At the Corner of Assertiveness & Cooperation: Collaboration

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© Copyright 2003-2010, Pfaff & Associates. All Rights Reserved.What do we meet at the corner of Assertiveness and Cooperation? The Thomas-Kilmann assessment suggests that it’s Collaboration.

Their assessment,  which is the basis for many others, explores different styles people use when handling conflict. For some of you this work may be familiar, but I only learned of it a few days ago from my sister, a professional mediator. Here is a free version which gives you a quick view of the five areas measured by the Thomas-Kilmann assessment.

It identifies five styles of handling conflict between two people: the Avoider, the Accommodater, the Compromiser, the Competitor and the Collaborator.

These types are arrayed in a graph with Assertiveness (defined as concern for the task, or as "thinks of self") on one axis, and Cooperation (defined as concern for people, or "thinks of others") on the other. In the lowest left hand corner is the Avoider, someone who’d rather not deal with conflict at all, and in the upper right hand corner, the corner where the highest level of Cooperation meets the highest level of Assertiveness, is the Collaborator. (Smack dab in the middle, as you’d expect, is the Compromiser, but we’ll save that for another day.)

What fascinated me about this model is the light it sheds on Collaboration: where its power comes from, and what distinguishes it from Compromise. Certainly, there are situations in which compromise is adequate and even worthwhile. I’d like to go out for dinner, you’d like to stay home. Taken a step further, I’d like not to cook tonight, and you’d like not to get dressed up or spend a lot of money. A compromise on a nearby casual restaurant fits the bill perfectly, and you and I probably don’t need to spend a minute more on a "conflict" like this. But a compromise is always a meeting in the middle, so each gets a little of what they want, and compromise often gets to a gray solution, not really satisfying to anyone but sort of appeasing everyone. In art, it’s mixing a lot of colors to get mud.

Collaboration gets its power because it uses the energy of Assertiveness–ideas and real points of view, championed by people who care–and the energy of Cooperation–a willingness to make things work for all involved. From collaboration comes the best result, the idea or solution which is fashioned from everyone’s input and is better than what any one person could have come up with on her or his own.

And a key point in all of this, a key ingredient in collaboration, is that it starts with conflict, but it doesn’t end there. It takes the energy of the conflict–opposing or differing views, needs and goals–and the attitude of collaboration–the willingness to reach the best solution for all concerned–to get somewhere we’ve never been before, and somewhere we couldn’t go alone.

I’ll close with a quote from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

"A leader isn’t a seeker of consensus, but a molder of consensus."

PS: If you love this kind of self-knowledge quiz, try our Trust Temperament assessment. Far cheaper and more revealing than a therapy session.

David Maister on Trust and Professional Services (Trust Quotes #7)

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David Maister  is well-known to readers of this blog. David was lead author on The Trusted Advisor along with myself and Rob Galford. A former Harvard Business School professor, he originally specialized in logistics and transportation (writing 8 books on those topics.) He became the guru of Professional Services with his 1993 book Managing the Professional Services Firm after which he wrote 6 additional books on professional service firm topics.

CHG: Welcome to the Trust Quotes series, David, I’m glad to get you on the record on the subject of trust some ten years after we co-authored The Trusted Advisor. How has your view of trust changed, if at all, since then?

DM: I’m probably a little more skeptical and less hopeful now than I was ten years ago as to the degree to which earning trust is learnable (or teachable.)

When you and I (and Rob) wrote about trust in 2000, we stressed that earning trust was not just about the knowledge of tactics or the possession of skills, but required some underlying attitudes or character attributes – for example, a real interest in those you were dealing with, and a sincere desire to help (what we called “low self-orientation.”)

As authors, consultants and teachers, we (and others) can help a lot with the knowledge and skill parts of understanding trust, and perhaps even (through role playing and practice) help people improve on the behavioral aspects – getting more skilled in conversations for example.

But what remains as a dilemma is what happens if people are actually not that interested (on a personal level) with those whose trust they are trying to earn, or are not really trying to “focus on helping first, and keep the faith that, by earning the relationship, you’ll get what you want down the road.” 

I am suspicious about whether the underlying attitudes or character traits necessary for trust are as common now as they have been in the past.

This is not a comment on the inherent flaws of individuals. Rather, I think we have seen a generational change (or two) in the institutional context within which people have been raised. Customers and clients, through their increased reliance on purchasing departments, are signaling a lesser interest in buying through relationships. At all levels (so-called “partner” or “non-partner”) professional firms are routinely achieving improved economic results by treating their people as “employees at will” rather than assets or members of an organization which gives and expects loyalty. The data is very clear – in the law for example, the single biggest means by which firms improved their profitability (across the profession) was de-equitizing existing partners and drastically reducing the numbers of people promoted to partner. That’s not just a response to the recession – it’s been going on for decades.

Accordingly, I think we are living in organizations which have low (and declining) trust and individuals are responding in kind. I think our economy and society has been training people to not trust.

 

CHG: For the record, what do you think is the role that trust plays in professional services–or for that matter in business as a whole?

DM: I remain as convinced as ever that a high-trust method of operation is the best high-profit, high growth strategy. In my 2001 book Practice What You Preach, I studied 139 professional operations and was able to show statistically that the key determinants of financial success were when the people throughout the organization (not just those at the top) agreed with the statements “we always put the interests of clients first,” “we have no room for individualists who put their own interests ahead of the clients or the firm,” and “Our managers are men and women of integrity who always act in accordance with what they preach.”

However, it is sad to report that while these attributes (where they existed) could be shown to produce high profits and high growth, they were not common. Alas, in most businesses, neither the employees nor the clients can trust that managers will act in accordance with the principles they advocate. So, cynicism and self-protection results.

CHG: In your career, David, you consulted to or worked with a panorama of industries—law firms, accounting firms, advertising, actuaries, public relations, architects, consulting firms. What did you find to be the most common trust issue across all of them?

DM: Over the past decade or two, there has been a collapse of the “professional service firm model” as a special form of organization. In the past, what made a professional service firm different from a general corporation was that it was built on some generally agreed (if sometimes implicit) assumptions. Assumptions that you could depend upon and trust that they would be observed.

Under the old model, professional firms offered careers, not just jobs. If you were hired at the entry level, it was “assumed” that, in exchange for your hard work, you would be given an apprenticeship, be well-trained and, if you didn’t make it to the higher levels of the firm, you would be helped to find an alternative career. If you did “make partner” there were assumptions that (even if there was no such thing as life tenure) you were treated (and expected to behave as) a long-term member of a cohesive team, and that the firm would be loyal to you if you were loyal to the firm.

