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Amsterdam, Schiphol Airport, flight lounge 52. I have 90 minutes of work to do in the business lounge.

A few desks away from me sat a very large man, gobbling snacks, sweating—and wheezing, very loudly, with every breath. The more he went to get food, the louder he wheezed on return.

He annoyed the hell out of me.

My head phones couldn’t compete, my iPod was unavailable. All seats were taken, and I had to work. The minutes droned on, his snargling wheezing got worse; I got angrier.

I hurried, mentally rehearsing snide remarks. I finally left early, thinking of noise pollution, gluttony, and the selfishness of other people. He’d put me in a bad mood.

Then I read the NYTimes story, “A 12th Dallas Convict is Exonerated by DNA.”
 

HOUSTON, Jan. 17 — A 50-year-old Dallas man whose conviction of raping a boy in 1982 cost him nearly half his life in prison and on parole won a court ruling declaring him innocent. He said he was not angry, “because the Lord has given me so much.”

The parolee, James Waller, was exonerated by DNA testing, the 12th person since 2001 whose conviction in Dallas County has been overturned long after the fact as a result of genetic evidence….

Prosecutors had joined defense lawyers in calling for the clearing of Mr. Waller, who spent more than 10 years behind bars before he was paroled in 1993…

Mr. Waller broke down once at the hearing, describing how his car crashed on the way to a court proceeding in 2001, an accident that killed his pregnant wife, Doris, and the unborn daughter they had wanted to call Grace. “I said, ‘Well, I don’t want to live no more,’ ” he recalled, mopping his face with a tissue…

By the [12-year old victim’s] account, he [had] heard the voice of his [medium-height, medium-weight] attacker that night at a 7-Eleven near his home, and turned to see Mr. Waller, who was then 25 and lived with his family in the same apartment complex as the victim, the only black family there. Although there were discrepancies in the boy’s account — Mr. Waller is almost 6-foot-4 and was heavy — and although Mr. Waller presented witnesses saying he was home at the time, he was convicted in 46 minutes and sentenced to 30 years. He won parole in 1993 but had to register as a sex offender….

Mr. Waller has started a lawn care business, but remains on parole pending the formal action of the appeals court and must shy from all contact with children. “It has been a long struggle for me,” he said. “They look at you like you’re an animal.”

Mr. Waller—incarcerated, libeled, despised—is free of anger.

I—flying business class internationally—was imprisoned by it. I couldn’t even own my anger, I had to blame someone else—a poor man who had the nerve, the temerity, to continue breathing after I had entered his room.

I am struck—and shamed—by the enormous gap between Mr. Waller’s way of dealing with reality, and my own.

Trust requires the ability to get outside oneself. Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. The optional part is vastly greater—if we only choose it.

Why do I find that so hard to do?

On Monday, the Wall Street Journal online wrote:

The Monday-morning quarterbacking continued today on the failed merger between Dewey Ballantine and Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe. Calling the deal an example of how “now not to consummate a merger…”

Dewey, Ballantine has about 550 lawyers; Orrick, about 900.

LegalTimes.com says it’s painful for both firms:

It represents at least the fourth time in four years that Orrick has failed to cinch a merger, prompting speculation about why the firm can’t close these deals…

..Two more partners last week decamped from Dewey, raising the question of whether the departures will mark the tail end of an exodus of more than a dozen partners…
..like many relationships that end badly, each side thinks it’s all the other’s fault.

Why did it happen? WSJ continues:

Dewey is old school, led by chairman Morton Pierce, an attorney first and manager second. Last year, he billed 3,300 hours; in his “spare” time he managed the firm. “Management is not my passion,” he admits.

Orrick chairman Ralph Baxter Jr., meanwhile, is a more modern, CEO-type leader; he doesn’t practice law, spending all of his time meeting recruits and clients and jetting to the firm’s offices around the world.

The comments on the WSJ blog boil down to:

“How can the chairman of a 550-lawyer firm legitimately bill 3,300 hours?”

But that’s not the right question. The right question is,

“How can someone who bills 3,300 hours legitimately be described as managing, much less leading, a 550-lawyer firm?”

