Posts

S&P and the New Challenge of Integrity in Business

/4 Comments/in , , /by

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

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

Subordinating Ethics to Legal Arguments

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

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

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

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

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

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

 The Name of the Problem

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

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

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

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

A Simple Problem

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

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

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

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

Judge Carter, who heard the case, was clear:

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

Exactly.

 

 

 

Why We Don’t Trust Companies Part IV: The Solution

/4 Comments/in , /by

Solving The PuzzleMy last three posts – here, and here, and here – were about why we don’t trust companies. To review the bidding, I’ve said it’s because:

  • Trust is predominantly personal in nature – a fact most companies don’t recognize
  • Corporate missions, motives and mindsets are all tainted by zero-sum, competitive ideologies
  • Trust requires risk, while companies abhor risk.

Stripped down – companies see trust as impersonal, ideologically suspect, and too risky.

Now, if I am right about that, then we would want to see solutions in the business world that recognize the personal nature of trust, incorporate trust-enhancing ideologies, and embrace risk-taking to enhance trust.

Surprise surprise – that’s not what we see.

The dialogue about corporate trust is consistently mis-framed. It is not companies that trust, or are trusted. It is the people in the companies who trust, or are trusted. The challenge is not to make companies trust or be trustworthy – it is to create corporate environments in which people can trust and be trusted.

In the trust game, the company is an agent, an enabler – not a primary actor.

The Usual Recommendations to Increase Corporate Trust

I spend a lot of time reading reports on how trust in business can be improved. Here are a few examples;

Believe me, there are hundreds more.

These are all reasonably good pieces of work (there are certainly worse). But even from these top-drawer sources, the top-line recommendations are bloodless, abstract, and cold – because they’re focused at the corporate level. (Curiously, the right answers in all four of these cases are in fact contained in the reports – they’re just buried deep.)

Typical topline recommendations look like these (taken from the sources above):

  • Increase adherence to ethical codes and standards
  • Create a set of values that define and clarify what your enterprise and its people are at root, and work to ensure that these values are adhered to consistently across your enterprise.
  • A well-defined, repeatable roadmap for the conversation…more transparency about fees and costs
  • Communicate frequently and honestly on the state of the business.

Again – there’s nothing wrong in these recommendations. But taken alone, they are sleep-inducing; they sound like Charlie Brown’s teacher’s Mwah, Mwah, Mwah.

Where is the personal? The belief system? The risk-taking? Where’s the people?

The Right Answer for Increasing Corporate Trust

Again, not that there’s anything wrong with the suggestions above, but they don’t get to the heart of the matter. Here are some recommendations that do.

1. Trust is personal – so lead by example.

Role model it. Everyone, not just the top leaders.  And to be sure what “it” is, identify hundreds of situations and the appropriate responses for each (not to memorize, but to ensure understanding). Talk about them – endlessly.  Get coaching. Do brainstorming sessions. Talk about what you’re doing with employees, and with customers. Identify key vocabulary terms you’ll use, and use them. Publicly praise and private counsel appropriate personal examples of trust-based interactions.

The way to get a trust-based company is not to fix the company – it’s to fix the people and the environment they live in so that the people can trust and be trusted in all their affairs.

2. Articulate and preach the trust ideology.

Reject zero-sum thinking. Think long-term relationships, not short-term transactions. Make transparency a default state in all conversations (except where illegal or harmful). Emphasize win-win solutions with customers, employees, and other stakeholders. Believe that trust relationships are more profitable over the medium and long-term, that they are complementary not opposed to corporate success.

3. Teach Social Risk-taking

People can’t learn to trust if they have no degrees of freedom to do so. People are more likely to be trustworthy if they are trusted. Human relationships are formed by the constant reciprocal taking of small risks; the result is long term risk mitigation.

There are personal relationship skills that drive trust. They can be taught, and the teaching of them gets to the heart of a trust-enhancing organization.

—————

The route to a high-trust organization is through its people. That route starts not with corporate policies per se, but with human interactions.

 

 

Why We Don’t Trust Companies, Part II – the Three M’s

/3 Comments/in , /by

light bulb: Mission, Motives & MindsetsYesterday I wrote about three fundamental reasons that most companies aren’t trusted: trust is mainly personal, most companies don’t understand trust, and they make bad choices of tools to enhance trust. Let’s call that Level I of  the Corporate Book of Being Trusted. Now let’s look at Level II.