None of these “rules’ or assumptions apply today. No-one today knows what it means to “be a partner.” It’s hard to be trusting or trustworthy (between and among partners) if no-one knows whether or not there are sustained “rules of engagement.” Accordingly, even in some incredibly admirable firms, I hear sentences like “I feel like I’m only one bad year away from being terminated.”

Few entry-level hires (according to the survey data I have seen) expect to be with their firms 5 years hence. They don’t believe that their firm has any form of commitment to them. The recent actions during the 2008-2010 recession, wherein junior and admin staff were the first to be tossed overboard in the (successful) attempt to preserve partner incomes proved to everyone where the true priorities of most organizations lie. Together with the fact that, in many professions, professional firms are increasingly publicly held, professional firms are (in my view) much more short-term focused than a decade or two ago. This breeds distrust inside the organization. No-one knows what rules or organizing principles (if any) can be depended upon.

I’m sorry to sound so cynical, but my experience is that juniors don’t trust partners, partners don’t trust each other (especially if the other partner is in a different office, practice specialty, or industry group), no-one trust that management will do what they say they will, and everyone views clients as people to be feared (or seduced) rather than people to trust. Shining counter-examples do exist (the usual names) but they are not the norm.

Yes, researchers, authors and consultants can prove that these are counterproductive and self-defeating attitudes, but that doesn’t make them any the less prevalent.

CHG: As long as we have that list in mind—is there one industry in particular that you found particularly better at—or more challenged, for that matter—at issues of trust?

DM: In general, I find excellence at trust to exist at an individual level (there are many incredibly admirable practitioners in every profession) a very few firms that have firm-wide reputations for it, and no one profession or industry that has a consistently high reputation for being more trusted than other industries. There’s a reason there are consultant jokes, doctor jokes, lawyer jokes, plumber jokes, dentist jokes, accountant jokes, etc. As generalizations across entire professions, we’re all bad at working well with clients.

One profession – the law – does have a particular challenge with trust inside their own organizations. As I pointed out in a recent article, lawyers are professional skeptics: They are selected, trained, and hired to be pessimistic and to spot flaws. To protect their clients, they place the worst possible construction on the outcome of any idea or proposal, and on the motives, intentions, and likely behaviors of those they are dealing with. As Tony Sacker, my kind and gentle brother-in-law and a solicitor in the United Kingdom, says: “I am paid to have a nasty, suspicious mind.”

Recently, I was advising a firm on its compensation system. They didn’t like my recommendations. Finally, one of the partners said, “David, all your recommendations are based on the assumption that we trust each other and trust our executive or compensation committees. We don’t. Give us a system that doesn’t require us to trust each other!”

Much current practice in firm governance, organization, and (not least) compensation comes from the fact that partners vigorously defend their rights to autonomy and individualism, well beyond what is common in other professions. There is nothing inherently wrong with that. However, as major corporations consolidate their work among a smaller number of firms, domestically and internationally, they expect that firms will serve them with effective cross-office and cross-disciplinary teams. Firms are vigorously responding to this with a stampede of lateral hires, mergers, and acquisitions. Their goal is to create big organizations offering many disciplines, locations, and cultures. The unanswered—actually, barely asked—question is whether these firms can shift from a managerial approach, based on partner autonomy, to new approaches that can create a well-coordinated set of team players.

It is hard to unbundle which is the cause and which is the effect, but the combination of a desire for autonomy and high levels of skepticism make most law firms low-trust environments.

CHG: What’s happening with trust in business these days? Your take on it?

DM: I’m not sure I have the “view from the mountaintop” perspective about business as a whole, so perhaps the best way for me to try and answer is as a consumer. Continuing my less-than-hopeful theme, I have to report that as a recipient I do not experience much change or improvement, at least systematically, from those who try to serve me. I’m not saying that I don’t like my doctor, lawyer, plumber, dentist, broker, (and so on.) It’s just that I do not perceive that they are doing anything new that they did not do ten years ago. (Do your readers?)

Nor do I see many game-changing approaches from new entrants in many professions that systematically increase trust between provider and client. Many professions are moving to fixed-fee pricing in part due to the historical lack of trust in the motives of providers who billed by the hour.

One approach that recently caught my attention was the offering of a premium-fee “concierge” primary care physician services where the doctor limits the number of patients to 400 instead of the normal primary care doctor who has a “list” of 2,500 patients or more. This COULD be a systematic way to increase intimacy and accessibility, but (at least in Massachusetts) it has not taken off in a big way.

CHG: Your old industry of professional services; what did you find to be the most common failing—and did it by any chance have any connection with trust?

DM: Most of the weaknesses or failings of professional firms, in my view, derive from the fact that professionals (and their institutions) are made up of highly intelligent people who value and celebrate that which is rational, logical, analytical and based on high intelligence. After all, it is superiority in those things that are screened for in doing well in college and, especially, in obtaining advanced degrees. However, few of us who went that route (unless we had it from childhood) were ever helped in developing our interactive, emotional people skills.

No one ever got their MBA because of superior empathetic skills. Few people, if any, had a successful law school career because of their predilection for being a team-player rather than focusing on their own accomplishments. No-one teaches you (formally) the abilities of being a good conversationalist – having a fresh point of view, but not trying to thrust it upon everyone else, speaking politely and respectfully; telling good stories to illustrate key points; being good at drawing other people’s views out and drawing them into the conversation; not being afraid to admit areas of ignorance; listening with genuine interest. In our educational system (and in our firms’ training and development approaches) these basic human skills are either absent, or treated as secondary.

It sounds trivial and trite to say “It’s all about learning to deal with people,” but what’s often overlooked is that it’s very HARD to develop such people skills if you don’t start until later in life. People and firms underestimate how much effort and time it takes to develop such skills.

CHG: Tactically speaking you’ve heard me talk about trustworthiness vs. trusting, with the combination adding up to trust. On which side do you think business needs more work?

DM: I think you have made an incredibly important distinction, Charlie, and it’s a major contribution to get people thinking about it. I think you and I have always believed that you can’t be seen as being trustworthy unless you are prepared to trust, and being prepared to trust is an incredible leap of faith for many people. So, that’s the hardest part for many people.

When people ask, “How can I be seen as more trustworthy?” there’s more than a little hint of “Let’s get to the stage where I begin to benefit as quickly as possible.” Asking “How can I learn to trust more those with whom I want to have a relationship?” demands that people really are taking a relationship (rather than transaction) approach. Unfortunately, there are people looking at “trust’ as an approach or tactic to “do the deal more quickly.’ They underestimate the mindset change that’s really required to make it work.

CHG: How do people come to learn about trust? How did you learn about it?

