The Problem With Lying

/2 Comments/in , , /by

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

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

——–

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

dilbert

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

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

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

Lying and Credibility

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

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

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

Lying and Evasiveness

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

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

Lying and Motive

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

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

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

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

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

Recovering from Lies

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

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

This post first appeared on TrustMatters.

And the Winner Is Low Price. Wait – No…

/7 Comments/in , , /by

It’s a time-honored business strategy – low prices. Michael Porter codified Low Price as one of three generic competitive strategies, but it’s not like it wasn’t already commonsense in  every business culture. Still, it’s remarkable to see the over-reliance on this particular strategy in our “modern” times.

Which leads me to ask: Just what is it with low prices?

You see products and services being sold on the basis of low price every day, all around you. Yet you’re also well aware that you shouldn’t compete on just price—that price competition is ruinous and that low prices suggest the absence of larger value.

But just what does that mean for your business? Don’t take my word for it; find out for yourself. Are you in a vicious, cut-throat, price-gouging business? Or are you in one of those cushy, big-margin, fat, dumb and happy businesses that doesn’t have to worry about price competition?

You may be surprised at where you fall on the continuum.

The 3-Question Price Competition Quiz

First, make a subjective estimation of where your business stands on a price sensitivity scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being “price ranks very low on the scale of our customers’ concerns” and 10 being “low price is just about the only item our customers care about in this business.” On which side of 5 does your business lie? And how far over toward the end?

Second, make a list of the last 25 competitive bid jobs your company bid on—and lost.

Third, make a list of the last 25 competitive bid jobs your company bid on—and won.

Now, for the “lost” list: in how many of the 25 cases where you lost the competitive bid did the client say something like, “Nice job. Thanks for bidding, but, well, you were just a little too far out of line on price.” In other words, how many jobs did you lose on price? What percent is that of the 25?

And finally, for the “won” list: in how many of the 25 cases where you won the competitive bid did the client say to you, in effect, “Congratulations, you won the job; looking forward to working with you. By the way, the reason you won was you were the low bidder.” In other words, how many jobs did you win on price? What percent is that of the 25?

And the Winner Is …

Let me guess: your percentage lost on price is larger than your percentage won on price.

Let me guess again: your percentage won on price is closer to zero than it is to 25%.

Another guess: your percentage lost on price is less than half.

Another: the ratio of your percentage lost on price to your percentage won on price is 2.5:1 or more.

And finally: looking at your subjectively estimated ranking of your business’s level of price competition, does it fall on the same side of 5 as your estimated wins and losses based on price?

Now, if those guesses are wrong, please write me. I want to know what business you are in! Because for most B2B businesses, particularly those with larger, more complex sales and services offerings, those guesses are well-based on historical data (my data, that is, from giving the quiz in classes).

The Pricing Conundrum

Assuming your results look like my guesses, that raises several conundrums.

One conundrum is this: “If we’re such a price-competitive business, why do both wins and losses appear to be less often based on price than on something else?”

The other is this: “Why do we seem to lose on price more often than we win?”

The answer to both conundrums is that price is overrated as a factor in buying decisions. The real question is why? The answer has mostly to do with buyer psychology.

How Buyers Think about Price

One level of buyer psychology is available to us simply by asking, or by envisioning, what goes on in client organizations. Many consultants and accountants I talk to (and nearly all lawyers) have a tale about how the client’s procurement process is destroying quality—”all they care about is price.”

That is not what the procurement people will tell you, however. Procurement specialists have little interest in incurring the wrath of internal clients with legitimate quality concerns just to be able to say they got the lowest bidder. Value and quality are hardly irrelevant to their concerns.

And assuming your data is like I suggested above, the low bidder doesn’t always win. In fact, the low bidder, it would appear, wins considerably less than half the time, even judging from the higher of the two numbers you estimated (percentage of time you lost on price). And considering the number of times you won on price, one has to wonder how the myth of price competition arose in the first place.

The answer goes deeper into buyer psychology. Suppose you worked for a client and were charged with telling the losing bidders the bad news. How would you deliver the message?