Most companies, even if they do reasonably well at Level 1, are still not very trusted. It’s often due to what we might call the three M’s – mission, motives and mindset. If your goals, beliefs and attitudes are all anti-trust – even if you think you mean well – then no matter what you say, it will bleed through. People can tell. And it’s people that do the trusting.

Mission.

I’m using the term “mission” loosely here, to include terms sometimes defined as distinct – vision, goals, and the like. Basically, what a company says it’s trying to do.

And despite the ringing statements of companies like Coca Cola (“…to inspire moments of optimism and happiness…”) and Enron (you really must read it for yourself), most companies in the past few decades would cop to “achieve sustainable competitive advantage,” (often dressed up as “be the best X in the Y business”).

Sustainable competitive advantage. Never mind whether that’s true, or whether the true underlying motive is to maintain the bureaucracy until the incumbent management has had its way. Let’s assume it is true. What does “sustainable competitive advantage” (hereafter, SCA) imply?

It says above all that business is a contest, and a largely zero-sum contest at that. It’s about winning, and what I win, I win by dint of you losing. And vice versa. As was very well articulated by the strategists from the 70s and 80s, this is a Hobbesian view, in which everyone is a competitor lying in wait to conquer us. And so we must conquer them first.

Much more could be said about this as a mission, but let’s stick with one observation – it is extremely hard to believe in all that and believe at the same time in the power and desirability of trust. People who believe in SCA are hard-pressed to believe that they might make alliances with suppliers, customers and even competitors, that they might benefit by greater transparency, that taking risks can be desirable, and that another goal besides winning might actually exist.

Most corporate people  just can’t wrap their heads around that.  And so they, and their companies, behave in anti-trust ways.

(There is, of course, a great irony here. Companies which actually do a better job of being trusted end up being more profitable and successful. But the power of the ideology is such that most corporations refuse to believe it).

Motives.

It’s almost an axiom in business that the purpose of a company is to make a profit. And even though few people now believe it as dogmatically as Milton Friedman asserted it’s pretty much an important goal, and rightly so. The problem comes from those who have boiled it down, stripped it to the bones, and turned it into Management Mantras Lite.

They have put a lot of emphasis on two beliefs: the primacy of shareholder value, and the short term perspective. As to shareholder value, Cornell Law School Professor Lynn Stout says, “the ideology of shareholder value maximization lacks any solid foundation in corporate law, corporate economics, or the empirical evidence.” So the belief is unnecessary, and unfounded. Yet it continues.

It is also anti-trust, because it subordinates the goals and desires of all other stakeholders.  Who can trust an entity that uses others as means to its own ends – and brags about it!

Short-termism is a long topic in itself. Let’s just note that the passage of time is a requirement for many forms of trust. Game theory shows distinctly different results if a game is played once, vs. many times. Over time, we can establish patterns, mutual obligations, track records and character.

Short-termism hobbles trust considerably; the accompanying belief in transactions rather than relationships is enough to strangle trust.

Mindset.

Some mindsets flow naturally from the missions and motives outlined above; see how many you have heard:

  • I’ll be gone, you’ll be gone – do the deal
  • Do unto others before they do unto you
  • It’s a dog eat dog world.

There is one other mindset I want to identify; I’ll write about it separately in this series. It is risk. In the Hobbesian corporate world we have created, risk is a no-no, a negative, something to be mitigated and hedged. Risks are to be laid off, written into supplier contracts so they’re transferred, and are not to be taken if they might result in legal or financial exposure – hence never admit guilt. Hence “nobody ever got fired for hiring IBM.” And so forth.

Yet trust requires risk. There can be no trust without risk. And a mindset that abhors risk is not a mindset that will easily tolerate trust.

=============

In short: at Level I, we saw that most companies are impersonal, and don’t understand the workings of trust. At Level II, we see that many mental constructs in today’s corporations are inimical to trust.

Is it any wonder that most companies are not trusted?

 

Why We Don’t Trust Companies Part I

/23 Comments/in /by

"Trust Me" (photo by Nancy Xu)People don’t trust companies very much.

Sure, we trust some companies more than others, and sometimes we trust them more than government (sometimes not), but when you think of someone you trust, a corporation tends not to come first to mind.

There are three simple, powerful, obvious reasons for this – every one of which tends to get ignored by corporations. Who then wonder why they’re not trusted.

Reason 1: Trust is Heavily Personal

Very few companies bother to make a simple distinction – that between trusting and being trusted. It takes both to create trust.

Only people can do trusting. To trust another is an act of will, not of policy or odds-making. Corporations, notwithstanding what Mitt Romney and the US Supreme Court ruled, cannot in any intelligible manner be said to “trust” others. It’s a human thing.  So right there, half of trust can only be done by humans.