DM: Today, “trust” is a hot topic. As you have pointed out, Charlie, claims to being “your trusted advisor” are everywhere. Everyone wants to train their people to earn clients’ trust in order to lower selling costs and avoid fee pressure. What is often misunderstood is that enhanced trust CAN do these things, but it’s not a gradually rising response curve. A little more trust does not get you a little less fee sensitivity or a little more repeat business.

In my experience, it’s a big “step function” – only when you have clearly put a big difference in trustworthiness (and trusting behavior) between you and others in the market can you then reap the rewards of being truly different. I’m not saying it’s “all or nothing” but it’s close to that. “I trust them a little bit more than others” is not much of a commendation, and is not likely to lead to a big change in buying behavior.

My own introduction to trust was by experiencing it – examples that we included in The Trusted Advisor book, and some that have happened since. Every so often, you come across someone – a dentist, an interior decorator, a financial advisor – who earns all your business and long-term loyalty by putting your interests first. And when it happens, as it happened to me, you become an instant convert.

I truly believe there are no secrets here – it’s just the Golden Rule, “Deal with others as you would wish to be dealt with.” The trouble is, too many of us think that our business is different or that our clients are different. We don’t trust them to reciprocate if we do the right thing, so we drop the golden rule and relapse into transactional behavior.

CHG: You didn’t just write about trust only in The Trusted Advisor; in what ways did trust show up in your other books?

DM: All of the lessons of trust in dealing with clients also apply, virtually un-translated, into building trust inside the organization. I wish I had done what our co-author Rob Galford did and written The Trusted Leader, which was a logical follow-up.

Actually, I did try write about effective management and how trust applies. It’s a constant theme thorough all my books. However, it’s still hard to be completely convincing. It’s very sad, but there’s a school of though out there among many managers that accepts Machiavelli’s line about it being better to be feared than to be admired. In the balance between “pragmatists” and “ideologues/idealists”, I still find more people who are self-described pragmatists, rather than managing their businesses according to strictly-adhered to values, standards and principles.

CHG: Unlike Willie Mays, you retired while still on top. Do you miss it?

DM: So far, not at all. I’m not saying I won’t wake up one day with a passionate desire to write another book, it could happen.

But it feels really great not to get on airplanes, and my wife and I, after treating Boston (our home town) as the place where for 25 years we did our laundry, are finding that (surprise, surprise!) it has many wonderful things to offer that keep us busy and engaged.

CHG: David, it’s been a delight talking with you again, thanks so much for taking the time.

This is number 7 in the Trust Quotes series.

The entire series can be found at: http://trustedadvisor.com/trustmatters.trustQuotes

Recent posts in this series include:
Trust Quotes #6: Anna Bernasek
Trust Quotes #5: Neil Rackham
Trust Quotes #4: Peter Firestein on Trust, Character and Reputation

Inflation Economics: the Tooth Fairy vs. Lemonade Stands

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Over the weekend, walking with a few other adults in 75-degree Holliston, Massachusetts, I observed a clear harbinger of spring: a kid’s lemondade stand in a cul de sac. The price: 10 cents per small cup. It wasn’t bad lemonade, either.

This led us (naturally) to discuss the resurgance of YouTube videos featuring beat-downs of Easter Bunny characters, and thence–again, naturally–to the going rates being paid by the Tooth Fairy. We reckon it’s a dollar.

The consensus–among 5 out of 6 adults–was that back in the day (20-40 years ago, depending on our ages), lemonade went for 5-10 cents, and the Tooth Fairy used to pay out somewhere between a dime and a quarter (that’s 10-25 cents, for our  New Zealand readers).

The astute among you will quickly calculate the implications: inflation has hit The Tooth Business far more heavily than that sugary-sour cause of tooth-decay itself, Lemonade. The  Tooth Fairy’s economic model, therefore, has been more inflation-challenged than that of the youthful entrepreneur.

Neo-classical Economics vs. Family Economics

Somebody out there will correct me, no doubt, but basically neo-classical economists suggest that people are largely rational utility-maximizers and that, markets being generally free, prices will seek levels informed by both those drivers.

The rest of us, of course, know that people are highly irrational and there is no such thing as a free market. So we are free to concoct our own theory of inflation in the realm of Family Economics.

Let’s start with the obvious fact: no rational adult would have kids in the first place. It makes no sense economically, and increasingly it’s becoming clear that it makes little sense in terms of happiness or sanity either (insanity being hereditary, since you get it from your kids.)

Let’s focus on who sets prices. Nominally, it’s the kids who set the lemonade prices, while the Tooth Fairy (aka Mom and Pop) sets rates for the tooth repo business. In fact, M&P play a big role in each.

Mom and Pop, being in the game for irrational reasons anyway, wish the best for their kids. The best, in the case of lemonade stands, means that the kids get lots of business, much gratitude and praise, and little grief from the (neighborhood) market.

The best way to achieve that goal? Subsidized low prices. The kids get high volume, praise, even tips. Parents rationalize they’re teaching the kids a valuable lesson in economics. (Of course, they’re really just teaching them the case for massive government subsidy and transfer payments, but no matter).

Then why the high prices in dental recycling? Parents, operating against their own enlightened self-interest once again, foolishly seek love and affection from their kids. They figure if they over-pay for teeth, they’ll get that much more gratitude. The fact that kids don’t effectively calibrate the difference between ten cents and a dollar somehow doesn’t register to them.

And as if that weren’t enough, the fight for kids’ love extends to the competition from the perceived love the neighbors’ kids get from their parents. "But Johnny got five dollars from his tooth fairy" is the surest way to generate a round of neighborhood inflation.

Behavioral Economics

There are several new approaches to economics out there, loosely aggregated under the term "behavioral economics." All aim to make sense out of otherwise nonsensical behaviors–seeing utilitarian maximization in people sacrificing their lives for the species’ sake (a la lemmings), that kind of thing. 

But sometimes, I think, the  search for meaning is simply doomed. Furthermore, if all behavior  makes sense on some scale, then there’s  no such thing as stupid. This is a dangerous belief, since if there’s no stupid, then there’s not much against which to contrast the opposing virtue.

A case in point may be parental love for children.  Kids–they break your bank, break your heart, yet still the human race engages in the eternal race to propagate. Go figure.

What sense does it make? Not much.  But  why should it have to make sense? It’s an "is" thing.

Let’s just call it human economics and move along, move along, nothing to see here, just move along…

 

 

Closing the Book on Closing

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Let’s pull out all the stops on this.

Aggressive, constant closing is just about the worst thing most salespeople can do. Closing kills more sales than it gets, and ruins future sales by squelching relationships. If you still have those old “50 Closing Strategies” books gathering dust, get rid of them. If you still believe in ABC—Always Be Closing—I want to convince you once and for all to stop it.