The issue isn’t integrity of billings—it’s seriousness of leadership.

The narrowest definition of management in the law business includes checking timesheets, hiring and firing based on numbers, and hosting a few annual events. It doesn’t involve articulating a market position 5 years hence, not to mention how to get there, how to align an organization, or how to develop human beings.

Mr. Pierce is not alone. Among the professions, law is—in general, by and large—the most anarchically managed. To be fair, this is partly an outgrowth of the nature of the business itself.

Another obstacle is low trust. David Maister quotes a former law firm managing partner, “It’s not that I don’t trust my partners. They’re good people, mostly. It’s that I don’t want to have to trust them. Why give up any degree of control over your own affairs if you don’t have to?”

But industry is not destiny. Larry Bodine notes that 5 law firms made the “best places to work in the US,” including one at #16. In Canada, a law firm is #4 (see this post on Trust and Law Firms). Leadership is a prime suspect in this aberrant behavior.

The best argument for Mr. Pierce’s model is that partners respect a practicing lawyer. This parallels Nebraska Senator Roman Hruska’s response to accusations of mediocrity: “the country has a lot of mediocre people, and they deserve representation too.”

The belief that widget-making is the best qualification for leading widget-makers is alive and well in the law business (I like to think Nebraska evolved).

It’s a belief that implies surgeons, architects, financial planners, accountants and actuaries are all equal in their leadership capabilities. It also belies a belief about leadership that there is no ‘there’ there.

Which firm’s leadership model would you trust over the next 10 years?
 

I taught a leadership seminar on building trusted relationships. A few attendees got impatient. At first, I wasn’t clear why. “This is too simple,” they said; “where’s the tough stuff from the book?”

What they wanted was more categories, patterns of resistance, 2×2 matrices, rules for generating trust in different kinds of roles and situations, with differing backgrounds and personalities.

The material I had been talking about—listening from curiosity, thinking out loud, empathy, understanding before recommending, massively open questions, etc.—felt basic to them.

Where was the advanced course, they wanted to know.

I’ll call this the Myers-Briggs syndrome—the belief that the critical and difficult task is to understand the world. Properly understood, execution is easy.

It’s a lie.

Myers-Briggs itself is fine. It describes four personality types, and how each, as a rule, behaves distinctly. The data are solid, and widely accepted. The point, MB analysts say, is to take tendencies—yours and others’—into account in interactions.

It is useful in aggregative tasks: team-formation, setting recruiting goals. On individual interactions, it’s trickier.

MB analysts caution against flatly applying generalizations to individuals. But—in my experience—users treat that disclaimer as seriously as the fine print on an aspirin bottle.

Categorizing is invaluable for managing inventory turns, strategies, long tails, receivables and production runs.

The power of Myers/Briggs lies in categorizing people. That’s also the charm of stereotypes. When I meet you for the first time and learn you’re from London, I may say, “Ah, so you’re English!” with the self-satisfaction of revealed insight in my voice. Click. It all fits.

But—if you’re the Englishman (or woman), your reaction is, “click—I just got put in a box.” The woman executive asked to get coffee knows the shock of being labeled. So does Jose-Miguel from Spain—when he’s visiting the US. Black Americans know it as a way of life.

Categorization is useful. Unfortunately, we slide easily from categorization to objectification. Some categorizations, like Myers/Briggs are politically correct—-e.g. “You’re such an INTJ, you’re classic!” Others are not. Try substituting “black man” for “INTJ” in that sentence.

Understanding categories is intellectually rewarding, like a rich crossword puzzle.

But categorization rarely creates trust—more often, it destroys it.

Trust is largely personal. I am not my alma mater, my race, my age, my height, my language, my nationality, my looks. My category doesn’t trust you—I do. Or not.

Treat me as category, and you reduce my trust in you. Apparent compliments—“ooh, you went to Harvard, my, you’re an ENTJ”—are either shallow or not compliments at all. They objectify me. People resist being labeled—we want to be accepted as unique wholes.

The advanced course is not about categorization: it’s about interacting from the heart without labels.

When you give a presentation, the trick is to prepare—then be prepared to throw it all away.