The other half, trustworthiness, also applies largely to humans. We might say, “I trust the sun will rise tomorrow,” but when it does, you don’t get much credit for your courageous risk-taking. You may trust Amazon to predict your book preferences, but that doesn’t mean you’d trust Amazon to make sales calls for you or set you up on a date.

Trust is hugely contextual, and the few contexts in which we “trust” a company tend to be very bloodless, relying largely on predictability of behavior. And it doesn’t run deep.

Trust is personal, and companies aren’t. Sorry, companies.

Reason 2: Companies Don’t Understand Trust

I noted above that companies rarely distinguish between something as basic as trusting and being trusted. Therefore, if they score low on trust surveys, they can’t tell whether the solution lies in being more trustworthy, or in being more trusting.

By default, most of them implicitly assume the issue is trustworthiness. This means they completely pass up opportunities to create trust by trusting their stakeholder constituencies, or by valuing the propensity to trust within the organization. Worse, they may even harm trustworthiness by assuming that it requires greater internal controls, thus limiting employees’ ability to be trusting.

Trust is contextual, and companies tend to be very vague about it. Sorry, companies.

Reason 3: Companies Choose Trust Tools Badly

Most companies confuse trust with reputation. They view it as a communications problem, something to be handled by PR, especially in times of crisis. Trust problems are addressed by amping up the messaging.

Most companies, if they think about increasing trust, will instantly phrase the issue in terms of measurement.  How do you measure it, what metrics can be developed to track it, and how do we manage to the metrics?

Most companies, to go along with their metrics, favor processes and policies as a way of increasing trust. We will review this 4 times, no Xs will go out without Ys, we celebrate Q and we will not tolerate Z.

But trust doesn’t work that way. Since trust is personal, it is transmitted largely through character, role-modeling, values, conversations, personal transparency, integrity, constructive confrontation, public praise and shaming, and mutual respect. How many corporate programs can you identify that use those as tools?

The one communications policy that positively affects trust is transparency; yet it is often sacrificed for message control, which predictably reduces trust. Reputation doesn’t drive trust – trust drives reputation, in any sensible time-frame past a fiscal quarter or two.

The measurement of trust is simply not as important an issue as companies make it out to be. We don’t measure love, and love seems to do fine without it; in fact we would be suspicious of people who purport to be able to measure love, much less do it quarterly, monthly and weekly. You do not need to measure trust in order to manage with it – see the list above of how it works.

Finally, policies and procedures are inherently impersonal. Other than creating greater predictability, is it any wonder they don’t affect trust? In fact, if you get enough policies and procedures, it makes everyone confuse compliance with ethics, and you end up with reduced trust.

There are many reasons we might not trust a company, or companies in general. But the biggest reasons are because we’ve defined the problem wrongly at the very outset.

How Neuroscience Over-reaches in Business

/16 Comments/in /by

The Science of BusinessEvery age has its fads and fashions. Some of them hold up over time – competitive strategy, business process re-engineering, quality circles.  Applying neuroscience to business, I suggest, will not be one of them.

In Mark Twain’s classic Huckleberry Finn, there is a passage where Huck tries to explain to Jim that French people speak a different language. Jim would no more be able to understand a Frenchman, says Huck, than he could understand a dog, or a cow, or a cat – because they all speak different languages.

Jim’s retort is that a Frenchman is not a dog, cow or cat, but a man – and that therefore by all rights he should talk like a man, meaning English. As is true in Huckleberry Finn at a meta-level, it’s the truth of the innocents (this time voiced by Jim) that is the deeper truth. The difference between human languages is trivially and categorically distinct from the differences between the species.

Neuroscience in business is something like that. Neuroscientists seem to think that their research is revealing previously hidden secrets of leadership, influence, motivation, and decision-making. But all too often, all they’re doing is translating into French.

Overstating the Case

There are plenty of examples, frequently from highly distinguished, educated, and highly regarded people, of claims for neuroscience in business. For example:

The statements all follow a general pattern. First, a discussion about the structure of the brain, or the neurochemistry of a particular event type. Second, a correlation of those structures or chemistries with some management phenomenon.  And third, a conclusion about what can and should be done in management, based on the preceding two insights.

The Proof is In the Pudding

Here are actual examples from the authors themselves about the power of neuro-thinking to help management.