And sales managers, please read on: because at every quarter’s end, when you exhort the troops to bring the numbers in, all you’re doing is telling them to close. And you are constructing a circular firing squad when you do it.

I’ve had a few things to say about this in the past, not just about closing  but about the paradox of selling,  and about why so much in sales these days works to defeat trust, hence defeat sales.  As Yogi Berra said, you could look it up.

Don’t Take My Word that Closing is Bad: Take Konrath and Rackham’s

Jill Konrath  is a highly-respected author,  sales consultant, and blogger.  She’s even less ambiguous than I am: “I will never, ever train people on closing techniques if they sell to the corporate marketplace.”

In Neil Rackham’s perennial best-seller SPIN Selling  , he describes results of research on closing for both low-priced and high-priced goods.

• For low-priced goods, training sellers in closing techniques resulted in slightly shorter sale times, and a slightly increased rate of sale (76% vs. 72%). Meaning—a slight improvement by increasing closing techniques.

• For higher-priced goods, training sellers in closing techniques also resulted in shorter sales transaction times—but it also resulted in less sales—33% vs. 42% before being trained in closing.  

In other words: closing may increase efficiency and slightly improve your results if you’re selling copy paper, and low cost add-on products (“you want fries with that” is actually a good use of closing: take note, McD’s countermen).

But if you’re selling any kind of professional services, or most anything over a few hundred dollars–the better you get at closing, the less you sell!  Oh well, at least you get shot down faster!

Rackham’s data was from a few decades ago.  Do you think closing techniques have gotten more effective, or less effective, in today’s times?  Yup, that’s right.

The Real Culprits: Sales Management and the Training Industry

Salespersons have their own battles to fight. But their job is made immeasurably harder by those who design the sales environments.

Ask yourself, which business strategy works better: one that is executed consistently over a long time period, or one that is given a new endpoint every few months? It’s the same with relationships—business or personal.

In personal relationships, we talk about people who are commitment-phobic, or about players—those looking only for one-night stands. In effect, those are what the quarterly insistence on cleaning up the numbers makes your salespeople.

Following is a quote from a sales training newsletter I received a week ago:

Charles, with only three days to go until the end of the month (and end of the first quarter), it is time to push hard to exceed budgets.

This month we focused on planning and preparation, but it is now tome [sic] for all your hard work to pay off. As it is time to close, we have put up a small selection of articles on our homepage to help you.

Members can log in and search for thousands more articles and resources, including over 40 more articles all on sales closing.

Presumably somebody buys this stuff. But let’s be clear about what it is: the intellectual version of crack. It urges you to give up on long-term plans and relationships, and subordinate them to the siren call of the “here-now.” Worse, it is entirely self-centered—urging the seller to bend the client, and particularly the client’s wallet, to the will of the seller.

Here’s how Neil Rackham puts it: “When salespeople are under pressure to produce short-term results and are being told to get the business this month by whatever means necessary, they pressure customers and this creates suspicion and mistrust.” 

Exactly. So if you’re a sales manager in a business that isn’t small-dollar and ancillary, and if you’re pushing your people to step up the closing at quarter’s end, then you are creating suspicion and mistrust. Which ruins sales in the medium and long term.

Who cuts off their nose to spite their face that way? Besides crack addicts, I mean?

Never mind. Just stop closing. In its place, substitute constant striving to improve results and relationships for your clients. If that feels too vague, then use Jill Konrath’s suggestion: focus on the Next Logical Step.

You’ll sell more. And sleep better too.
 

Apollo 13: A Love Song to Collaboration

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“Houston, we have a problem.” Famous words uttered by Jim Lovell in the real Apollo 13 mission, and by Tom Hanks as Lovell in the great movie Apollo 13. The mission, we know, was a ‘successful failure’ in that they didn’t reach the moon, but the three astronauts, Lovell, Swigert and Haise, got home safely.

And they got home, I believe, because of collaboration in its purest sense.

Just after getting the ‘problem’ news, and checking and hoping there were simply reporting malfunctions, Flight Director Gene Kranz (as played beautifully by Ed Harris in the movie) assigns teams to work on solutions with only the gear the astronauts have on board. In the movie we see only a short scene:

Several technicians dump boxes containing the same equipment and tools that the astronauts have with them onto a table
Technician 1: We’ve got to find a way to make this
[square CSM LiOH canister]
Technician 2: fit into the hole for this
[round LEM canister]
Technician 3: … using nothing but that.

The rest of the engineering takes place off camera, but we can imagine what it was like:

Technician 1: Well, we’ve got three meters of g17 tubing to start…

Technician 2: and if that’s too small we can hook it up with the FCG-420 …. and so on until they made it work.

I can also imagine what it wasn’t like:

Technician 1: Well, we’ve got three meters of g17 tubing to start.

Technician 2: No, that won’t work. Too small. (Thinking, I don’t want his idea to win. I wanna be the one who comes up with the solution.)

Technician 3: You’re both wrong. You’re looking at it from the wrong direction. (Thinking: these guys are total dopes and they’re going to make me look bad to the boss.) …and so on until Lovell, Swigert and Haise ran out of air, or fell into the ocean, or hit the entry trajectory wrong and were hurtled right back out into space.

My guess is that the guys on the ground weren’t worried about career limiting moves, one-upsmanship, or even being on the “winning team” which engineered the solution. My guess is that they were worried about one thing and one thing only: how do we bring these guys home?

True collaboration means taking the best of all the individual ideas, and from that building the very best solution. It’s not compromise, a watering down, but playing off one another’s ideas and work to build something better than any one person could have done alone. It’s the highest intersection of cooperation and assertiveness.

What made collaboration work?

First, it’s no coincidence that the space missions were called missions. They weren’t projects or details or jobs, but missions. It took over 400,000 people to get a spacecraft launched, and all of them had a clear and common goal.

Second, there was a terrible sense of urgency that become even more intense in the Apollo 13 crisis: the clock was ticking , and crafting a solution was truly life-and-death.

Third, they had in Kranz a Flight Director who was both a manager and a leader. Once the doors were shut in ground control at the beginning of a launch, he reportedly told the ground crew: “Gentlemen, I will support every decision you make.” And in the movie:

NASA Director: This could be the worst disaster NASA’s ever faced.

Gene Kranz: With all due respect, sir, I believe this is gonna be our finest hour.

Anna Bernasek on the Economics of Integrity (Trust Quotes #6)

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Anna Bernasek is author of the just-published book The Economics of Integrity

No stranger to the subject matter, she’s been a regular contributor to the Economic View column in the New York Times. She has been a staff writer covering finance and the economy at Fortune Magazine, TIME Magazine and Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald newspaper. She has frequently appeared as a guest commentator on broadcast media including CNN, CNBC, public television and NPR.