In advance of meeting someone, it’s respectful to do some homework on them. But the meaning of the homework has to be discovered anew in the meeting.

To interact with freshness, curiosity and genuine interest, instead of resentment, fear, disgust, anger, expectations, manipulation, hidden agendas, pre-set outcomes, stereotypes or labels—that’s the advanced course.

Trust comes from the heart, not the brain. Heart work is a lot tougher.

And they don’t teach it at Harvard Business School.

Until three years ago, I had heard about it, but hadn’t yet seen it.

Then I saw the resume of a Fortune 100 Commodity Purchasing Manager. At the top, it said:

Manage the following Global Business Commodities:

• control packaging
• mailing & fulfillment
• signage
• design, printing & duplicating
• sub-contract labor
• consulting services
• information technology services.

Wait a minute: consulting services? Along with signage? And Mailing & fulfillment? Does this mean the guy who buys signs and postage meters also handles negotiations with McKinsey?

Not quite. But directionally, yes.

There has been a trend to formalize, professionalize, depersonalize, whatever you want to call it, the buying of services. You’re finding much more involvement of purchasing departments, RFPs, 3rd party buyer consultants and the like.

What’s your first response when you’re told you have to go through purchasing? Usually, it’s “how do we comply minimally, while carefully end-running the purchasing guy to get back to my customer.”

Don’t do it. The purchasing department buyer is your new client. Treat him or her as such.

Look at it from his point of view. Management has asked him to manage costs, while maintaining quality. 80% of the message is about costs. But he’s savvy enough to know that if he goes with a low quality choice, his internal users will never let him hear the end of it.

So how does it affect him when a potential buyer tries the end-run on him?

Don’t you be the one who tries it. Be the one who respects him.

Treat him as the new client. Understand his needs. Listen to what he wants. Don’t pull the switcheroo, give him what he asks for.

Offer advice without being asked—but only if it’s useful to him. Suggest that you offer some free ideas: and that he solicit ideas from your competitors too.

Client focus beats self-focus. R espect the new rules of the game. If you do that, at the very least you’ll get a fair shake. More likely, you’ll get a chance to demonstrate more added value.

That’s how you create trust in the new game. And that’s good for both parties.

In 2000, I co-wrote The Trusted Advisor with David Maister and Rob Galford. It has been translated into several languages, including Russian.

Yesterday, Maister received an email from Russia, which he passed along to me. The enthusiasm burst through the language barrier so charmingly that I wanted to post it. Here it is, unedited except for his name.

Dear M-r Maister!

Great interest, intellectual amusement and deep YESSS! – that’s what I’ve felt reading the Russian translation of your The Trusted Advisor".
15 years of psychotherapy and psychological consulting – dysfunctional families, drug addicts, co-dependency – have lead me to the very similar proposals; but you and your colleges formulate it (and help me to formulate my own experience) with the elegance of gathered Rubik’s cube.

You see – psychological consulting have some specific nature: client’s business there is just his personal, very and only personal area. But the question of trust, the stages and technology" of it’s establishing, danger of methodical occupation" instead of personality-oriented approach and many other aspects, underlined in your remarkable book, are quite the same (and even more important) as in other areas of consulting.

Thank you for your deep and consistent humanism. Adler can have some rest (as Russians say) – his ideas of contradiction between the neurotic behavior and cooperation finds in your book very practical actualization.

What a joy for me was to see, that the main principle of my practice – each problem of client is the challenge, opportunity for personality (not only professional!) growth of advisor, and if the last miss this opportunity and doesn’t grow – he can’t help the client – is one of the main points of your book; it is not formulated, but each line affirms that!

Once again thank you; I wish you, your friends and your families more successes, joyful opportunities, new horizons and grateful readers!
K.L., Russia.

P.S. I sincerely hope, that the remarks about my professional experience is not the trespass of demonstrating competence; that pointed parallels doesn’t look like as inadequate self-orientation; that underlined principle is not a demonstration of value-intervention"; and that the hole letter is not the trespass of compliments.

And sorry for my, may be,terrible English!

Not so terrible at all, I think.