Perhaps you’d prefer to do nothing and just skip the unpleasant task. But you know someone has to do it, and you owe it to the bidders to give a decent explanation.

You don’t want to share too much about the decision process, however, for a variety of reasons—chief among which is you chose the winning firm because, frankly, “we just feel more right about working with them.” You can’t saythat, for heavens’ sake!

So, you end up with several generalizations. Your team wasn’t quite as qualified, the winner had a really strong track record, and that game-ending no-appeals-allowed reason—your price was just a little too high.

Price is an enormously appealing excuse. It’s quantitative (and we all know numbers are good, right?). It’s completely opaque—the proposer has no way of knowing anyone else’s price and would never ask (and only partly because of legal issues).

But most important of all, the bidder wants to believe price was the reason they lost. Because the alternatives are unpalatable: they don’t have good people, they don’t have a good reputation, they don’t appear trustworthy, and so on. No selling team, particularly a team that would be involved in delivering the work, is interested in a message like that!

So, price becomes their refuge. “Darn! If we just could have priced it a little lower. I knew it. The market is tough out there; next time we can’t afford to be so choosy. We need to get in there and fight. And if we have to lower prices to get the work, well maybe we need to do just that.”

And that’s how the myth of low prices gets perpetuated. The moral of the story: if you think you lost on price, think again. Price is just the most convenient excuse for something more fundamental.

 

This post originally appeared on RainToday. 

DON’T Always Exceed Expectations

/5 Comments/in , , /by

Like most people, I enjoy a good positive surprise. Whether that’s something as simple as getting an unexpected discount at the grocery store, snagging a last-minute table at a popular restaurant, or being surprised by having the driver in front of me pay for my toll – it’s all good.

But when it comes to business – good old fashioned straight-forward honesty can do more for building your reliability than can exceeding expectations. How’s that? Read on.

——-

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

There is a website ExceedAllExpectations. Another website, HowTo.gov, tells governmental agencies they ought to incent (suborn?) performance beyond expectations. And as you well know, it’s a common mantra in business.

Well – not so fast.

Why Always Exceeding Expectations is a Bad Idea

Think this through. If you intentionally exceed a customer’s expectations, then you intentionally misled your customer about what to expect in the first place. In plain English – you lied. And if you make that a habit – as in “consistently exceed expectations” – then you’re a habitual liar.

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

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

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

Proof from the Market

In a recent issue of my newsletter TrustedAdvice, I included a link to a video clip about this idea. (By the way, if you’d like to get TrustedAdvice via email, click here to subscribe).

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

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

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

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

So – don’t do that.

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

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

This post first appeared in Trust Matters. 

The Art of Listening: Establishing Trust without Saying a Thing

/5 Comments/in /by

Buyer Psychology

Ask a client what they want, and they’ll tell you “expertise; credentials; someone who’ll meet my needs.” Ask them what their needs are, and they’ll tell you.

But ask really successful salespeople (or honest clients with experience in buying), and they’ll tell you how it really works. Clients only ask for credentials and expertise because they’re not really sure what else to do. In truth, they’d rather get in range with expertise, and then decide based on their trust in the seller.

Clients will tell you their needs because they think they’re supposed to, and because they’re afraid if they don’t, you’ll take advantage of them. But if you can engage them in honest discussion, they’ll admit their uncertainties and discuss, engage in, and evolve their views of what their needs are.

It all depends on why you’re listening.

If you’re listening to hear an answer to a predetermined question, then you will hear the “canned” definitions of needs that clients have prepared for you. You’ll hear their request for credentials and expertise at face value, and not hear the undertone in the question, or in the bored way they listen to your answer.

Because what clients really want to talk about is what everyone wants to talk about: Themselves. When someone says, “Tell me about yourself,” they’re just being polite – whether it’s on a date, at a social event, or in a sales call. The right answer is not to tell them about your vast experience with other clients – it is to get them talking about themselves. And to listen as they do so.

The Quality Of Listening

The usual form of listening is conditioned by sales models looking for answers and by flawed views of buyer psychology focused on surface dialogue. What is required is a different quality of listening.

The main reason for listening to prospects is to allow the prospect to be heard. Really heard. As in, actually being paid attention to by another human being.

This kind of listening is listening for the sake of listening. Listening to understand, period. No strings attached. No links back to your product. No refined problem statements. Because that’s what people in relationships, at their best, really do. They listen because they want to know what the other person thinks about whatever the other person is interested in talking about.

This kind of listening validates other people. It connects us to them. It provides meaning. And, among other things, it sets the stage for sellers and buyers to interact – if that is the right thing to happen next.

Authors Bill Brooks and Tom Travesano, in You’re Working Too Hard To Make The Sale, note that people greatly prefer to buy what they need from those who understand what it is that they want.

Read that over again, carefully. People prefer to buy what they need (stuff they’re going to buy anyway), from those who understand them on the basis of what they want (things in life they’d love to have – wishes, hopes, desires).

You don’t even have to give them what they want; it’s enough to understand them.

To bring it full circle back to listening: Relationships are the context for successful selling. Relationships are based on trust; they predispose us to engage in qualitatively different kinds of sales conversations. And listening – unrestricted, unbounded, listening for its own sake – is the way we develop such relationships.

And therein lies the paradox. The most powerful way to sell depends on unlinking listening from selling – and instead, just listening. Listening not as a step in a sales process, and not as a search for answers to questions. Listening not as a means to an end, but as an end in itself.

The point of listening is not what you hear, but the act of listening itself.

Making It Work

Here are 5 tips to listening this way. Number five is the most powerful.

  1. Ditch the distractions. You cannot multitask undiscovered. Being multitasked feels insulting. Close the door. Face away from the window. Blank the computer screen. Turn the iPhone over. Now, pay attention.
  2. Use your whole body. Lean toward the speaker – even on the phone. Use facial expressions. Use hands and arms, shake your head, and use “non-verbal” verbalisms. This improves your listening – and indicates you are listening.
  3. Keep it about them – not you. Use open-ended, not closed, questions. Let them tell their own story – don’t use them as foils for your hypotheses.
  4. Acknowledge frequently. Paraphrase their data, empathize with their emotions. Make sure you are hearing both correctly; make sure they know you are.
  5. Think out loud. The biggest obstacle to listening is your own thinking. Be courageous – postpone your thinking until they’re done talking. Be willing to think out loud – with the client. Doing so role-models collaboration and transparency, and that reinforces trust. I hear you. I value you. I respond to you, with no hidden agenda. I trust you. You can trust me.

That’s the message of listening.

This article was first published on RainToday.com

Caught Between the Grinding Wheels of Sales

/11 Comments/in , /by

A workshop participant recently said something that instantly took me back a few decades. I remember feeling exactly as he described it:

What am I supposed to do? On the one hand, I genuinely want to do right by my client. At the same time, my firm is depending on me to drive revenue there. They’re not asking me to do anything wrong, of course, but the pressure is there nonetheless; it’s on me to figure out how to do it, how to ring the bell. And I’ve got to make it happen; it’s my job.

I feel caught between two grinding wheels: everyone’s nice about it, but that just makes it worse.  I don’t know how to make both sides happy, and it’s just grinding me down.

Exactly. Boy do I remember that. And if you sell systems, or professional services, or complex B2B services, I bet you can relate too.

So here’s what I’ve learned that’s kept me away from the grinding wheels for a long time now.

What You Must Remember

Here’s the thing. Three things, actually.

Thing 1. You can’t make people do what they don’t want. Trying to do so just makes it worse. And much ‘selling’ rhymes with trying to do just that. (One of my favorite findings in Neil Rackham’s great work SPIN Selling is that attempts to teach ‘closing’ actually made students worse at closing).

Thing 2. If you help other people, it predisposes them to help you. And “help” comes in many flavors, including – very much including – just plain old listening. Listening to people predisposes them to listen to  you. And listening to you tends to increase the odds of their buying.

Thing 3. Principle-based behavior beats tactical behavior. If your actions are always based on short-term self-interest, others will not trust you. If your actions are based on principles, others will see it and trust you, including in the buying process.

If you accept Thing 1, you’ll lose less. If you start doing Things 2 and 3, you’ll win more.

If you think rightly about these three ideas, and act on them – you can escape that feeling of being ground down.  Here’s how.

Putting the Basic Things Together

In the happy event that your offering is better than your competitor’s, don’t blow it by over-reaching. Be calm, open, and natural. Be forthright, but confident that your offering can speak for itself.

If your offering is worse than your competitor’s, don’t blunt your sword. Admit it. Do what you can to help your client, including – yes, I’m serious – recommending your competitor (you’ll gain hugely in credibility). Then go back to your product people and convince them you’ve got a product problem, not a sales problem.

In the most usual case – your offering is comparable – you do not win by clever pricing, sexy presentations, or ingenious politics. And frankly, winning by adding more value or being cleverer at content is over-rated. Because let’s be honest: your competitors are more or less as smart or clever as you are. Expertise these days is a commodity.

Where you can win is by playing the long game, and the principles game. If you consistently aim to help your clients, being forthright at all times about what is in their best interest, they will notice. And you will get more than your “fair share” of business, i.e. more than just the share you might expect based solely on quality of service offering.

Because buyers prefer to deal with principled sellers who have their long-term interests at heart, rather than with serially selfish tacticians. For proof, just ask yourself and your firm how you behave as buyers.

Escaping the Grinding Wheels of Sales

Back to my workshop participant, caught between the grinding wheel of sales. How to escape it?

The answer is an inside job. It requires recognizing that all the tension comes from an inability to accept the Three Things:

  • We feel tension when we try to get people to do something we know they don’t really want
  • We feel tension when we try for what we want, rather than what helps the client
  • We feel tension when we try for the transaction, not the relationship.

So – don’t do that.

You must believe in and act on those principles. If you decide the principles need a little nudge, that somehow they’re not strong enough on their own, then you are simply willing yourself back into that space between the grinding wheels. If you can’t live your principles, you will not benefit from them. Nor would you deserve to.

But if you can believe and act on them, you no longer have to worry. Just do the next right thing. Be client-helpful in the long term. Don’t Always Be Closing: instead, Always Be Helping.

Work hard, but don’t spend an ounce of your effort on trying to get others to do your short-term selfish bidding. Let your competitors play that game, because it simply helps you play yours.

Answering Objections

What if your boss doesn’t buy it, you ask? Tell them you need 9 months to prove it. If they refuse to have anything to do with your view, then you must either come to peace with the grinding wheels, or accept that you’ll be happier in another place. The good news is, many managers are quite educable in this regard, particularly if you begin to deliver the numbers, and 9 months give or take is about enough time.

What if your clients don’t buy it, you ask? In my experience, about 80% of clients react the way I’ve described above. The others are either nasty people or monopolists, and they are the ones you should willingly cede to your competitors.

You can stop feeling ground down any time you choose to, starting now. Just choose to Always Be Helping.

Grow Trust with Delegation and Boundaries

/2 Comments/in , , /by

Taking Care of The Horses

We often think of ‘management’ as black and white. It’s not. I’m delighted to welcome Jurgen Appelo, one of Europe’s finest management writers, to Trust Matters, to finely articulate some shades of gray. Check out Jurgen’s new book, Management 3.0 Workout, as well.”

——————————————-

I once tried to figure out what the difference is between the words responsible and accountable. I honestly didn’t know. The words are often used interchangeably. And in Dutch, German, Swedish, Finnish, and other European languages, they even translate to the same word! This makes the use of the two words confusing for readers and annoying for translators. The Wikipedia entry on Delegation tries to clarify it like this:

“Delegation (or passing down) is the assignment of authority and responsibility to another person (normally from a manager to a subordinate) to carry out specific activities (…) However the person who delegated the work remains accountable for the outcome of the delegated work.”

Wikipedia, “Delegation”

In my own words:

You are responsible for your own agreement to be held accountable by someone else.

Beware the accountability trap

It is crucial that you understand that this works in both directions. In any value exchange between two people, each is responsible for his own actions, and for agreeing that he can be held accountable by the other. Sadly, this is often misunderstood. In management 1.0 and management 2.0 organizations, “superiors” seek fulfillment of their own goals over the fulfillment of others, and they hold their “subordinates” accountable without acknowledging that they themselves should be held accountable for the well-being of the workers. Some call it the accountability trap. [Mayer, “The Accountability Trap”] This one-sided view of accountability leads down the path to compliance, compulsion, and complicacy and probably some complaints. You can escape this trap by not only ignoring the difference between the words (as we do in some European languages), but also by acknowledging that empowerment is a reflexive relationship between two equal partners.

Defining Boundaries

The word “management” is derived from the Italian word “manneggiare,” which means “taking care of horses.” I often compare teams and organizations—not people!—with horses, and I believe in mutually respectful relationships between horses and their caretakers. The caretaking of horses includes giving direction and setting boundaries. Quite often, when managers delegate work to teams, they don’t give them clear boundaries of authority [Vozza, “How to Set Healthy Boundaries in Your Workplace”]. By trial and error, teams need to find out what they can and cannot do usually incurring some emotional damage along the way. This was described by Donald Reinertsen as the “discovery of invisible electric fences,” [Reinertsen, Managing the Design Factory pag:107]. Repeatedly running into an electric fence is not only a waste of time and resources but it also kills motivation. And it ruins the coat of the horse. With no idea of what the invisible boundaries are around it, the horse will prefer to stand still or kick another in the head.

Reinertsen suggests creating a list of key decision areas to address the problem of not setting boundaries. The list can include things like working hours, key technologies, product design, and team membership. A manager should make it perfectly clear what the team’s authority level is for each key decision area in this list. When the horse can actually see the fence, there will be less fear and pain. And the farther away the fence, the more the horse will enjoy its territory.

It also works the other way around because of the reflexive relationship of responsibility and accountability. A team usually delegates work to management, such as rewards and remuneration, business partnerships, market strategy, and parking space. The horse is not required to simply accept any kind of boundaries, constraints, and abuse. Nature gave the horse strong teeth and hind legs for this very reason.

Balancing Authority

There’s nothing that scares an inexperienced rider more than the loss of control over the horse. Indeed, a well-managed horse will heed the instructions of its rider, while at the same time the rider will understand the needs and desires of the horse. When we consider a manager and a team, is there an equivalent of the bridle and the reins? Delegation is not a binary thing; there are shades of grey between a dictator and an anarchist. Managers can hand over responsibilities to teams in a controlled and gradual way. The art of management is in finding the right balance. You want to delegate as much as possible in order to decrease bureaucracy and increase power. But if you go too far, self-organization might lead to an undesirable and costly outcome, maybe even chaos. How much you can delegate depends on the maturity of the team, the status of its work, and the impact of decisions on the organization.

Delegation is context-dependent and reflexive. Teams are responsible for their agreement to be held accountable by their managers, and vice versa. Trust between the horse and the rider should always work both ways.

——————–

References
Mayer, Tobias. “The Accountability Trap” <http://bit.ly/YLhZsS> Business Craftsmanship, 20 December 2012. Web.
Reinertsen, Donald G. Managing the Design Factory: A Product Developer’s Toolkit. New York: Free Press, 1997. Print.
Vozza, Stephanie. “How to Set Healthy Boundaries in Your Workplace” <http://bit.ly/1l9NgRs> Entrepreneur, 30 December 2013. Web

Integrity: What’s Up With That?

/4 Comments/in , /by

Can You Roll The Dice On IntegrityLike trust, integrity is something we all talk about, meaning many different things, but always assuming that everyone else means just what we do.  That leads to some vagueness and confusion. But a careful examination of how we use the words in common language is useful.

Integrity and the Dictionary

Merriam Webster says it’s “the quality of being honest and fair,” and/or “the state of being complete or whole.”