CHG: Welcome to the Trust Quotes series, Anna. Let’s lead with your book, if you don’t mind. What’s the central thesis of The Economics of Integrity? Or theses, if that’s too limiting?

AB: If there’s one thing I’d like readers to get out of my book, it’s that integrity—or trust if you prefer—is an economic asset. Once you understand that, you can think about the topic without being limited by the conventional idea that integrity is a personal virtue, and that it’s costly. If one approaches it in the right way, integrity isn’t a cost at all. It’s an investment opportunity, a way to build wealth. That’s very exciting because there’s no upper limit to how much trust—wealth—we can create. I think it’s the biggest opportunity we face.

CHG: You use several examples of inter-dependence to make your point about integrity; care to share one?

AB: Well, one of the points I try to make is that integrity—in the sense of trust and interdependence—is an abundant fact that is found literally in every aspect of our economy. For me, a good example is milk. There are about 15 people who are directly involved in making a gallon of milk. Think of the farmer, the vet, the milk hauler, lab technicians at the milk plant and so on.
If you include all the people who are indirectly responsible for making milk the number grows exponentially. When everyone does what they say they are going to do they all benefit. If one cuts corners or does the wrong thing it can hurt everyone in the chain. That’s why integrity is a shared asset. We share in the rewards of integrity but we also share in the risks.

CHG: What do you believe is the most controversial point you’re trying to make? Controversial, that is, compared to current received wisdom?

AB: Not everybody gets my ideas right away. There are two classic responses to my book, usually from people who haven’t read more than a few words of it. The first is what the heck am I talking about, can’t I just pick up the paper on any day and see that nobody has any integrity anymore? And the second is that, well, there’s nothing new here because we always knew that trust is important.

I would say this. To anybody who says we are lacking in integrity, you don’t need to think very hard to see that if we totally lacked trust in our institutions and fellow citizens the economy would be back in the stone age. We are where we are because generations upon generations have through trial and error, with great effort and sacrifice, bequeathed to us an advanced society where our wealth and our economy depends on an enormous stock of integrity.

It’s so ingrained that we take it for granted, and most people can only think of the defects in our collective integrity assets. I’m saying it’s there, it’s enormous, and it’s very important. It’s an opportunity, not a problem. Sure there are places to improve. But that’s the point—let’s do that and we’ll benefit.

To those who say there’s nothing new here, I have to admit that I didn’t exactly invent or discover trust and integrity. But in mainstream economics trust is treated in an offhand way. It’s typically an assumption on which an intellectual superstructure is then constructed. I’m saying something new: integrity is an asset, and therefore has the property of quantity. Not easy to measure, but still a quantitative subject. We can create it, invest in it, and diminish it as we choose. What I’m saying is that integrity is not just related to, but integral to wealth.

CHG: Are you using the terms ‘trust,’ ‘integrity,’ and ‘virtue’ to mean largely the same thing, or do you see particular relationships between them?

AB: I make a distinction between integrity in its colloquial sense and integrity as an economic asset. In ordinary conversation, integrity is a personal quality. That suggests personal ethics and morality, desirable and virtuous qualities in anyone. When I talk about integrity insofar as it relates to the economy, I am talking about relationships of trust.

In economic terms it doesn’t matter how pure your soul is if nobody knows about it. But if somebody respects you and trusts you, then you have something valuable. So I use the word integrity to describe a relationship of trust between persons or institutions. That trust is an economic asset and it’s very valuable. It underlies everything we do.

CHG: You write that the recent financial crisis was first and foremost a crisis of integrity. To what extent do you think we—government, business, the public—have learned this lesson (or not)?

AB: I think a lot of people recognize that what I’m saying makes intuitive sense. The issue for many people, and the reason I wrote the book, is that they don’t have the tools and concepts they need to think deeply about the problems we have experienced with integrity and about the solutions we need to go forward. It’s not going to cut it anymore to say that we need to deregulate financial markets and encourage financial innovation. But what is going to replace the rhetoric of deregulation? I think my book has some pretty good answers.

CHG: You’re a fan of disclosure in financial markets; how far can disclosure along take us? What else has to happen to increase trust in financial markets?

AB: Disclosure is probably the single most crucial step we can take. But it can’t happen in a vacuum. If there are no norms and guidelines, disclosure becomes an exercise in futility as enormous quantities of irrelevant information obscure what’s really going on. We need to get the important and relevant information out there in a fast, organized and convenient way.

But look at the tools we have now. The internet is the greatest tool ever invented to get this job done. And once we have norms and guidelines, we need to have accountability so that they aren’t just ignored. It’s a big job, no doubt, but the payoff is even bigger. We simply can’t go back to where we were before the crisis. It’s a broken system.

CHG: You’ve written recently about our health care situation, and the recently-passed legislation. If legislators had read, and absorbed, your book (it’s a hypothetical, I know), what would they have done differently?

AB: Just about everything, I’m sorry to say. There are a couple of key points that are hidden in plain view.
First, our existing system is grossly inefficient. On the whole we are paying way too much for health care and we’re not getting results. Second, our system is grossly unfair. Everybody is getting care, but not at the right time or place and certainly not at the right cost. That’s actually making people less well than they could otherwise be.

And along the way, a minority of people are being bankrupted or severely burdened financially in a way that literally adds insult to injury, while others–including caregivers, taxpayers and local communities–are bearing inappropriate burdens.

Every other developed nation—every one—has a better system. There are existing, proven, tested, popular solutions that are being ignored. The biggest travesty of the whole legislative process was the calumnious abandonment of single payer.

Only single payer moves us significantly forward. Everything else, no matter what desirable features it has (and there are a few positive things in the legislation) further entrenches a bad system and endangers not only our future health but our economic prosperity. The only thing I like about the recent law is that it is proof that change can happen. But it wasn’t the change we need.

CHG: I’ve often thought of brands as the corporate equivalent of personal trust. What is, in your view, the relationship between personal trust and corporate, or systemic, integrity? Can you have systemic trust without personal integrity?

AB: Personal integrity is a building block for corporate integrity. Of course you can imagine a situation where someone has a defect in personal integrity but it doesn’t affect their institution because it isn’t relevant to the institutional context. However, I don’t tend to think that’s the norm.

CHG: You talk about the DNA of integrity. Is integrity born, or can it be made? Can we develop integrity, or must it come with mother’s milk? How long does it take?

AB: Integrity can be created. And I think that’s what’s so exciting about it. I think a good example is eBay. From scratch eBay created an integrity system where buyers and sellers came together in a relationship of trust to create wealth. The more people heard about the good experience, the more people were encouraged to try eBay and it created a self-reinforcing system of integrity and wealth.
It can take decades to create integrity or it can literally happen overnight. It depends on whether the DNA of integrity is present (disclosure, norms and accountability) These three conditions together create integrity. They are present in eBay and they are present in other integrity systems like the NYSE.

CHG: Anna, it’s been a pleasure to have you share these thoughts with Trust Matters readers; thank you very much.

AB: Thank you!

This is number 6 in the Trust Quotes series.

The entire series can be found at: http://trustedadvisor.com/trustmatters.trustQuotes

Recent posts in this series include:
 Trust Quotes #5: Neil Rackham
Trust Quotes #4: Peter Firestein on Trust, Character and Reputation
Trust Quotes #3: Dr. Eric Uslaner on the Nature of Trust

Why Nobody Cares About You, And You Should Be Glad They Don’t

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Nobody cares about you. I don’t mean your parents, of course they do. And of course your dog. And your significant other, if you have one. Maybe even your kids or your siblings, though there’s no guarantee.   And maybe a great friend or two. 

No, I’m talking about all the rest. Your work team, your customers, your suppliers, your neighbors, your kids’ teachers, the gang at the gym and at church. The people you spend 85% of your time with, who make up 90% of the entries in your contacts database and 95% of the people in your LinkedIn catalog. 99% of your Facebook and Twitter friends. They don’t really care about you. None of them. Not really.

Basically, the vast majority of human interactions we have are with people who don’t really care about us.

And that, my ‘friends,’ is a wonderful thing. Here’s why.

My Life has Been Very Eventful: Some of It Actually Happened.

For me, almost all the stomach-churning fear and angst I have experienced in my life consisted of fictional plots hatched in the dark places in my own mind. They nearly always featured those 90%-plus people in my life. A huge chunk of my life’s emotional energy was spent on winning fictional arguments and fights with them—though now, finally, I spend a lot less time on that.

If only I could have realized more fully, earlier on in my life, the One Big Truth, how much more productive I could have been! And what is the One Big Truth?

They don’t really give a damn. Any more than I do about them. Oh sure I like interacting with them, most of them, most of the time. And I actually don’t think badly about hardly any of them—they mean well, mostly. It’s just that, I’ve got my own issues to worry about, and I honestly don’t spend that much time focusing on them.

And, surprise surprise, they spend about as much time focused on me as I do focused on them. Which is not a lot. And they probably don’t think any more badly about me than I think badly about them, which is not much. The main thing is: I just think about myself more than I do about them. And they do the same.

The Freedom That Lies in Realizing No One Really Cares

Again, I don’t mean we’re all selfish, mean-spirited people. But I do mean that we’re all pretty much wrapped up in ourselves. And that turns out to be an enormous, high-potential gift.

Because: imagine doubling the quality of attention you show to other people. Not even the quantity—just the quality.   No more time—just more connection.   What if you could really connect with your customer. Just for two minutes. For two minutes, to engage in a way that is not dominated by your desire to close the deal, to advance the sale, to get them to like you.

What if, for two minutes, you could actually care about them? About how they are feeling, about why they’re thinking what they’re thinking, about how it must feel to be them in that moment. 

What if you could offer the fine gift of your attention? 

What would happen if someone gave a damn about you for just two minutes? How would it feel? 

Pretty good, I think. And what does it cost? Pretty much nothing.

You Can Radically Improve Lives in Two Minutes a Day

Any time you want, you can stop the noise, get off the Bozo Bus, and reach out and touch someone. All it takes is the gift of your attention.

It seems to me that the reason we don’t give the gift of attention is that we are trapped in the fictional belief that we must gain the approval of others. Thus we are afraid of what they think of us.

The truth is: they can’t think good or ill of us if they’re not even thinking of us at all. Which means we are free—gloriously free—to share our attention. No one else is claiming it.

And if you give it away, you’ll get something back. It’s a universal truth.

Declare the obvious—your own freedom from the myth of others’ judgment. Then go use that freedom to fix your little corner of the world. You might even find that someone cares just a little bit about you.

 

Career Limiting Moves: Are You Kidding?

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Perhaps the most toxic thing you can hear in the arena of people management is “That’s not my job.” It should be grounds for firing. But at least it’s a declarative, first-person statement.

Unlike another leading candidate for management poison: “That’s a career-limiting move.” A passive-aggressive statement if there ever was one.

Let me be clear about my point of view on this: if you work in a company where “that’s a career-limiting move” is part of the vocabulary, you work in a career-limiting company. And if your company has acronymized it to CLM, then you probably have those stupid round-figured laughing cartoon characters saying “You want it when?” in the coffee room too. Bad signs all.

What “Career-Limiting Move” Really Means

In my experience, the term doesn’t get applied to dumb stunts like mooning the chairman or emailing your bookie on the company’s email server. It gets used when you’re talking about doing something very right, that feels personally risky. Things like speaking the truth about an abusive partner; or about taking advantage of a customer; or about skating on thin legal/ethical ice. 

Usually there’s just enough truth in “career-limiting moves” to make it a scary proposition. After all, whistle-blowers often do get fired. But that’s not usually the case. Usually, “career-limiting move” just means speaking the truth where most people prefer to let things be unspoken. And more often than not, truth-tellers are appreciated, not punished.

Why People Don’t Speak the Truth

Human beings demonstrably mis-assess risk all the time. We are more afraid than we should be of doing the wrong thing; and we are less afraid than we should be of failing to the right thing. We constantly avoid the clear and present discomfort of speaking some truth, in favor of the faint hope that maybe someone else will speak up, someday. Meanwhile, things get toxic because of our failure to speak up.

Why ‘Career-Limiting Move’ is a Disastrous Concept

Every time someone invokes “that’s a career-limiting move” to justify a failure to act, their company sinks a little deeper into the muck. It means an organizational shortcoming has been fed, not stopped. That shortcoming will metastasize, since the more you refuse to speak the truth, the harder it is to do so the next time.

It means someone has put their own perceived self-interest ahead of the organization, and selfishness is the death of collective behavior. It means a failure to lead. When “leaders” invoke “career-limiting move” to justify their failure to act, it makes hypocrites of their claim to be leaders. 

It means a stake in the heart for collaboration, transparency, and innovation, because it punishes the risk-taking that is the fuel of those virtues. 

I can hear some of you saying, “But Charlie, you don’t appreciate the real-world situation; people have families, they have to earn a paycheck, they can’t afford the high principles you like to talk about. Get real.”

Fair enough. But we all have to live with our consciences, too. And we each have to draw that line by ourselves, for ourselves.

Where’s your line? When would you invoke the CLM clause rather than speak the truth? And are you sure about that?

 

Can You Train for Trust?

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Can you train for trust?

The question needs to be broken down; but the quick answer is — yes. Let’s talk about how. And then we want to invite you to experience it yourself.

Disclosure: this blog-post is part advertisement. Trusted Advisor Associates is offering an open enrollment Being a Trusted Advisor program  in New York, New York. Read on to find out more, or just click here to sign up.

Now, back to training for trust; let’s break it down.

How to Approach Training for Trust

1. Be clear what you’re teaching. There is training for trustworthiness, and there is training for trusting. They are not the same. It’s the combination of one’s trustworthiness and another’s propensity for trusting that creates trust. Trustworthiness can be learned and is a lower-risk proposition–focus your energy and resources here. (See Trust, Trusting and Trustworthiness)

2. Keep it simple. Break an amorphous, complex topic into bite-sized, digestible pieces. Use a few solid, core models of trust. We use the three Trust Models: the Trust Equation, the Trust Creation Process, and the Trust Principles.

3. Make it stick. Thought-provoking concepts are necessary…and far from sufficient. We recommend four specific learning techniques to make a lasting impact:

a. Generous use of anecdotes—stories have a way of conveying the paradoxes of trustworthiness better than any rigorous intellectual model;
b. Realistic cases—in particular, role-play exercises, cases and video vignettes;
c. Muscle Memory—there is no substitute for ‘feeling’ the techniques, with hands-on demonstrations by experienced trainers and a lot of experimentation by participants;
d. Ongoing application to current business situations—with instructors and coaches guiding you through it in real time, live ammunition, no safety net.

Above all else, trust is learned by doing. What action will you take today to increase your trustworthiness?

Back to the advertisement: Being a Trusted Advisor is being held in New York, New York, April 22-23, at the Columbia University Faculty House. This program develops the mindsets, skills, and day-to-day practices of a Trusted Advisor. It includes built-in reinforcement–a one-on-one coaching call for each participant–along with a personalized Trust Temperament(tm) and autographed copy of either "The Trusted Advisor" or "Trust-based Selling."  Click here to sign up.   An early-bird discount is available until April 1.

We hope to see you in New York City!

 

 

Neil Rackham on Trust in Professional Selling (Trust Quotes #5)

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Neil Rackham is a name many of you will recognize: the Professor of Professional Selling. He didn’t just write the book, he wrote three books that made NYTimes Best Sellers. Most famously the author of SPIN Selling — a book that still ranks at 2800 on Amazon twenty-two years after publication—Neil continues to travel the world and consult with Huthwaite, the organization that has the rights to SPIN Selling.

SPIN was a revolution in the approach to sales, and still rings fresh today. Massively researched, it introduced the key notions of consultative selling, and of inquisitive interactions. He’s McGraw-Hill’s all time biggest business book seller; his material is used in about half the Fortune 500 companies today.

What does Neil have to say about trust, you may ask? Let’s ask him.

CHG: Welcome to the Trust Quotes series, Neil. Let’s start with that question: to paraphrase Tina Turner, when it comes to selling—-what’s trust got to do with it?

NR: Trust has always been central to effective selling but, in recent years, two things have made trust even more important. First, an increasing percentage of routine transactional sales have migrated away from face-to-face selling to cheaper channels like the Internet and telesales. That means the average face-to-face sale today is significantly larger and more complex than it was five years ago. And the bigger and the more complex a decision, the more important trust becomes.

The second factor that makes trust a more important issue today is the increasing tendency to build service, implementation and advisory components into the sale. So instead of just buying a tangible stand-alone product, you are also buying advice and support. If I’m selling you a product you can think that Neil Rackham is sleazy and untrustworthy, but you look at the product and if it does what you need at a good price, you might well buy it.

But once there’s an advisory component to the sale you can no longer separate the product from the person selling it. If you don’t trust me, you don’t trust my advice. So trust in selling is more important than ever before.

CHG: You’re in that rare position of being able to look at your own work from a 30,000-foot stand-alone level. What do you think the world made of SPIN? And do you think the world got it right? What do you think was its biggest impact?

NR: The SPIN research was notable because it was the first time that anyone had tried to scientifically measure selling and buying behavior. It was also by far the largest sales study ever carried out: 35,000 sales calls in 23 countries over 12 years. In today’s dollars that would cost upwards of $30 million. It’s not likely anyone will try to do another study on a similar scale to take the ideas further.

That’s a shame because bringing a rigorous research approach had a huge impact. Over half the Fortune 500, for example, use models in their training derived from that original research. So it’s had an enormous impact. But I feel we only scratched the surface. There’s so much more.

For me, the biggest impact of the SPIN research has been that it created a model for large B2B sales where none existed before. And it showed that selling is much more about understanding and creating customer value than about persuasion and pressure.

CHG: I recently heard a lovely quote from a blogger: Nobody buys a value proposition. True?

NR: Value propositions are incredibly useful in selling but are generally misunderstood. They are not elevator messages that the sales force is supposed to give to customers. In fact, in most circumstances, the customer should never explicitly be told the value proposition. A good value proposition shows you whether your offering will be worthwhile and – as a result – shows you what your chances are of winning the business.

If you’ll allow me a quick swipe at bad marketing departments, too often value propositions are not about value. They are statements that fancifully massage minute competitive differences. As the inventor of value propositions, Michael Lanning, puts it, “You can’t judge value unless you know its price – and that’s too often a missing element.”

CHG: In the field of complex sales, including intangible sales—what do you find is the most pervasive problem, and what do you find is the hardest-to-correct-for problem?

The most pervasive and hardest sales problem? Premature solutions… The mistaken belief that that sooner they can begin solving the problem, the more effective they will be.

NR: Perhaps the most pervasive one is also the hardest to correct. I’d call it “premature solutions”. Most salespeople understand that their role in complex sales is to use products and services to solve customer problems. Many of them mistakenly believe that the sooner they can begin solving the problem, the more effective they will be.

Our earliest research showed that top salespeople didn’t focus on solutions until very late in the sale. Less successful salespeople couldn’t wait to begin showing how their products and services could solve a customer problem.

So most salespeople don’t spend enough time listening and questioning. The moment they think they have the answer, they jump straight to talking about their solution. As a result they don’t do a good enough job of understanding issues from the customer point of view. And if customers don’t feel that they are listened to and understood, there’s an inevitable loss of trust.

CHG: What has been the impact of some of the nominally depersonalizing aspects of sales: blinded online auctions, the professionalization of purchasing agents, increasingly detailed buying process designs?