Here is Daniel Goleman distilling the neuroscience advice on how to help others change bad habits:

  1. Empathize before giving advice
  2. Be a good listener
  3. Offer a caring gesture
  4. Give them your full attention

Here are Crawford’s four lessons from neuroscience on how to improve innovation:

  1. Eat and sleep well, and don’t stress
  2. Expose yourself to new ideas
  3. Make it safe for people to share ideas
  4. Create playful environments.

Here is John Ryan on four neuroscience-derived “tactics to boost our performance and model success for our colleagues.”

  1. Be positive
  2. Give detailed, positive feedback
  3. Stay healthy and in good physical shape
  4. Seek challenge, but not to the point of stress

Here is Pillay on ways that brain science can “enhance understanding within the executive environment”

  1. Re-packaging old ideas in neuroscience terms can make them more acceptable
  2. Using the language of brain science can seem less personally threatening
  3. Brain science uncovers myths (he lists six myths, none of which need brain science to debunk)
  4. Giving further insights and evidence (e.g. “visualizing isn’t just New Agey,” and “the brain can change.”)
  5. Providing a system for targeted interventions
  6. Developing coaching protocols and tools.

Non Sequiturs and Blinding Flashes of the Obvious

I don’t know about you, but I find these conclusions to be either completely unrelated to the neuroscience itself (Pillay’s claim that people like scientific language, therefore the language helps people understand better), or numbingly old hat.

Do we really need the language of neuroscience to be convinced that we should be positive, healthy, empathetic and good listeners? Where are the now-decisively vanquished proponents of negative, unhealthy self-absorbed managers?

The neuro-fans do have one point, however. An MIT study evaluated the effect of logically irrelevant neuro-babble on listeners to a debate. They found:

Subjects in all three groups judged good explanations as more satisfying than bad ones. But subjects in the two nonexpert groups additionally judged that explanations with logically irrelevant neuroscience information were more satisfying than explanations without. The neuroscience information had a particularly striking effect on nonexperts’ judgments of bad explanations, masking otherwise salient problems in these explanations.

In other words – it all just sounds so much prettier when they say it in French.

[Note: I do believe there are valuable applications of neuroscience, particularly in designing targeted medical solutions. I just don’t see them much in evidence in business. And yet, it’s a mainstream fad. Ah, Barnum…]

 

Know Yourself. Wait, what does that even mean?

/10 Comments/in , /by

"To Thy Own Self Be True"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.

In fact, 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 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.

When You Can’t Get No Respect

/10 Comments/in /by

You Gotta Give Some, To Get SomeSome will recall comic Rodney Dangerfield’s catch phrase. Others may remember Aretha Franklin’s iconic spelling, R-E-S-P-E-C-T.

When you respect someone, it’s a verb.  When you get respect, it’s a noun. Either way, it has positive connotations.

But what’s the connection between respecting someone, and receiving respect from them?

Is it a chicken-egg thing? Does one cause the other? Is it inevitably one-sided, as in “respect for one’s elders,” where the relationship between respecter and respectee is a permanent one?

Is it like trust, where the trustor and trustee exist in a constantly reciprocating relationship? Is it like Jesus’s saying, “It is more blessed to [respect] than to [be respected]?”

Is it a Beatles-like thing, where “the [respect] you take is equal to the [respect] you make“? Is it like exercise, where no pain, no gain is the rule? Or is it like Bonnie Raitt sang, “I can’t make you [respect] me, if you don’t?”

And finally, what’s the connection with buying, selling, and the modern workplace?

Respect is Unconditional

We agree that we should respect others where respect is due (never mind who judges “due”). It’s much harder to agree that others should respect us. Particularly when the “others” are the ones we may be disagreeing with.

If I respect you, it doesn’t necessarily follow that you’ll respect me. Many cultures show respect for elders; it doesn’t follow that the elders must respect the young. Nor is it necessarily disrespectful if they don’t.  So respecting someone is no guarantee that they’ll respect you (sorry, John Lennon).

Though frequently, it does work that way. To show respect to another can be a form of etiquette.  This function is powerful in sales, where it’s easy to disrespect customers’ knowledge, even if we don’t intend to.

Demonstrated respect for the customer is rare enough that respect can be a source of differentiation.  Too many sellers don’t follow the Kantian rule of treating others as ends in themselves, treating them instead as means to our own ends. That’s disrespect, and it’s not uncommon, given that selling is potentially a manipulative, secretive black art – if not handled from trust.

Respect should be unconditional. If I respect you only on condition that you respect me, that is faux respect. If you merit respect, I should respect you, regardless of whether you return it to me.

Disrespect

So far, you’re likely agreeing with most of what I’ve said.  But how about this. What happens when you should, by any objective measure, be respected – and someone disrespects you?

The key question is: do you return disrespect for disrespect? Let me be a little controversial here:

  • If you are holding a resentment against someone who has disrespected you, the salient point is that you are holding a resentment.
  • If you are upset by the lack of respect from others, as should be your due, the only relevant point is that you are upset.
  • If you lose all respect for someone who has disrespected you, then either you misplaced your respect in the first place, or you gave in the desire for revenge.
  • If you demand respect, you will most likely not get it. If you continue to demand it, you will continue to drive down the odds of getting it.

Respect is a virtue – when paid.  When respect is received – treat it as a gift, a gift of grace.

Act so as to earn respect – but give up attachment to the outcome.

Be grateful for the respect you earn – but don’t treasure it.

Respect others – but do so without conditioning it on being respected in return.

It is better to respect than to be respected.

If you can’t get no respect – that’s your problem. And you can fix it anytime you want, by detaching from the outcome.

Go respect someone.

 

 

 

 

 

 

When Being Trustworthy Isn’t Enough to be Trusted

/4 Comments/in /by

In sales, you sometimes hear, “They were pursuing an aggressive strategy – aggressively waiting for the phone to ring.” In other words, sometimes you’ve got to take action.

Much the same is true of trust. If you want to be trusted, sometimes it’s not enough just to be trustworthy. Sometimes you’ve got to take action. But how?

Most of my work over the past 15 years has been on trustworthiness. In The Trusted Advisor and my other books, I’ve put a lot of emphasis on the Trust Equation – more properly, the “Trustworthiness Equation.” The implied (and often explicit) message is, “To be trusted, be trustworthy.”

But what about when that’s not enough?  How do you take action?

To understand what action to take, I need to differentiate between trust, trusting, and being trusted.

Trust, Trusting, and Being Trusted

In all the writing and research I see done in the field of trust, rarely do I see this critical but simple distinction being made. It seems quite obvious, when you think about it. One party trusts, the other party is trusted, and the result is trust. Simple.

And yet – most trust talk obscures the differences. See if you can guess which one is being talked about in these examples:

  1.      Trust in banking is down
  2.      Banks rank low on the trust scale
  3.      People don’t automatically trust their bank anymore.

I’d suggest that probably they mean the following:

1. “Trust in banking is down” – is about trust (e.g. the level of trust that exists between banks and their clients is less than it used to be)

2. “Banks rank low on the trust scale” – is about being trusted (e.g. banks are viewed as less trustworthy than football clubs or hospitals)

3. “People don’t automatically trust their bank anymore” – is about trusting (e.g. these days people are less inclined to trust everything, including, for example, their bank).

But since they all sound pretty much alike, unless you can read the mind of the writer, you can’t be sure. And here’s why that’s important.

The Reciprocal Relationship between Trusting and Being Trusted

The creation of trust between two parties depends on a reciprocating exchange. It begins when party A takes a small risk to trust party B – A is the trustor, the one doing the trusting. Party B is the trustee, the one who is trusted. And if party B agrees to the new relationship, the result is a higher level of trust.

Take something as simple as a handshake at a networking event. Party A goes over to party B and says, “Hi Mark, I’m Charlie – I think your work on the boson participles was great, and I just wanted to meet you (extends hand).”

If party B reciprocates (e.g. “Hi Charlie, delighted to meet you, I’ve heard about you as well, how are things? (shakes hand),” then the result is trust.

If party B does not reciprocate (e.g. B looks at A’s hand, does not extend his own, gives a tight-lipped smile and turns away), then trust is not created.

The key to trust creation is reciprocity – the trustor takes a risk, and if the trustee reciprocates, trust is created. If not, trust is not created.

Therefore: the absence of trust can be caused by:

a. too little trustworthiness on the part of the trustee, or

b. too much risk aversion on the part of the trustor.

Now here’s the key: if you want to be trusted, you have two strategies you can pursue.

  1. Increase your level of perceived trustworthiness (think trust equation), or
  2. Kick-start the reciprocity relationship by first playing the role of trustor. 

You’ve heard the second strategy before. Henry Stimson often gets credit for first saying, “The best way to make a man trustworthy is to trust him.” The same is true of making yourself more trusted – demonstrate vulnerability by offering to trust first.  The natural human reciprocal response is to return the gesture – tit for tat, good for good, bad for bad.

