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Facts, Phrases, and Ferguson

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“Hands up, don’t shoot,” became a chanted slogan for outraged protesters after Michael Brown’s killing in Ferguson, Missouri.

There was considerable mainstream media skepticism from the beginning about whether Mr. Brown actually had his hands raised (see Washington Post, December 4; see Newsweek, December 2), though those suspicions didn’t hold back the popularity of the phrase as a rallying cry for demonstrators.

The suspicions were proven out by the Justice Department’s report published March 4.  Whereupon  conservative commentators unleashed outraged attacks on the mainstream media for having perpetuated a lie (see Limbaugh, Rush, and Scarborough, Joe), notwithstanding the previous citations.

On the face of it, Limbaugh et al would seem to have a point: how can anyone justify repeating a slogan based on something proven not to be the case? How can you base a movement on a lie?

But look deeper. This is far, far from the only time that a good story line overwhelmed the facts. You can even argue that it’s human nature not to let the facts get in the way of a good piece of rhetoric.

Famous Past Facts vs. Phrases

Remember when Humphrey Bogart famously said, “Play it again, Sam,” in the classic movie Casablanca? Except that you don’t, because he didn’t.  Further, it’s widely known that he didn’t. But it doesn’t stop anyone repeating it.

Everyone knows that the US Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4. Except that it wasn’t.

One of the more eloquent statements of environmental and spiritual thought was uttered in 1854 by Chief Seattle, who said in opposition to a request to sell land, “The earth does not belong to us; we belong to the earth.”  Except those words were actually written by a Hollywood screen writer in 1971.

In the 1988 US Presidential campaign, Gary Hart was a leading Democratic candidate – until he responded to charges of womanizing by saying to reporters, “Go ahead, follow me around – I don’t care.” Whereupon a Miami Herald reporting team took him up on it, and quickly confronted him engaged in a dalliance with Donna Rice. Except that it didn’t happen that way at all. The Herald reporters did their investigation without having heard the challenge, made weeks earlier to an entirely different journalist.

Who said, “Nice guys finish last?” If you think it was Leo Durocher, you’re not alone – Leo Durocher himself thought he said it – 25 years after the fact.  What he actually said was, “the nice guys are all over there, in seventh place.” People later truncated the phrase, including Leo himself.

Probably the best-known quote from the original TV series Dragnet was from Sgt. Friday, who famously said, “Just the facts, ma’am.”  Except, you guessed it – he never said it.

And let’s don’t even start with George Washington and that cherry tree.

In fact, let’s let another President have the last word.

In a 1983 Congressional Medal of Honor ceremony, Reagan cited a story of heroism from WWII.  A New York Daily News reporter tracked down the story, and determined it had never happened in real life. It did, however, happen in the 1944 film A Wing and a Prayer.

Asked to comment on the boss’s apparent mismatch between rhetoric and reality, Reagan’s press secretary Larry Speakes put it thusly: “If you tell the same story five times, it’s true.”

Speakes spoke the truth, in an important way. Reagan knew that truth very well himself (Lincoln, too, placed great value on rhetoric, though most of his stories were transparently fictional). Done to excess, of course, unbounded rhetoric is also the Big Lie strategy of propaganda.

But when the mischaracterization is close, makes some sense, and offers a fling at a ringing and rhythmic bit of rhetoric – well, humans have proven time and again that they prefer a good story to being tied down by those pesky facts.

Crime, Fear and Trust

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Most casual readers of the general press know three things: crime is up, public safety is down, and trust is declining.

The problem is: the first two are flat out wrong, and together they cast doubt on the third.

Crime and Fear

(The following data are compiled from the Atlantic, March 2015, Be Not Afraid).

Fear: In the US, Gallup annually asks if crime is up or down from the previous year. Every year, and usually by large amounts (73% vs 24% last year) the public says crime has risen.

Fact: Violent crime has declined by 70% since the early 1990s. The homicide rate has been cut in half, and three years ago hit the lowest level since 1963. Rape and sexual assault rates declined 60% from 1995 to 2010.

Fear: 58% of the public fears another US terrorist attack, down not much from one month after 9-11, when the number was 71%. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff declared the world “more dangerous than it has ever been,” and that was two years ago and before ISIS.

Fact: Despite the horrific stories of ISIS, you’re four times more likely to drown in your bathtub than from a terrorist attack. Armed conflicts in the world are down 40% since the end of the Cold War.

And so on.

The point? Fear of crime and of danger are not necessarily linked to actual rates of crime and danger. In fact, myth is often negatively correlated with reality.

I’m fond of the saying, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.”

But as ee cummings said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. And sometimes paranoia is just irrational.

Trust and Statistics

What’s this got to do with trust? Good question.

First of all, ask yourself what the headlines say: Is trust in business generally up? Or is it down?  You all know the ‘right’ answer.

But trust has a definitional problem that crime doesn’t. Determining whether crime is really up or down is simple: look at the crime rate.

When it comes to trust, however there are three conceivable measures:

  1. Trust, the verb – are people more, or less, inclined to offer their trust in principle?
  2. Trust, the adjective – is business more or less trustworthy?
  3. Trust, the noun – is the resultant state of people’s trust in business up, or down?
Verb x   adjective  =  noun
Propensity to trust of trustor x trustworthiness of trustee = Level of trust achieved

All too often, the business press is guilty of mass confusion. When you see precise statistics from sources like the high visibility Edelman Trust Barometer, saying ’Trust in XYZ industry is up (or down)’  – ask yourself just what that oh-so-precise percentage is referring to. Does it mean:

  • People are X% less inclined to trust a given industry or company?
  • Industries/companies have gotten X% less trustworthy?
  • The state of consumer-to-industry trust has undergone an X% decline?

Presumably it means the last – the state of trust has declined. But here we have a problem – because we can’t tell which driving factor drove the decline.

  • Do we have a problem of paranoid consumers?
  • Or do we have a problem of endemic industry untrustworthiness?

If consumer fear-driven low propensity to trust is the root issue, then the financial services industry has got a public relations problem on its hands, and they should hire Edelman.

But if industry misbehavior is the root issue, then we’ve got a social, regulatory and political problem – throwing PR solutions at it won’t help, and may hurt.

Parsing the Data

There do exist some data. Every year the General Social Survey asks some trust questions, which are clearly of the “verb” type, assessing people’s general propensity to trust strangers in principle.

Here there is a clear trend: across the world, and particularly in the US, there is a secular decline in the level of propensity to trust.  So we have part of the answer: paranoia is increasing.

The question is: is the paranoia justified? Has trustworthiness declined, or has it increased?

I only know of two data sources that speak to that, and only partially at that. One is Trust Across America’s FACTS database, which gathers a number of data-points and aggregates them into measures of corporate trustworthiness. And while the TAA data does an excellent job of facilitating cross-company comparisons over time, its five years of data isn’t yet enough to speak clearly to aggregate trends.

The other source is our own Trust Quotient, or TQ, which overtly measures trustworthiness at the personal, not corporate, level.  We have noticed, both anecdotally and statistically, a gradual rise in the average level of TQ over the past 7 years. However, the data is self-reported, and is not a controlled valid sample of a broader population; it may just be grade inflation, or it may be comparing apples and oranges.

The conclusion? Except for the propensity to trust, which is clearly down on average, most trust data is either very specific and qualified, or definitionally vague.

I confess to some irritation on this topic. Trust is a serious issue, with many people seriously studying it, and doing so carefully. There are many more, however, who feel qualified to spout generalities and truisms about trust with no definitional clarity. Simply put, there is a lot of non-sense out there.

Next time you read something about trust being up or down, be critical. Ask whether the ‘trust’ being measured is a verb, an adjective, or a noun.  Ask whether pessimism is justified by data, or whether paranoia is overwhelming reality. Ditto for trust on the upside: if a company tells you their trust levels are up, push for definitions.

Don’t just nod your head: be a discerning student of trust data.

 

 

 

Lost Wallets, Trust, and Honesty

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I lost my wallet.

Somewhere between a golf driving range and a supermarket, in a 30-minute period, it went missing. I turned things upside down, retraced my paths, left notes with wanting-to-be-helpful staff.

I monitored accounts for three days; no bank charges, no credit card hits, so I held off canceling the cards, calling the DMV etc. I shudder at the thought of replacing it all.

At dinner on day three, the sheriff’s department calls; I meet the officer at a gas station. All the cards are there, as well as the original $140 in cash intact. He says, “Good thing you left your number at the driving range, that made it easy to confirm it was you.”

I say, “I know you can’t take a reward, but how about the guy who turned it in?” The cop says, “That’s between you and him; here’s his name and phone number.”

I meet the good samaritan the next day – let’s call him Ishmael. Why did Ishmael do it? He gave the Kantian reason; “If it was me, I’d hope someone would turn it in.” I offer him $100 reward; he demurs; I insist; he graciously accepts.

But my big question: why did he wait three days? Had it laid unfound for so long? Was it a struggle with his own conscience?  Enquiring minds wanted to know.

His answer: “I didn’t feel right turning it in to the proprietor at the driving range; I guess I just didn’t know if I could trust him. I meant to call the police, but I worked late the next day, and wasn’t sure who to call at the police. But my girlfriend, she cleans houses; one of her clients is a cop. She asked him who to contact, and he said, ‘call this number.’ So she gave it to me, and I called, and now you have your wallet. I’m glad.”

Whom Can You Trust?

Clearly, Ishmael turned out to be highly trustworthy. But let’s note a few other trust decisions along the way.

Ishmael trusted a cop – note he didn’t trust ’the cops,’ but he did trust one cop. He trusted his girlfriend’s due diligence to find out which one. I wonder how Ishmael would answer an Edelman Trust Barometer survey asking if he trusted the police?

Ishmael didn’t trust the driving range proprietor. I initially didn’t either, though I met a second driving range employee on day two whom I trusted more.

The police didn’t have to trust anyone in this case. Their role was limited to being trustworthy – or not. In this case, they were. One cop gave a correct phone number; the other responded. He checked out the information, made the phone calls, and most obviously the wallet didn’t ‘disappear’ while in his custody. I would add he was pleasant, and also expressed the Kantian view when I apologized for keeping him waiting a bit – “Hey, no worries, I know how worried I’d be if it was my wallet.”

What about the bank? I trusted the bank’s systems in two ways. First, I trusted that any use of my debit or credit cards or withdrawal from my checking account would show up quickly, and I’d find out about it online.

But second, I ‘trusted’ that the bank wouldn’t trust me very far – at the first hint of a suspicious charge, or at my first suggestion of it, I knew the bank would drop the iron curtain on all my accounts. (US laws limit the liability of individuals in such cases, so banks will pull the trigger quickly on a false positive). So, I could afford to wait a bit.

And, I had some sort of trust in Ishmael – without even knowing who he was, or even that he existed. The clue was the lack of activity in my accounts. I figured either the wallet was still in my possession, or it had been stripped of cash by an addict and dumped (or, by a Kantian addict who had then put the cashless wallet in the mail – hey it used to happen that way in the 70s with cabdriver theft in NY).

Or, there was some Ishmael out there. But what was he waiting for? I confess I didn’t have an answer to that.

Past Lost Wallets

There is a pattern here.  Actually, two patterns. One is that clearly I have an issue with losing things. I’ve lost my wallet once before, in Copenhagen.  I’ve also managed to leave my MacBook Air computer on the plane – not just once, but twice.  The first was at O’Hare; the second, in Charlotte.

So yes, clearly I’ve got an issue with carelessness. But there are other things to note here as well, even though this is all anecdotal.

In the first wallet case, it was returned within the hour by a taxi driver. This was calmly and confidently predicted, both by my client and by the hotel; it’s the norm in Denmark, not even worth commenting on, they said. But you know, I’ve heard many stories about the same even in New York.

And in the airline cases, it all came down to individuals, taking personal responsibility far outside the system.

How Can We Trust Institutions?

The quick answer is, institutional trust is by its nature shallow. I can trust Chase bank’s systems (or not), but if I need something truly out of the ordinary, I’d better find a real person. Trust of the type that returns wallets is an individual thing – or, as the case of Denmark points out, a cultural thing.

It is a kind of misnomer to use the word ‘trust’ in the sense of ‘I trust an institution.’ But that doesn’t mean institutions have no role in trust. They have a huge role. The role is to establish an environment within which people can behave in trusting and trustworthy manners.

That is non-trivial. In fact, it’s vital. An organization that fosters bureaucracy, suspicion, and conformity is not going to attract, and certainly not sustain, trust-operating people.  By contrast, an organization that celebrates trusting and being trusted among its people will greatly influence the amount of trust that is created.

And our job, as we go about our daily lives, is to be open about when other people might surprise us – and, hopefully, to do the Kantian thing ourselves when the opportunity presents.

 

Trust, Lying and Apologies – the Brian Williams Case

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UPDATE 9:30PM Feb 10: Since this post was first written, NBC News has suspended Brian Williams for 6 months. This will only heighten the buzz around something really not all that important (except to Wiliams, of  course).  He has become the gossip du jour, and I don’t see anyone achieving escape velocity beyond the obsession with “what should be done about him.”

That is SO the wrong question. The real question – and the one this blogpost originally set out to address – is “what are the learnings for all of us who find ourselves in positions of trust: what threatens our perceived trustworthiness? How do we keep trust?  And, can we recover trust lost – and how?”

That question is relevant to nearly everyone reading this blog. The question of whither Brian Williams will occupy magazine covers and water cooler chit chat for 10 days max, before Bruce Jenner knocks him off the hashtag list. But when that happens – what will we have learned from it? What will you have learned from it?

——

Original post Feb 8: The fate of US newscaster Brian Williams is still unknown at this writing. The facts as they are emerging suggest that truth was stretched, it was stretched by Williams, and it was not a blinding surprise to a lot of news insiders.

I’ll leave it to others to talk about ethics, or to predict Williams’ fate. But it does offer a teachable moment about human frailties, about apologies, and in particular how to recover – and how not to recover – from trust disasters.

Human Memory is Not Binary

Williams went from correctly recalling past events in the far past, to revising them more recently. While some people do consciously lie, it is much more common that we deceive ourselves, through a process of constant repetition of a story.

I can relate to this personally. I used someone else’s case study to round out a trio of cases I had created (I wrote the first two). Over years of using them, I somehow came to believe I had written all three. When confronted dramatically in a class session by none other than the real case author, I was at first righteously indignant. How dare you accuse me of plagiarism?  Yet over the course of the next 12 hours, I began to recall, and realized to my horror that that was exactly what I had done. And I had to completely eat my earlier words, taking full responsibility.

Just this past week, I wrote a sharply worded email to someone who had inappropriately used some intellectual property of mine on Slideshare, without attribution. He wrote back quickly in a tone of annoyance, disingenuously saying it wasn’t important and was aimed at a higher goal.  I wrote back even more sharply.

Less than 24 hours later, I received another email from the person, this time very clearly acknowledging the transgression, accepting full responsibility, and offering not only a correction but a form of restitution. I gratefully accepted, 100% – it was, after all, a totally proper apology. And I know, first hand, how easy it is to fool one’s own memory.

Something like this is almost certainly what’s happing with Brian Williams. His first halting attempt at apology suggested that he was involved in a higher mission, and that his intentions were good.

I strongly suspect Mr Williams is going through agonizing soul-searching right now, wondering how he could have possibly gotten things so wrong over the years. The word ‘hubris’ will be mentioned by others, and eventually I suspect he’ll see it in himself.

Trust and Apologies

There is a very simple rule, which is constantly violated by nearly all tellers-of-untruth. It is this:

Rule 1: Never, ever, under-estimate your responsibility for what happened.

  • If you were Richard Nixon, never refer to Watergate as “a two-bit burglary.”
  • If you were Bill Clinton, never suggest culpability depends on the meaning of the word ‘is.’
  • If you were Brian Williams, never suggest your error was justified by good intentions or a higher cause.

A corollary to the rule: the likelihood of your being condemned in the public’s eye increases with the square of the time you take to acknowledge Rule 1.

To recover trust, you must first acknowledge. It’s hard to over-acknowledge, and in fact we want and expect a bit of exaggeration of  responsibility – that’s how we know you “got it.” But it’s the kiss of death to under-estimate your responsibility.

And of course, you’ve got to do it soon.

Brian Williams may feel he bought himself time by voluntarily stepping down for “several days” as anchor.

My feeling is that he misunderstood the role of time; in this case, time is not on his side. He didn’t buy time – he squandered it.

 

 

When Customers Demand to Know the Price Up Front

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Q. What should you say when the potential customer says, “Before we start discussions, I need you to tell me your price.”

A. Tell them your price.

What a concept.

I know, I know. Most of you reading this disagree with me, and you’re in good company. Many respected sales writers suggest just the opposite. But on balance – with all respect – on this point, I think they’re wrong.  Here’s why.

Offering Price Up Front – Pro and Con

The case against answering an upfront question about price boils down to two arguments.

  1. You haven’t had a chance to anchor price to value.
  2. By answering an up-front price question, you encourage price-based buying.

By both of those arguments, you have lost control of the conversation. And that, most writers say, is a bad thing.

But that’s precisely the problem. If you approach sales by trying to be in control from the very outset, you’re already in trouble. Customers have never liked being controlled, and in this day and age they like it even less. And increasingly they don’t have to put up with it.

Aretha Franklin Selling

There’s basically one argument in favor of answering the question, and it’s simple: R-E-S-P-E-C-T.

If you respect someone at first meeting, they are positively inclined toward you. They tend to then trust you, and in turn treat you with respect.

If you refuse to answer the question, you are disrespecting the buyer, in at least one of several ways.

  1. You are trying to control them – and nobody likes being controlled
  2. They expect you to try and evade the answer, and you just confirmed their suspicions
  3. They think you have something to hide

Any way you cut it, a refusal to answer a direct question, whether it is a direct refusal or an ‘artful’ (read ‘obfuscatory’) refusal, is a statement that you either know more than the buyer, or do not grant the buyer the privilege of asking their own question, or both.

And buyers resent it.

The Positive Effect of Respect

Most buyers approach most sellers with a certain degree of caution – they expect the seller to try and control them.  And, most sellers oblige them by trying to do exactly that. Which means the initial conversations are about dancing around questions, jockeying for advantage, each challenging the other.

But what if, right at the start, you opted out of that game? What if you could immediately convey to the buyer that you are not trying to control them, that you’ll answer any question they have, that you’re actually there to help them, rather than manipulate them to your ends?  What if you could do that convincingly?

Then they’d be more likely to trust you. If they trust you, then they’ll listen to you. And if they’ll actually listen to you, your odds of making a sale go up.

Establishing Respect by Answering the Price Question

Buyer: I want to know more about your XYZ offering, but first I need to know your prices.

Seller: OK, sure. It’s $8000 for the annual plan, or $1,000 per month for 12 months.

[Pause.  And seller, do not fill in the pause]

Buyer: Um, OK; so, it’s a better deal for the annual?

Seller: It depends on what you want; 2/3 of our customers do choose the annual plan, but 1/3 choose monthly.

Buyer: Other than cash flow, why would I choose the monthly plan?

Seller: For half of them it’s just cash flow; but others are intending to switch CRM plans within the year, so they value the flexibility.

Buyer: How does the offering relate to our CRM?

Seller: [discussion continues about product features, value, etc.]

Note there is no scripted answer to this dialogue, other than the first response: “It’s $8000 for the annual plan, or $1,000 per month for 12 months.” After that, everything is a response driven by the customer’s questions.

This is not rocket science – but it is science nonetheless. Call it the science of human relationships. When someone does a favor for us – like showing us respect – we unfailingly return the favor, by showing respect in turn. In sales, the currency of respect is listening.

If you listen to your customer’s question, and answer it directly, you are paying the currency of respect. The customer quickly gets the message – ‘This person is not trying to control me, they are respecting me. I’ll ask a few more questions, and if I continue to get that respect, I’ll show them respect in turn, by listening to what they have to say.’

If your service is competitive, this form of sales interaction will get you over the finish line. You end up with better sales results than if you had tried to control the dialogue in the first place.

The paradox: you end up getting better results by resolving to give up control over the customer than if you had tried to control them in the first place.

 

 

A Better New Year’s Resolution

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It’s that time of year again. Resolutions come in full swing and we all start to assess how we can improve on the last year. It just so happens that I wrote a pretty good blog post at this time eight years ago, and I haven’t improved on it yet. Here it is again.

Happy New Year!

—————–

My unscientific sampling says many people make New Years resolutions, but 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 being 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.

 

Trust and The Mentalist

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Some of you may be familiar with the CBS TV series The Mentalist, starring Golden Globe nominee Australian Simon Baker.  The lead character, Patrick Jane, is a consultant to law enforcement agencies who uses his carnival-honed powers of observation and human nature to appear almost clairvoyant.

In a recent episode, Jane makes three trust-related comments. While prepping his co-worker (and lover) Teresa Lisbon how to behave in an under-cover job in prison, he gives her three pieces of advice.

Jane’s insights show he’s a pretty good judge of trust as well. (Or at least the writers are).

Trust Advice from Patrick Jane

Most TV shows treat trust in fairly broad-stroke, big picture kinds of ways. For example, a cop might tell a fellow officer, “I can’t work with someone I can’t trust,” after having been lied to by the second officer.

But that’s relatively mundane. What’s interesting about the Patrick Jane character is that he grasps some subtleties about trust.  He “gets” the advanced version of trust, if you will – as is totally appropriate for the character’s persona.

Advice Tidbit Number One.“Tell them one Big Lie, not lots of little ones.”

On the face of it, truth and lies are the province of credibility – the first of the four elements in the CRI/S Trust Equation. But many truths and lies, over the course of time, affect reliability, the second element.

The drip drip of lies, even small ones, is a double-whammy. One “mistake” can be excused or forgiven. But a pattern of lies is more than the sum of the individual untruths.  It is the difference between a series of lies told, and a teller of lies – a liar.

Advice Tidbit Number Two. “If you want to get someone to lower their guard – lower your own.”

Trust relationships are based on an iterative series of risk gestures.

Consider a handshake. The one who proffers the hand to shake is the trustor, the one who first takes the risk. The other person is the trustee; if they return the handshake, the level of trust goes up a tiny fraction.

What this is about is vulnerability. Being vulnerable makes one available to relationships – and trust is above all a relationship. Note the one taking the risk is the one initiating trust; this runs counter to the usual image of trust as being about risk mitigation.

 

Advice Tidbit Number Three. “If you want someone to trust you, ask them for a favor – even a small one.”

The reciprocal exchange of risk gestures is the template of trust creation. While we usually think of doing someone else a favor as risky, Jane is quite right that the asking of a favor is also a form of risk.

If done sensitively, sincerely, and infrequently, asking someone a favor is a form of flattery. It shows the asker has such respect for the other that he is willing to suffer the embarrassment of refusal. It is a form of risk-taking. It demonstrates vulnerability.

Vulnerability drives risk, which initiates the formation of trust. There is no trust without risk.

Caught Between the Grinding Wheels of Sales

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

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

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

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

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

What You Must Remember

Here’s the thing. Three things, actually.

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

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

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

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

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

Putting the Basic Things Together

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

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

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

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

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

Escaping the Grinding Wheels of Sales

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

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

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

So – don’t do that.

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

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

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

Answering Objections

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

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

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

Leadership Lessons from a Horse’s Mouth

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Today’s guest post is from June Gunter, Ed. D. and CEO of TeachingHorse, LLC.

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I am the Co-Founder and CEO of TeachingHorse, LLC. TeachingHorse provides leadership development and coaching through experiential learning with horses. Working with horses, people learn how to build trusting relationships, practice authenticity, and remain calm and confident in the face of uncertainty.

Several of my clients are on the path of becoming trusted advisors. Their work with horses has been a great way for them to practice developing intimacy and reducing their self-orientation.

Most of the clients I work with do not have issues with credibility or reliability. They are skilled experts with long track records of success – but they are staring squarely at a new reality. The complexity of the issues they are being asked to address is unprecedented. The information available to them is unreliable and changes quickly. The demand for innovation means that previous performance and expertise are only the equivalent of an entry fee and will no longer win the race.

It is the capacity to create trusting relationships that is often the defining factor in selection of both leaders and advisors.

Enter Horses

So what do horses have to teach leaders about being trusted advisors? To begin with, horses don’t care if you have an RN, MBA, MD or have CEO after your name. Horses will never ask you if you have reputation for being dependable or reliable. So we can just take credibility and reliability out of the equation for now.

For horses to place their trust in leaders, they must know four things about them.

  • One, that leaders are paying attention, and can detect even the most subtle shifts in the environment.
  • Two, that leaders can give them clear direction on how to respond to the shifts.
  • Three, that leaders are able to follow that direction with focused energy, providing guidance on the pace with which to respond.
  • Four, that leaders display congruence of their inner and outer expressions. Ultimately, horses must know that the leaders have their best interest as their source of motivation at all times.

It all starts with saying “Hello.” One of the first things we teach is how to approach a horse in a way that creates confidence. It is a process of mutual decision-making that begins with taking a step towards the horse. If they continue to look relaxed and comfortable with your presence, take another step closer. If they look anxious or unsure, stop, take a deep breath to ground yourself, and then take a small step back. This reassures the horse that you are actually paying attention to the signals they are sending, that you are willing to respect their experience and make adjustments to honor their choice. With this simple process, the horse learns that you are not a threat.

Blue Leadership

One of the horses I work with frequently is a large white draft horse named Blue. She weighs about 2000 pounds. Blue is a fabulous teacher. In one particular session I was working with a board of directors for a healthcare organization. The participant saying hello to Blue was a petite woman, maybe 5 feet tall, with no horse experience.

As she began moving closer to Blue, I could hear her say tentatively, “Hi Blue.  Are we good?  Can I come a bit closer?”  I stopped the woman in her tracks and said, “What question do you have of Blue right now?”  She replied, “Is it safe for me to take another step closer?”

My reply to her was, “As long as that is your question, neither one of you is safe. It is not Blue’s job to convince you that you are safe with her. It is your job to show Blue that she is safe with you, just as if she was a patient in your hospital.”

I could sense that what I said resonated deeply with this person. Her energy changed completely. The woman lifted her head and squared her shoulders. You could feel the conviction running through her veins. At the same time, her eyes filled with respect, appreciation and love. She looked at Blue and said, “I got you girl. You are safe with me.”

Much to her surprise, Blue lowered her head, a signal that a horse is feeling safe, and Blue took the last few steps that closed the gap between them. With the woman’s hand now placed gently and confidently on Blue’s forehead, the connection between them created a palpable hush over the entire group.

I asked the woman what changed. She said, “I did.” And she was right.

As it turns out, this person is a gifted nurse leader. She tapped into a deeply held value that can get lost in the hustle and bustle of executive life. She moved her attention from self to other with a commitment to earn trust.

In the face of uncertainty, fear takes over when too much of our attention is on the self. Turn your attention to those you are leading or serving with a clear intention to act in their best interests. Trust will grow.

 

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For more information about leadership development with horses contact June Gunter at [email protected].

Books we Trust: Jacob Morgan’s The Future of Work

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Future of WorkJacob Morgan is the author of the newly released, The Future of Work: Attract New Talent, Build Better Leaders, and Create a Competitive Organization (Wiley). He is also the principal and co-founder of the future of work consulting firm Chess Media Group and the FOW Community, an invite only membership community dedicated to the future of work and collaboration.

I first met Jacob a few years ago before he started working on his book The Collaborative Organization, previously reviewed on this blog. Jacob has a new book coming out called, The Future of Work which promises to get readers to think differently about how they work, lead, and build their organizations. Most of us get that the world of work is changing but many of us still don’t realize why it’s changing, how exactly it’s changing, and what we need to do about it.

The book is very well-researched (I read it in manuscript) and has some great corporate stories. Its release date is today, September 2.

Charlie Green: Jacob, your previous book was endorsed and supported mainly by CIOs, CMOs, and folks that one could say lean more towards the IT or technical side of things. That’s quite a stark contrast to this book, where you’ve lined up impressive testimonials from CEOs and respected business leaders. How did you get these guys involved and why did you up the ante?

Jacob Morgan: Getting CEOs was challenging. I started the process quite early on, but the CEOs that endorsed this book (from companies like KPMG, SAP, Intuit, Whirlpool, and others) are all strong believers in changing how work gets done. They all their own initiatives along these lines. My previous book was also more geared towards a specific audience; mainly those who were running collaboration efforts or were interested in collaboration. It wasn’t a broad book that someone might see at the book store and say, “Ah, I need to read that.”

The Future of Work is much more appealing to a broader audience, I wanted to write something that was relevant to employees and managers alike. We all have or need jobs which means that we all need to be thinking about the future of work!

CG: I’ve heard you say numerous times that “work as we know it is dead.” What exactly are you referring to? Clearly we still need to work.

JM: What I mean is that the common notions that employees are cogs, managers are slave-drivers, and that work is drudgery, are all dead. By the way, these are actual synonyms that you will find if you look up the words in a dictionary. We spend more time working than doing anything else in our lives so it’s about time that we start thinking differently about work.

CG: Well then, just what does the future of work actually look like?

JM: I get asked this question a lot. It obviously includes a LOT of different things. But broadly speaking on the employee side we will see things like flexible work, freelancing, decreased employee tenure, and a shift towards focusing more on projects and tasks vs career paths. For managers we will see greater use of collective intelligence, an acceptance of vulnerability in the workplace, and mindset change from “employees should serve managers” to “managers should serve employees.” Organizations will become more distributed, they will shift to the cloud, and will have to measure success by more than just profit.

CG: I’m sure some companies out there are thinking, “things are going fine for us, we’re making a ton of money, no need to do anything differently.” What would you say to do those companies?

JM: I don’t think those companies realize what they are talking about. What’s going on today is unique. It’s not just the fact that change is happening that’s important, it’s the fact that the rate of change is increasing. That means that being a late adopter is tantamount to being out of business.

There are five trends driving the changes we are seeing today: globalization, millennials, new behaviors, technology, and mobility. We’re also seeing a complete shift in who guides and dictates how work gets done. This used to be very top down but now employees are starting to drive the conversation. I always tell companies, “if your organization doesn’t think about and plan for the future of work, then your organization has no future.”

CG: Jacob thanks for sharing with us. The Future of Work: Attract New Talent, Build Better Leaders, and Create a Competitive Organization is available on Amazon and wherever books are sold.

JM: My pleasure!