughts in Are You Content With the Word ‘Content?’ are right on.  Her definition of “content” includes:

…the unique message you shape for your clients and customers. For your business it’s a body of work that will define what you do.

That definition of content insists on uniqueness at the client level, and on meaningfulness.  That’s precisely right.  Absent such meaning, “content” is just fodder for robo-marketing, a kissing cousin to spam.

What can you do to help? I welcome your thoughts.  Here are a few to prime the pump:

  • Don’t just produce content—say something.
  • If your content doesn’t have a message, it’s just content.
  • Don’t be content with “just content.”
  • Content is less than the sum of the words; meaning is greater.
  • When you write, speak or sing; do it with a particular real person in mind.

———————————————————————————————————

Oops, one of our service providers had a hiccup last week on the “Advertising” post:

“You may have experienced links…incorrectly redirecting to a page that you didn’t designate from Tuesday, September 6th at 5pm PT through Wednesday, September 7th at approximately 10:00 am PT. This was due to an incorrect database update on our part. On top of it, the link re-directed to an anti-phishing website which probably added concern and confusion to the problem. We want to personally say that we’re sorry for this incident.”–our service provider, NetResults.

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.

The June Trust Matters Review

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Trust Equation

This month at the Trust Review we’re going to intersperse the more recent articles and posts with some goodies, but oldies, including one article from the 90s because, really, trust, trust never changes.

Yves Smith tries to answer the question, how long can trust created by public institutions last? Well, here’s a hint, you can tell where the Hapsburg Empire once ruled by levels of trust in public institutions? Whoa.

Doug Bartholomew of Industry Week discusses the issue of trust between manufacturing suppliers and their customers, including hard data from 90s on how top suppliers operate. I wonder if it’s still true that trust pays for suppliers.

Knowledge@Wharton, back in 2005, had Peter Cappelli lead a discussion on a question which is eternal, at least since the creation of Human Resources. Does HR exist to be a bureaucratic pain in the neck, or is it actually useful, and, dare I ask, worth trusting to find top talent (what used to be known as good workers?)

The Trust Diva blog wonders if a contract can actually save you from the bad intentions of someone you’re doing business with. Or, to put it another way, should you do business with someone you don’t trust, trusting the contract to keep them on the straight and narrow?

Daniel H. Pink writes about a Columbian bank’s efforts to use incentives to convince its loan officers to not leave their work till the end of the month. Did it work? And more broadly, do incentives work?

Brad VanAuken makes a point about brands, a brand is nothing without trust. Or, to put it another way, like McDonalds food, or hate it, you know what you’re getting when you order a Big Mac. A brand is a promise. At the same blog, Mark Ritson meditates on Sri Lankan beer and trust.

The McLaren blog has a 12 part series on trust building behavior, and they’re up to number 11. A good reminder of the basic points. Start with number 1 – straight talking.

Anthony Iannarino writes about delegation—the art of giving tasks to their rightful owners, which means trusting them.

Dave Brock writes about the commoditization of referrals, the invitations to join “referral networks” with people you don’t even know and receive prizes in exchange for referrals.

Discover magazine on how the perception of choice makes us lose our compassion for people. Even if those people were completely the victim of circumstances.

Denny Coates: trust and they will trust back, give and they will give back. Do you believe this is true?

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: