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A Better New Year’s Resolution

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Ten years have passed since I first wrote the following thoughts on New Years resolutions. Frankly, it was good. And frankly I haven’t been able to write a better one. Next year, maybe.
So, apologies to those who have read it year after year—though I suspect some of you won’t mind.

Happy New Year.
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My unscientific sampling says many people make New Years resolutions, and few follow through. Net result—unhappiness.

It doesn’t have to be that way.

You could, of course, just try harder, stiffen your resolve, etc. But you’ve been there, tried that.

You could also ditch the whole idea and just stop making resolutions. Avoid goal-failure by eliminating goal-setting. Effective, but at the cost of giving up on aspirations.

I heard another idea: replace the New Year’s Resolution List with a New Year’s Gratitude List. Here’s why it makes sense.

First, most resolutions are about self-improvement—this year I resolve to: quit smoking, lose weight, cut the gossip, drink less, exercise more, and so on. All those resolutions are rooted in a dissatisfaction with the current state of affairs—or with oneself.

In other words: resolutions often have a component of dissatisfaction with self. For many, it isn’t just dissatisfaction—it’s self-hatred. And the stronger the loathing of self, the stronger the resolutions—and the more they hurt when they go unfulfilled.  It can be a very vicious circle.

Second, happy people do better. This has some verification in science, and it’s a common point of view in religion and psychology—and in common sense. People who are slightly optimistic do better in life. People who are happy are more attractive to other people. In a very real sense, you empower what you fear—and attract what you put out.

Ergo, replace resolutions with gratitude. The best way to improve oneself is paradoxical—start by begin grateful for what you already have. That turns your aspirations from negative (fixing a bad situation) to positive (making a fine situation even better).

Gratitude forces our attention outwards, to others—a common recommendation of almost all spiritual programs.

Finally, gratitude calms us. We worry less. We don’t obsess. We attract others by our calm, which makes our lives connected and meaningful. And before long, we tend to smoke less, drink less, exercise more, gossip less, and so on. Which of course is what we thought we wanted in the first place.

But the real truth is—it wasn’t the resolutions we wanted in the first place.  It was the peace that comes with gratitude.  We mistook cause for effect.

Go for an attitude of gratitude. The rest are positive side-effects.

Do We Learn From Our Mistakes? Or Not?

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The NYTimes reported a few years back on a Harvard Business School study of venture capital-backed entrepreneurs to test whether or not we learn from our mistakes. The results are confounding to many—including me.

Here’s the story. Several thousand VC-backed companies were studied over 17 years. First-timers had an aggregate success rate of 22% (success meaning going public).

The study is about those trying for a second time. Did the 78% who failed the first time learn from the experience, and do better the second time? Or worse? How did the 22% first-time winners fare—did they get lazy and decline? Or did they somehow do better the second time?

No less an expert than Gordon Moore, sainted ex-leader of Intel and the author of “Moore’s law,” said “You’re more valuable because of the experiences you’ve been through under failures.”

I’m with Gordon. But according to this data, we’re both wrong.

Those who succeeded the first time upped their success rate, to 34%. But those who failed the first time stayed mired in the muck, at 23%. So much for the myth of the gritty, plucky lads who pick themselves up and learn from their failures.

Apparently the data are not the problem: “the data are absolutely clear,” says Paul Gompers, one of the study’s authors. Yet it is still far from clear what the data mean.

As is often the case, data are one thing, and explanation another. Of course, the obvious explanation may be true: people just do not learn from adversity. This seems to be the study’s authors’ view—that the learn-from-failure ethos celebrated in Silicon Valley is really just anecdotal tales over-told.

Then again, maybe we actually do learn more from success than from failure. If so, perhaps that’s because of increased confidence resulting from one win.

Or, maybe only the really good people learn at all. And they can learn from experience alone, whether success or failure.

Or, perhaps these conclusions are only true of a certain type of person, characterized by some cross-cutting characteristic, such as risk tolerance. (Did you know height is correlated with IQ? True: short people score lower on the same IQ tests that tall people take. Of course, if you separate young children from the adults, or use age-normalized tests, the correlation goes away).

Or, to channel a recent 30 Rock storyline, maybe the first time winners are just very good-looking people who are actually horrible, but live in a bubble in which others let them pass. Hey, you never know!

Causal deductions are never fully provable—thanks, Dr. Hume. But progress can be made toward explanations.

So, what do you think’s going on?

And I’ll throw one idea into the ring, borrowed from Karl Popper, who developed the falsifiability theory of meaningfulness. A theory which is highly disprovable, but which remains standing, is superior to a hard-to-disprove theory.

Maybe people who fail have a much greater chance to learn. Why it is that they don’t still seems a mystery to me.

The Cost of Freedom, the Savings of Trust

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We don’t usually think of trust and freedom as existing in a trade-off relationship. But in an important sense, they do. Thinking about the two factors this way allows us to view trust from an unusual perspective.

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Kathy Sierra has a great post on the degree to which software designers should design in user freedom – there are limits.

On the face of it, freedom is good. More freedom is better. In fact, if it doesn’t threaten us bodily harm, then more freedom is way better. Isn’t it?

Not so. Sierra offers a 2×2 matrix relating payoff to effort. The payoff is good for things like Amazon. But digital home thermostats and new stereo systems give us too much freedom for the payoff. They’re just a pain.

There is a limit beyond which freedom of choice generates shutdown. Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice explores it well. After a while, complexity overwhelms the desirability of choice.

Sierra and Schwartz happen to illustrate the economic relationship between freedom and trust. In a nutshell, we give up freedom of choice in return for more efficient use of our time. We do it with trust.

Branding is the corporate version of trust. Rather than analyze every brand of bottled water, every version of jeans, or every make and model of HD-TV, we abdicate our freedom to do so in return for the security of a brand name. We trust Sony, or Coke, or Amazon, to make acceptably acceptable selections for us—so are freed to make other decisions.

But trust is about more than branding.

The last two centuries of global economic development have been driven by the search for division of labor. Adam Smith’s pin-makers organized around 19 specialized operations; it was far cheaper to assign individuals to distinct operations than to have each operator do all operations.

The transaction cost of coordination was well below the benefits of specialization.

At a corporate level, transaction costs remained high at the turn of the 20th century; early US auto companies made their own tires rather than incur the cost and risk of buying tires from others.

As transaction costs declined, it became more feasible to contract work out – the history of the auto industry is one of moving from integrated manufacturers to contract assemblers.

In recent years, we’ve seen diverging trends: lower unit transaction costs, and higher volumes of transaction costs. The net effect has been driven more by volume than by unit cost. Transaction costs as a percent of GDP have been going up. By one estimate, they now exceed 50% in the US.

We are reminded constantly of the internet’s effect on lowering unit transaction costs; but we don’t notice that the total of such costs is rising.

Here’s what it means: for further economic efficiency, the ability to reduce transaction costs is going to become more critical than further division of labor.

The more technically and globally integrated we get, the more freedom of choice we get. But at some point, freedom of choice becomes overwhelming.

If I want to make and sell jeans, I probably have dozens (hundreds? thousands?) of ways to contract the work out. Past some point, I don’t want more options—I want someone I can trust to make that decision for me.

In other words, I’ll give up freedom in return for lower transaction costs. The currency of that exchange is trust.

In an economy where half the costs are transaction costs, the currency of trust is massively valuable. Think of the transaction costs between auto producers and their suppliers: lawyers, agreements, contracts, specifications, bonus systems, QC, compliance, etc. Suppose they were 100% obliterated by trust. What kind of marketplace cost reduction would that provide?

Trust is not soft stuff. In a world that is getting massively more connected, greater trust has a very real economic role to play.

Giving up freedom for trust can be, paradoxically, a very freeing thing.

Trusting: the Other Side of Trust

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Much has been written about trust.  However, it’s often not clear in the writing whether the subject is trust, trustworthiness – or trusting.  If trust in the government is down, does that mean that the government is less trustworthy? Or does it mean that people are less inclined to trust?

Most of my work has been about trustworthiness (e.g. The Trusted Advisor). Other people write more overtly about trusting – a good example is the HBR article ReThinking Trust, by Stanford Professor Rod Kramer, which focuses on the danger of trusting.

Some people write about the big subject of trust itself – the end result of the interaction between trustor and trustee. A fine example is Francis Fukuyama’s classic Trust: the Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity.

Finally, many other sources end up talking about all three; think Covey’s Speed of Trust, or Bob Hurley’s The Decision to Trust.

The Power of Trusting

The sources above are largely academic. In the popular press, by far the most common topics are trustworthiness and the state of trust itself (trust as the result of an interaction between trustor and trustee). Throw a dart into a pile of 100 popular press articles on trust, and you’re likely to find Congress, investment bankers, and the Madoff-du-jour scandal as the subject.

This means most public policy debates focus on trustworthiness.  Most examples are negative; hence trusting is positioned as cautionary, i.e. watch out for car salesmen, lawyers, etc. The moral of the story is tut tut, another untrustworthy group, watch out.

And all this focus on negative examples of trustworthiness is having an effect on people’s inclination to trust. How could it not! And that is a terribly unfortunate thing. Because the scarce trust resource increasingly is not trustworthiness, but the willingness to trust.  We need to start focusing on the trustor, not just on the trustee.

The power of trusting is enormous. When it comes to trust, there is an answer to the chicken and egg dilemma of which comes first, the trustor or the trustee?  The answer is trustor.  Consider:

  • Until one party decides to take a risk and trust another, trust does not come into existence
  • Trusting has a profound impact on trustworthiness – think “the fastest way to make a man trustworthy is to trust him,” or “people live up or down to the expectations of them”
  • Trusting is inherently an act of optimism; a decline in trusting in the business world drives down innovation, and prevents collaboration and alliances.

 

Traveling Trust, Reciprocating Trust

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I was in Munich for a one-day stopover en route to Bucharest. I left New York a day earlier than planned to avoid some weather. And I realized yet again – travel has a way of doing that – what an extraordinary level of trust we all take for granted in our modern world.

Yes, the news is full of the opposite. Doctors have a hard time trusting pharmaceutical manufacturers. Patients have a hard time trusting their doctors, and doctors have a hard time trusting their patients. Some patients trust the internet more than their doctors, often with bad results. And trust in most institutions is down over time (the military being a notable exception).

A Trusted Trip

With all that going on, it’s easy to forget some basic things. I can freely cross national borders with some mere papers. I can trust the exchange rate when I buy Euros. I can trust the flight controllers that govern the airspace, the airline handling companies that do catering, the bus and taxi systems I encounter.

But most of all, I know I can rely deeply on the basic human decency of people I run into to help with any simple issues – even though we may not speak the same language, and we’ll never see each other again. I can trust that people will give me directions, help me with travel issues, take a moment to help sort out a problem. And I’m almost never, ever wrong in that basic level of trust.

Which motivates me, of course, to try and return the favor whenever I can. And you do the same, I know.

What’s Really Amazing

What’s really amazing is not how often trust goes wrong, but how often it goes right.  Our modern life is unbelievably complex, and yet runs remarkably well.

I don’t want to be Pollyana-ish about this. The fact that trust is so pervasive is precisely the reason we notice and feel trust violations so deeply. We are all right to be deeply offended by untrustworthy behavior; if we lose our capacity to be outraged, we have lost our ability to recover.

Lots of things can be said about lost trust, but I want to highlight one. Trust is reciprocal. My trusting you causes you to trust me, and vice versa. An absence of trust starts with one party. The presence of trust starts with one party. The question facing all of us is, will you be the one to start?  Or will you always insist on the other party going first?

Do you insist on your vendors insuring you against all losses?  Then don’t be surprised when they don’t trust you.  Do you have all your employees sign cutting-edge non-compete clauses?  Then perhaps you can understand why they might seek ways around it.  Do you give lie detector tests to your employees? Then you might gain insight into why you have a shrinkage problem.

You can do your part as an individual too. To be trusted, be trustworthy.  And if you think others are not trustworthy as you – try trusting them first.

For starters, that’ll make your travel a lot easier.

Trust Takes a Long Time to Create, a Short Time to Destroy. Not.

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There are two kinds of mistakes we make with trust. One is to trust mistakenly – the other is to fail to trust at all. One is a failure of commission, the other a failure of omission.

The former gets all the press – but it’s the latter that is the bigger problem.

Let me explain.

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One of the bigger myths about trust this one: “Trust takes a long time to create, but only a moment to destroy.” There’s no need to name names here, but you can see examples of it here and here and here and here.

Here’s why that myth isn’t merely annoying, but positively harmful as well.

The Truth.

Let’s start with the truth. Most human relationships, like most emotions, take roughly as long to get over as they took to develop. Marriages or friendships don’t end overnight. There may be a flash point, a straw that breaks the camel’s back. But we cut slack for people we trust. We don’t dump them abruptly.

If trust were lost in a minute, many victims of relationship abuse would leave their abuser at the first incident; but things are often a little more complicated than that.

If trust died quickly, the SEC would have investigated Bernie Madoff when Harry Markopolos first lodged charges against him. If trust died quickly, the steady drip drip drip of evidence at Penn State, Enron, and Wells Fargo would have ended at the first drip.

Most examples of “trust lost quickly” turn out to be either just the last drip in a long series of drips – or a delusion about trust’s existence in the first place (you don’t “violate the trust” of a subscriber to your email list by sending them a worthless referral; the relationship you have with a name on your email list may be many things, but “trust-based” is probably a stretch).

Trust formed quickly can be lost quickly; trust formed at a shallow level can be lost at the same level.  But trust formed deeply, or over time, takes deeper violations, or a longer time, to be lost. The pattern looks more like a standard bell curve than a cliff.

But, you might say, so what?  Why is that harmful? What’s the big deal? 

The Harm.

If you believe that trust can be lost in a moment, then you likely believe you must be cautious and careful about protecting it. You are likely to think about trust as a precious resource to be guarded against being tarnished. You are inclined to institute rules and procedures to protect it and to give cautionary lectures about the risk of losing trust.

Yet these are precisely the kinds of behavior that result in trust lost.

I don’t trust the man who talks with me while pointing a gun at me‬ – partly because he looks threatening to me, but also because he clearly does not trust me.

Trust, at a personal level, is like love and hate: you tend to get back what you put out. You empower what you fear. Those afraid of getting burned are the most likely to get burned.

This works at a corporate level too. I remember vividly the convenience store chain that gave monthly lie detector tests to store managers to prevent theft – and then wondered why the theft kept on happening.

I recently heard from a company wanting to modify the Trust Equation by “toning down” the component called Intimacy to something more bland, like affability or good manners. Why? They didn’t want to be seen as encouraging employees to have sexual liaisons with customers. This falls in the same category with multi-paragraph email signature caveats, and the fine print on retail customer receipts. Fear of trust not only doesn’t save trust – it actually causes low trust.

Trust is a Muscle.

Thinking of trust as something you can lose in a minute makes you cautious and unlikely to take risks. But the absence of risk is what starves trust. There simply is no trust without risk – that’s why they call it trust.

If your people aren’t empowered, if they’re always afraid of being second-guessed, then they will always operate from fear and never take a risk – and as a result, will never be trusted.

Trust is a muscle – it atrophies without use. And the repetition of the mantra “trust can be lost in a moment” just tells people not to use it.

Turns out the stupidest, craziest trust is the trust you never engaged in because you were too afraid of losing it. The smartest trust is the trust you create by taking a risk.

Know Yourself. Wait, what does that even mean?

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Know Yourself. It seems a timely topic these days – musically speaking, educationally speaking, pop-culture speaking. It’s also an old adage, from Socrates’ “know thyself” to Shakespeare’s “to thine own self be true.” We learned it in high school, but maybe we lost sight along the way.

What do you think? Do you know yourself? Are you willing to?

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In college, I majored in philosophy. I underlined all the important parts in my texbooks – the hard, the empirical, the deductive, the categorical. I underlined about half of each book. What I skipped over were the soft and squishy parts: know thyself, be virtuous, metaphysics, that kind of thing.

Years later I deigned to go to the School for Practical Philosophy. After a class or two, I realized it was powerful stuff. I also realized it was about the other half of the book – all the things I hadn’t underlined.

I still eschew the metaphysics stuff in favor of David Hume, but I have become a complete convert on the subject of Know Thyself.

Self-knowledge is one of the five trust skills that my co-author Andrea Howe and I describe in the Trusted Advisor FieldBook. In fact, it’s the capstone skill of the five skills we describe in that book, as well as in our workshop program Trust-based Leadership.

If “know yourself” strikes you as squishy, soft, fuzzy, left coast suburban buddhist hippie-talk homilies – like it used to strike me – then let me break it down and toughen it up for you. Because when you get it, it’s a lot tougher than the analytical subject-mastery behavioral neuro-babble that is too often celebrated in business today.

Know yourself means four things.

  1. To know yourself, you have to be able to see yourself objectively. The “you” that knows yourself cannot be the same as the “self” that you know. If you can’t do this, you’re doomed to always just doing and feeling the stuff that you always did and felt. You can’t do anything about it if you’re always in it.  (Hang on, I’ll tell you how later).
  2. If you know yourself, then you know what makes you the same as, and different from, the other 7.091 billion humanoids on the planet. And you are more same than different. Get over your terminal uniqueness. You are better than some billions, worse than other billions, on billions of continua. You fall into the broad middle billions of humanity. You ain’t all that.
  3. Seeing who you are and recognizing your right-sized place in humanity, you can now find freedom. You don’t owe anybody anything, nobody owes you anything. Everything is a gift, or nothing at all. You make your own luck, you create your own suck. Your life is what you make of it, nothing more, nothing less. Success is heavily an inside job –  happiness, completely.
  4. Once free, you can decide what to do with your freedom. Since you no longer need anything, you are free to give, and to make the world a better place. And the collateral damage of doing good is that you get good back in return.

Because the universe has a way of paying you back.  I’m not talking about metaphysics and karma, I’m talking human nature. Way more often than not, people return good for good and evil for evil. By leading with good, you greatly increase the odds of receiving good. It’s not a cosmic principle thing – it’s just how people work. That’s concrete.

And it’s a powerful enough rule that you can make book on it – and do business based on it. It’s not guaranteed in every situation, instance or transaction – but it is ironclad in the long run across multiple events.

What Good is Knowing Yourself?

You mean, besides making you happy and free and attractive to other people?  Well, OK, here’s just one concrete specific item.

You know how sometimes you find out that someone thinks way more highly of you than you thought they did? Or that they think much worse of you? Either way, you know the shock when you discover the disconnect?

Knowing yourself prevents those shocks, because there’s no disconnect. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. By knowing who you are and aren’t, you can maximize your potential. You don’t cause friction, waste and slippage by under- or over-shooting, or by seeking more or less from others than you should. When you know who you are, you can calibrate exactly what impact you will create in any given situation – no more guessing, wishing, hoping. That is empowering.

How Am I Supposed to Do This?

I know, I know – how do you do this stuff? Where’s the tips and tricks, top ten lists, business processes and metrics that you need to do things?

Andrea Howe and I give you three concrete actions to take in The Trusted Advisor Fieldbook. They are:

  1. Look inward – basically, introspection. Lots of ways to do that. Write it down and share with others as you discover.
  2. Convert blind spots to insights – get feedback. Simple. Just go ask for it.
  3. Experiment – create learning opportunities. Put money where mouth is. Try stuff; evaluate; recalibrate; try again.

You can break each one down further – into processes, timeframes, sequences, metrics and milestones – if that’s your preferred style. Or, you can just swim in it. Both ways will work.

One last thing about knowing yourself. It’s not a step function, it’s incremental. You can always get better, and as you do, you reap the benefits at the same time. It’s a progressive thing. And anytime is a good time to start.

Interview with Barbara Kimmel of Trust Across America – Trust Across the World

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Today’s interview is with a significant player in the world of those who seek to improve trust in the business world – Barbara Kimmel. Barbara is CEO and co-founder of Trust Across America – Trust Across the World. She is also the co-creator of the proprietary FACTS® Framework – a unique methodology measuring the trustworthiness of public companies. We focus on FACTS in this interview.

Charlie Green: Barbara, welcome to Trust Matters, and thanks for sharing your insights with us. First, you founded Trust Across America – Trust Across the World. What is that, and what do you do?

Barbara Kimmel: Thanks for having me, Charlie. TAA-TAW’s mission is to help organizations build trust. We’re in our seventh year now. Our proprietary FACTS® Framework ranks and measures the trustworthiness of over 1500 of the largest US public companies on five quantitative indicators of trust. I also run the global Trust Alliance, am the editor of the award winning TRUST INC. book series and am a Managing Member at FACTS® Asset Management, a NJ registered investment advisor.

The FACTS Model

CG: OK, let’s get into FACTS®. Just what is it (and what do the letters stand for)?

BK: FACTS® is an acronym covering Financial Stability, Accounting Conservativeness, Corporate Governance, Transparency and Sustainability. This multi-factor framework was developed by a cross-silo multidisciplinary team in the wake of the financial crisis in 2008. The Framework evolved by asking the same question of dozens of “siloized” professionals from leadership, compliance and ethics, legal, accounting, finance, HR, consulting, CSR, sustainability, etc. “What do you consider an indicator of corporate integrity or trust “worthiness” that can be independently and quantitatively measured without requiring the input of the organization itself? 

While every professional had a different perspective, the same indicators were repeatedly mentioned within each silo. The governance professionals pointed to board composition and compensation policies. Those in finance pointed to stable earnings, and so on. By blending these indicators of corporate trustworthiness into a spreadsheet, the first quantitative measure of organizational integrity and trust was created.

CG: How many metrics in total are subsumed in all those five major categories? And how did you weight the categories?

BK: In all there are approximately 200 specific distinct metrics. The five categories are equally weighted.

CG: Can you give me a current example of the model’s applicability?

BK: Corporate leaders who want to be proactive about building and communicating trust across all stakeholder categories, or who want to avoid the next crisis can use our data to discover their organizations’ strengths (and weaknesses). Because our data is holistic and does not rely on employee surveys or questionnaires, it makes glaringly apparent where and why the Wells Fargo and Enron-like “risk” often lays hidden in the 1500+ public companies evaluated on an annual basis.  A company might have a high score in 4 out of 5 FACTS indicators and a low score in the 5th. Digging further into our data allows us to identify the cause of the low score and often this is a red flag that should not be ignored by leadership.

Third parties including major consulting firms, investment managers and associations are also requesting information. After 7 years, the FACTS Framework continues to make a solid case for the elusive link between trustworthiness and profitability.

In 2008 The Economist published a briefing paper sponsored by Cisco, called “The Role of Trust in Business Collaboration” stating that “tens of millions of dollars had been spent evaluating corporate governance – but a definition of corporate trust continues to elude us.” We at Trust Across America took on that challenge. What if the most trust “worthy” companies could be identified? That’s what we set out to do.

What FACTS Says

CG: What does FACTS tell us?

BK: Now with seven years of unique and compelling data, FACTS® data tells us which companies are doing more than just “talking trust.” It also shows us high-risk companies that may be the next to make the news. The majority of companies and their leaders still think that integrity and trust are soft and immeasurable skills, and don’t consider integrating trust-related data from one corporate silo to the next.

Balancing long-term value creation against the need to “maximize earnings” and meet the always-looming quarterly numbers is hard work. Waiting until the next expensive corporate crisis will afford leadership the opportunity to talk about the importance of integrity and trust, and how measures will be implemented to safeguard against future missteps. Implementing measures to increase the organization’s level of trust before the crisis is a proactive business strategy requiring both a 21st century mindset and the right tools.

CG: What about the long-questioned link between Doing Good and Doing Well: does it exist? Are highly trustworthy companies more profitable, or more successful in general, than lower-trust-rated companies? Or is it just a soft fluffy wish?

BK: Good question Charlie. With over 7 years of data on the trustworthiness of 1500+ of the largest US public companies, and three years of audited performance against the S&P 500, evidence is mounting that the most trustworthy companies are in fact more profitable over the long-term, and certainly less likely to have a Wells Fargo like blow up. Our data reveals many similar patterns like CEO tenure, board diversity, a commitment to ethical business and all stakeholders, not just shareholders. You may call it Doing Good and Doing Well, we call it “Value with Values.”

Trust Research

CG: Where does FACTS fit in the scheme of trust research?

BK: I don’t know that it does “fit.” Much of the trust research appears to rely on qualitative surveys, not quantitative metrics.  We are unique in that regard.

CG: Well, let me toot your horn for you a bit. I don’t know of any other research that combines rigorous definitions, seriously vetted data, a breadth of subjects and a 7-year-plus timeframe anywhere near as much as does the FACTS data.

In what form do you make it available to researchers, companies or individuals today? How can people reach out to you?

BK: We share many free resources on our website including our findings from our FACTS research. The data itself is proprietary and available for licensing. http://trustacrossamerica.com/about.shtml

CG: What do you see as key issues facing trust in organizations today?

BK: At both the individual and organizational level, trust is not only a tangible asset but also serves as a tiebreaker in every relationship. In most organizations, leaders take this asset for granted, viewing it as a “soft” skill or ignoring it completely. The assumption is high trust simply “exists” at the individual, team and organizational level.

Yet when integrity and trust are considered tangible assets and a business imperative, the following results are achieved:

  • Decisions are made faster and less expensively
  • Employees are more engaged and retention increases
  • Innovation is higher and occurs more quickly
  • Profitability increases

Convincing leaders of this remains a key issue.

CG: Let me push on that. If merely convincing them is the problem, then the FACTS data ought to solve the problem. I suspect that’s not the whole deal, however. Some if also lies in not knowing what to do about it. Can you speak to that?

BK: There is no single “department” that “owns” trust in an organization, so it tends to be either overlooked or taken for granted until there is a crisis. Then lots of money is dumped into trying to “restore” via crisis communications something that never existed in the first place.

But I really do think the main issue isn’t knowing what to do – it is, as I said, convincing leaders that it’s a problem. How hard was it to see that a culture of “hard-selling” retail banking products to unsophisticated consumers at Wells Fargo was trust-destroying and unethical? This is not a problem of insight, metrics or technical sophistication; this was willful moral blindness.

Leadership needs to be proactive about building trust and they need to own it. Only if they, and perhaps regulators, begin to take it seriously will organizations become more trustworthy.

CG: Barbara, many thanks for your time today, and best wishes to Trust Across America – Trust Across the World.

 

 

Tips, Tricks and Trust

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In the spirit of the season, I recently started thinking about a question I used to get asked frequently: what are some tricks to becoming more trusted?

Here’s the thing: Trust is a Treat. Not a trick.

Let me elaborate.

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When I give seminars or training sessions, I often begin by asking for participants’ expectations. And reliably, at least one of the first few will say, “I’d just like to learn some tips and tricks to become more trusted.”

Tips and tricks to become more trusted.

My first reaction—which I’ve learned to stifle—is to think, “Who do you think you’re kidding! You’re not going to get anyone to trust you with some slick trick!”

Occasionally, if I’m feeling testy, I’ll ask the participant, “Tell me—when was the last time you went to a session like this where you actually got a great “tip” or “trick”—and what was it?” Usually, I get a panicked, blind stare.

But the truth is, who am I to get sarcastic? Because I do the exact same thing myself.  And, some of the most popular posts on this blog have been my  “trust tips” series.

When I listen to others’ DVDs or speeches or articles, I too am looking for that one little “aha!” that will give me some kind of great insight. And if not a great insight, I’ll settle for something that gives me an incremental nudge in the right direction.

Something that’s pretty easy to do.

So, it would seem that my attendees and I are all looking for the same thing. Ideas that are low investment and fast payback. In fact, we value those over high return. Fast, easy, and directionally right beats high ROI – if it requires high I.

But I’m not sure I’ve got it right, and I don’t want to give in too easily to the desire for “fast, easy and directionally right.” Not entirely anyway.

I do believe that becoming trustworthy is at least as much about mindset as it is about skillset. You actually have to change your attitude. You can’t fake it ‘til you make it, or just act your way into good thinking.

But since I’m guilty of the same desire—let me take the cotton out of my ears and put it in my mouth, and listen to you.

What’s the role of tips? What are some great “tips” you have heard? What made them great? And what is the right balance between serving up “tips” and the harder work of becoming trustworthy? Let’s get some dialogue going.

How (Not) to Ask for Recommendations, Referrals and References

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A while back I met a first-time author, who gave me a copy of their book. Shortly after, I got an email from the author’s publicist, saying:

“…We’d appreciate it if you would post your 5-star review of the book on Amazon…”

Now:

  • I don’t mind being asked to post a review of a book (though this ask was poorly done)
  • I don’t mind being asked by a publicist, as opposed to the author, if it’s done well (this was not)
  • But what frosts me is being told by a publicist what rating to assign the book – without even asking whether I’d read it, or even intended to read it.

Let’s break it down: what are the rules governing recommendations, referrals and references? And how many did the publicist violate?

How To Ask for a Favor

Rule Number One: Don’t ask for a favor – ask for the repayment of a favor already done.

The ideal way to promote your book is to start 6 months in advance by deciding whose help you’re going to want – and immediately start promoting them.  Comment on their blogposts; tweet their material; introduce them to others.

That way, when it comes time for your ask, they are simply discharging an obligation of etiquette, a favor they are more than happy to grant. (And lest this sound coldly utilitarian, note this is a description of what friends do for friends).

What’s true for books is true for referrals.  Haven’t done any favors for others lately? Then you’re going to come up short when you start trying to ask for favors.  Life is like that. Favors earned are favors granted.

Think that’s not fair? Wrong: it is very, very fair. It’s the essence of the matter.

 

Rule Number Two: Assume absolutely nothing.

Remember the saying, “Assume makes an ass of u and me.” Do not assume the person has the time, or the interest, or the inclination, to do you the favor you want.

In fact, make it clear you have no clue whether what you’re asking is reasonable. Say something like, “I realize this may be an inopportune time, or more complex than I realize, or there may be other reasons you can’t do this, and I assure you I don’t mean to be asking for an unnatural act on your part….”

By explicitly saying you’re not making assumptions, you give the other person all the degrees of freedom. You grant them several outs, should they choose to take them; you willfully give up the guilt-trip approach; and you humbly recognize that you are not in a position to judge them.

Let a favor be a favor, not a guilt-tinged, calculated script. A favor freely given is worth vastly more than an extracted behavior.

 

Rule Number Three: Don’t over-specify the favor. “Would you consider writing a review on Amazon?” is a perfectly reasonable statement. Asking that my review contain five stars is just insulting: it implies either that my ratings are for sale, or that I needn’t read the book to determine its value, both of which rankle the would-be favor giver.

“I’m not sure what the right next step would be, but would you mind having a look at Joseph’s resume?” That’s fine.  Compare it to, “I’d appreciate it you’d take Joseph’s phone call and meet with him, just for a half hour or so.” That’s over the line.

(A tour guide on the canal in Bruges, Belgium, after a delightful ride, said to me, “May I remind you the ten-franc tip is not included in the admission price.”).

 

Rule Number Four: Treat it like a big deal.  Because presumably it is. Which means, you won’t often ask it unless you’ve earned some favors in the favor bank already (see Rule Number One).

And if you have earned some favors – say so. You want to convey very clearly words to the effect of, “I value our relationship; it is strengthened by our mutual collaboration and reciprocal favor-doing. I don’t ask this favor lightly – and I don’t want you to treat it lightly. If you agree you can return this favor to me – or do this favor and I’ll owe you big-time – then we will be that much closer going forward. That’s how I look at this favor; how about you?”

Of course, those are not the words you’ll use; you’ll use words that are right for you.  But they’d better convey that kind of intent.

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A favor asked and given is an invitation to a deeper relationship. Don’t be cheap in granting favors; and don’t be promiscuous in asking for them.

Referrals, references, recommendations; all follow another “R” word – reciprocity. What you give, you get. What you don’t give, you won’t get. To get, give. Pay it forward isn’t some dumb movie line – it’s how it all works.

Finally – a word to those of you still reading who are rolling your eyes upward and saying, “Charlie, you don’t get how ratings are done these days – the agent is just playing the game the way the game works, and you’ve got to play it to be in it.”

  • Yes, that is how the game works – for the masses. But being like everyone else is inherently un-strategic; you succeed only in failing to differentiate yourself.
  • And no, you don’t have to play that game to be in it.  The Trusted Advisor, to my knowledge, never once made it to the top of the best-seller list – any best-seller list.  And yet – sixteen years after it was published – it still ranks about #5,000 on Amazon on any given day. Not bad for a business book up against Harry Potter and Fifty Shades of Gray. I’ll take 16 years in the #5,000 slot any day of the week against a one-shot “number one” ranking. Which is all the ‘game’ does for you.

Really being “in it” means consistently playing a long-term game of substantive favors given and favors received. That’s the only game ultimately worth playing.