If you’re into derivations of words (as I am), then it’s the second of these definitions that rings true. The root of “integrity” is Latin, integer.  That suggests the heart of the matter (integral), and an entirety. “Integer” also has the sense of a non-fractional number, i.e. whole, not fragmented, complete.

In manufacturing, we have the idea of “surface integrity,” the effect that a machined surface has on the performance of the product in question: integrity here means keeping a package of specified performance levels intact. Similarly, a high-integrity steel beam is one that will not break or otherwise become compromised within certain parameters of stress.

Related also to this theme of wholeness is the idea of transparency, of things being whole, complete, not hidden – in this sense, we have high integrity to the extent we appear the same way to all people. Think of the phrase “two-faced” as an example of someone without integrity. (For a somewhat different and nuanced take on this issue in cyberspace, see @danahboyd on Mark Zuckerberg and multiple online identities).

Sometimes when we say someone has integrity, we mean they act consistently, in accord with principles. We say someone has high integrity when they stick to their guns, even in the face of resistance or difficulty.

Which raises an interesting question: where’s the line between integrity and obstinacy? For that matter, can a politician who believes passionately in the art of compromise ever be considered to have high integrity?

Then there’s that other common use of integrity that has a moral overtone – honorable, honest, upright, virtuous, and decent. Some of it has to do with truth-telling; but some of it has to do with pursuing a moral code.

Yet that raises another interesting question: can a gang member or a mafioso be considered to have integrity? Can an Occupy person ever consider a Wall Streeter to have integrity? Or vice versa? There may be honor among thieves, but can there be integrity?

Integrity – Your Choice?

So which is it?  Does integrity mean you tell the truth? Does it mean you operate from values? Does it mean you always keep your word? Does it mean you live a moral life? Does it mean your life is an open book?

Let’s be clear: there is no “right” answer. Words like “integrity” mean whatever we choose to make them mean; there is no objective “meaning” that exists in a way that can be arbitrated.

But that makes it even more important that we be clear about what we do mean. It just helps in communication.

For my part, I’m going to use “integrity” mainly to mean whole, complete, transparent, evident-to-all, untainted, what-you-see-is-what-you-get.

For other common meanings of “integrity,” I’m going to stick with synonyms like credible or honest; or moral and upright; or consistent.

What do you mean when you think of integrity?

Applying Trust Principles to Pricing

/4 Comments/in , /by

A New Perspective on PricingLet’s get tactical.

Friend Mark runs a small coaching business, mainly by himself.  He focuses on an intersection of personal and business development issues: helping people get unstuck.

The usual approaches to pricing in that business are tried and true. Rates are typically quoted for a month at a time, over a planned period of months. Variations on the theme are weekly rates, or hourly rates with a stipulated number of hours agreed upon up front.

Basically, it’s a time-based fee linked to some agreement about the period of time over which the agreement will be in effect. It’s an arrangement familiar not only to coaches, but to consultants, lawyers and other professionals.

Attempts are occasionally made to introduce value-based billing. The attempts succeed or founder based on both the definition of value, and the percent of said value attributable to the professional. I’d love to hear from readers about successful examples, but I’ve rarely run across them.
Mark, however, has some interesting ideas.  Let him tell it.

Many of my clients are hourly-type billers like me.  Since it takes me 8 hours, on average, to get a client from stuck to where they want to be…one approach is to charge them 8x the rate THEY bill at. Using their rates rather than mine, I suspect, is both easier to comprehend for them, and it strikes them as client-focused.

Another approach is that I figure I can work with about a hundred paying clients a year.  So, each client represents 1% of my income.  So I now ask 1% of their income as the fee.

Again, from what I can see, it engenders even more trust in the coaching relationship, helps things go faster, and makes it more likely for clients to refer.  Now, there’s no way I’d ask them to verify that the figure they give me is 1% of their income – I leave it all up to them.  And, of course, if they aren’t satisfied with the journey, I don’t charge them at all.  I leave that entirely up to them.  [David Maister used to do the same—CHG]

I see two powerful themes in the approaches that Mark is developing. First, I’m sure the pricing feels more ‘fair’ to his clients, because he is overtly working off their economic model, not his. It’s the opposite of one size fits all.