NR: On the whole, I think the impact of these changes has been very positive. The professionalization of purchasing, in particular, has introduced a new generation of smart and thoughtful customers into the buying process. Salespeople often feel that the new purchasing has made life harder. And so it has – at least for the good-old-boy traditionalists who used the golf course and business lunches as their main sales tools.

But, for salespeople who genuinely create customer value, it’s a good thing to see customers who would rather make better decisions than be bought a better lunch. When I hear salespeople complain about the new buying professionals, I wonder whether they are really complaining that they are being forced to be more professional themselves and that it’s hard work.

But there is a downside to the new purchasing. Buying processes, purchasing segmentation, the internet, reverse auctions and the like have been designed to benefit buyers, not sellers. So they make it harder for salespeople to get away with excessive margins or offerings that do a poor job of meeting needs.

And, in the hands of inept or rigid purchasing agents, the new purchasing can become a rigid and unresponsive liability that isn’t in anyone’s interests. But, on the whole, the quality of selling can only benefit in the long run from the new purchasing.

CHG: Some sales writers—Jeff Thule, Sharon Drew Morgan—are focusing on the need for the sales person to be kind of an OD consultant to the buyers. Your take?

NR: I’ve a lot of sympathy with the various writers who are saying that selling isn’t about pitching products any more. Research is on their side. We did a study of what customers valued in salespeople. Out of 1,100 buyers we talked to, nobody, not even one, said that salespeople created most value by talking about their products. In fact, the majority of buyers rated product pitches as actively negative in terms of value.

So I think everybody now agrees that the sales role is diminishingly about products. It’s less clear what the various new value-added roles will be. Some say OD consultant, some say intellectual challenger, some say industry advisor, some even say political consultant. I think that it’s whatever the salesperson can do that creates value for individual customers.

CHG: You were kind enough to offer a testimonial for the cover of Trust-based Selling, my own book. What did you find attractive enough to lend your name to in that book?

NR: I’ve been following your work ever since you and David Maister and Galford wrote The Trusted Advisor. Trust is what makes business happen and it’s certainly at the root of any professional relationship. However, I did have a criticism of your early work. Too much of it was focused exclusively on the professional/client relationship when there was a vastly wider seller/buyer population that needed your message.

So I was delighted to read the manuscript of Trust-based Selling.

My only complaint is that you waited too long to write it. Beyond that, I like the way you eat your own cooking. There’s none of the self-importance and exaggeration that goes along with most sales books. It’s a book people can trust.

CHG: (blush) Thanks very much for that. What’s the single biggest thing you think a salesperson can do to improve trust in the relationship?

NR: We know quite a lot about what creates mistrust. The biggest single factor is lack of concern for the customer. So if a salesperson is a poor listener, or appears to be more interested in making a sale than in helping the customer, then it sends off alarm bells. Only a third of high-level salespeople are rated adequate or better by their customers in terms of the depth of concern they show for the customer’s issues and needs.

It’s a pervasive problem because however honest you are, however much integrity you have, however deep your expertise, unless you show concern you will not be trusted. The solution is to demonstrate customer concern by patient listening, skilled questioning and a deep desire to understand rather than to persuade.

CHG: Can you kill this issue once and for all: what’s the role of price?

NR: Price is a real and difficult issue in selling. I’ve no patience with the sales gurus who pretend that price doesn’t matter. But it’s easy, particularly in tough economic times, to overestimate the role that price plays in decisions. Let me give you a couple of examples.

We did a study in Xerox where we interviewed 50 customers who had turned Xerox down and put in writing that the reason was price. It turned out that in 32 cases – that’s 64% — price was not the primary factor. Buyers didn’t trust the salesperson, didn’t feel they could handle internal opposition or were afraid of becoming too dependent on a sole supplier. Each of these reasons can be awkward to explain, so they chose the easy and unchallengeable excuse – the Xerox price was too high.

And another indicator that price may not be as important as it seems comes from one of the most spectacularly successful marketing campaigns of all time. In the 1980’s recession, computer makers were having a hard time. Most of them, like DEC and Burroughs — both long dead – decided it was a price issue and cut their prices by 30% or more.

IBM decided it was a risk issue. They actually raised prices for equipment that was generally agreed in the industry to be overpriced and under-featured. They did all possible to make the decision safe. People today still remember their marketing slogan, “Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM.” They had record profits in those years because they understood that price is rarely the most important decision criterion. But – and here’s where your work comes in – you can’t sell safety unless you can build trust.

CHG: Why is sales so often viewed as unethical? Not just historically, but intrinsically? I think that is not necessary; what’s your view?

NR: Sales has been its own worst enemy. And I would point the finger particularly at sales management. When salespeople are under pressure to produce short-term results and are being told to get the business this month by whatever means necessary, they pressure customers and this creates suspicion and mistrust.

The most successful salespeople are almost always the most ethical. So good selling, I believe, is intrinsically ethical.

And compensation doesn’t help. Customers find it hard to treat salespeople as objective when they know they are being paid to influence the decision. However, I’m comforted by the fact that the most successful salespeople are almost always the most ethical. So good selling, I believe, is intrinsically ethical.

CHG: What’s the role of sales in the broader corporate context? What’s the role of sales in the broader business at large context? What does great selling do for the economy, and for people’s souls, if I may?

NR: Wow! How many days do I have for an answer? First, the role of sales is becoming more important to corporations than ever before. We’re in an era of organic growth, where organizations will not succeed by internal efficiencies or by acquisitions. They will succeed by outselling their competition.

Second, success today comes more from how you sell than from what you sell. For every Apple that succeeds through an innovative product strategy, there are a thousand companies succeeding through effective selling of products that are not much different from their competitors. So good selling is more important now than it has ever been.

Finally — something I find exciting and inspiring – the top end of selling is changing so much that I’m not sure whether the word “selling” even applies. The new top-level sale is about redesigning the boundary between the buying and the selling company so that new value is created that neither company could have achieved alone. I don’t know about how others feel, but seeing this new and challenging high level selling, seeing how much selling has grown in stature, is certainly good for my soul.

CHG: Neil, it has been a real pleasure to engage with you in this conversation; thank you for your time and insights.

NR: A pleasure.

This is number 5 in the Trust Quotes series.

The entire series can be found at: http://trustedadvisor.com/trustmatters.trustQuotes

Recent posts in this series include:
 Trust Quotes #4: Peter Firestein on Trust, Character and Reputation
Trust Quotes #3: Dr. Eric Uslaner on the Nature of Trust
Trust Quotes #2: Robert Porter Lynch on Trust, Innovation and Performance