The other thing is that he trusts his clients – right from the outset. And as I’ve often written about, the impulse toward reciprocity plays out strongly in trust. We live up to the trust people place in us – and live down to the suspicions others have of us.

I asked Mark, “Have you ever, to your knowledge, been screwed over by an unscrupulous client taking advantage of your ‘honor-box’ approach to pricing?”

Mark’s answer: “Never.”

S&P and the New Challenge of Integrity in Business

/4 Comments/in , , /by

We’ve all read tales of corporate wrongdoing – think Bernie Madoff, Enron, LIBOR. In most cases, managers engaged in nefarious behavior, knowing they were doing wrong. There are a few cases where the miscreant could plausibly argue ignorance, or good intentions – Martha Stewart, perhaps.

But a recent courtroom defense by Standard & Poors in response to a Federal charge of fraud, opens up a whole new threat to corporate ethics.

Subordinating Ethics to Legal Arguments

Back in April, S&P responded to a Justice Department’s complaint that S&P’s claims of ratings objectivity, independence and integrity were false, and part of a scheme to defraud investors.

S&P’s creative approach was to argue that such statements were only “puffery,” and that a reasonable investor would not depend on them.

Let’s underscore this. S&P, as a legal strategy, decided to disavow its own declarations of objectivity, independence and integrity, saying in effect, “everyone knows we’re just blowing smoke.”

  • Picture Boeing saying, “About that 787 safety stuff – you didn’t really think we were serious, did you?”
  • Picture Legal SeaFood saying, “Oh, you thought we meant genuine bluefish?  Ha ha, silly you.”
  • You get the picture.

This is not a company trying to avoid being caught. It’s not a case of extenuating circumstances, or offsetting benefits.  It is not even arguing an interpretation of what is wrong.

S&P is arguing – as part of a legal strategy – that “integrity” is just a marketing tool. This subordinates “integrity” to both marketing and legal considerations. It puts it somewhere on a par with market research or creative ad spots.

 The Name of the Problem

It’s not just S&P that is confused – the media is implicated too. In his Bloomberg News story on the issue, Jonathan Weil characterizes the problem this way:

The problem is that sound legal strategies sometimes create public-relations nightmares…Often PR and legal professionals end up pursuing conflicting agendas if they don’t work cooperatively. There’s an old test that everyone in the public eye should use when making important decisions: How would this look if you read about it on the front page of a major newspaper or website?

Where S&P’s lawyers confuse ethics and legal arguments, Weil is reducing ethical issues to ones of reputation and PR.

At least Bernie Madoff had a moral compass. He knew what he was doing was wrong, and tried to hide it. But if “integrity” is a marketing tool, justified by ROI or PR, then we are in uncharted waters.

A Simple Problem

This should not be hard to manage. If someone brings a legal strategy of “integrity as puffery” to the Chief Counsel or CEO, this is what they should say in response:

“Excuse me – you are deeply confused.  This is not a legal or marketing strategy issue. There will be no analyses of riskiness, ROI, or trade-offs with reputation. Integrity is not something we bargain with. It is a core value. That means precisely what it says.

“Throw away immediately any work you were doing in that direction. And I want to know tomorrow at 9AM, in writing, why it was you were even thinking in this misconceived direction. Am I clear?”

Which would you trust?  A company with leadership that answered this way? Or a company that went to court with integrity for sale?

Judge Carter, who heard the case, was clear:

The court cannot find that all of these ‘shalls’ and ‘must nots’ are the mere aspirational musings of a corporation setting out vague goals for its future. Rather, they are specific assertions of current and ongoing policies that stand in stark contrast to the behavior alleged by the government’s complaint.

Exactly.

 

 

 

The Problem with Lying

/7 Comments/in /by

Dilbert on trust and lying:

dilbert

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

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

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

Lying and Credibility

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

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

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

Lying and Evasiveness

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

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

Lying and Motive

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

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

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

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

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

Recovering from Lies

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

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