How often have we heard: You get out what you put in, the love you take is equal to the love you make, one good turn deserves another, whether you expect good or ill, that’s what you’ll get. They’re simple statements, but not simplistic – they’re profound.

In game theory, the simple “tit for tat” strategy is shown to beat all others. (You’ll love the link – Richard Dawkins in video with circa 1990 computers).

Using Reciprocity – Rightly 

Reciprocity is deeply wired into our psyches. You can trust it. You can use it. You can depend on it working – if, that is, you don’t abuse it.

Want your customers to trust you? Find some ways to trust them.

Want your colleagues to trust you? Find some ways to trust them.

Want your direct reports, and your report-to’s to trust you? Find some ways to trust them.

Trusting + Trusted = Trust

Trust it. It’ll work for you too.

Destroying Trust with Just a Verb

/3 Comments/in , /by

The Associated Press decided to drop the term “illegal immigrant” from its reporting. Their point: the term ‘illegal’ should be applied to actions, but not to persons. It’s the immigration equivalent of, “hate the game, not the player.”

Of course, that’s red meat to a lion for some. Senator John McCain said, “You can call it whatever you want to, but it’s illegal. There’s a big difference…I’ll continue to call it illegal.” And so the battle is joined. Where one side sees respect, another sees absurd political correctness.

This is a worthless, useless, and totally unnecessary argument. It is also typical of a great many pretend arguments – full of energy and fury, truly signifying nothing.

And who’s the culprit? A verb. To be precise, the verb “to be.” I’m not kidding.

The Tyranny of the Verb “To Be”

In Spanish (and other Romance languages, I think), the English “to be” actually has three forms: estar, tener, and ser. Estar refers to a temporary condition: he is tired, she is in Europe, I’m sick. Tener refers to “having” a passing state – I have hunger, you have thirst, he has luck. Ser, the third form of “to be,” has to do with permanence: he is a man, you are virtuous, she is from the US.

In English, all those forms translate into one word, to be: I am, you are, he is.

Why is that a problem? Consider these interactions:

“The new Bond movie is great.” “No it isn’t, it stinks.”

“He is always negative.” “No, he’s just realistic.”

“You’re not serious.” “I am totally serious!”

“He’s an illegal.” “How can you be so judgmental?”

Because we have only one verb in English to cover so many situations, we end up bludgeoning each other. Since we can’t distinguish our several meanings, we assume others mean the same thing we do.  And when it turns out they meant something else, we chalk it up to obtuseness and  bad will on their part.

Which explains why I always have good intentions – but you! You’re always working some angle.

The American Burden

We’re not about to add two new verbs to American English (I can’t speak for the British or the Strines). But it’s not like we’re handcuffed. All we need is a little clarity of thinking.

1. Distinguish between actions and actors. The AP had this one right. You can still morally condemn people if you want – just don’t be sloppy about your definitions of morality.

2. Distinguish between your preferences and the other’s characteristics. I am not annoying – you are annoyed.

3. Avoid using personal pronouns with “to be” except for “I” and “it.” We have a right to say “I am __.”  We don’t have the same right to say “you are __” or “he is __.”  Only a rocking chair is oblivious to the difference.

I am fairly confident it’ll work for you. Unless you’re seriously pigheaded, that is.

Leadership Development: the Trust Perspective

/0 Comments/in , /by

Leadership and Development, Trusted Advisor, Trust-Based LeadershipI rarely write blogposts promoting the services we offer. But since we have something new to offer – this is one of those times.

Are you involved with issues of leadership in your organization? Then you may be interested in our newest service offering, Trust-based Leadership.

And if learning and developments is not your thing, please pass it on to the appropriate person.

Trust-based Leadership joins our two other flagship programs – Being Trusted Advisors and Trust-based Selling. Here’s how it came about.

The Case for Trust-based Leadership

In 2011’s The Trusted Advisor Fieldbook: A Comprehensive Toolkit for Leading With Trust, Andrea Howe and I articulated the central role of trust in leadership. That may sound like a no-brainer, but it’s not all that obvious. Historically, the idea of “leadership” has been all about vertical relationships – leaders and followers, the high-potential few, charisma. Not so much anymore.

Now, critical business relationships have moved to the horizontal dimension: partners, joint ventures, alignment, startups, remote teams. In such environments, leaders have no direct control – they can’t give orders, they often can’t even offer incentives. What they can do, and must do, is influence people to move in the same general direction. And the number one driver of influence is – trust.

(For a longer discussion of this issue, see The New Leadership is Horizontal, Not Vertical).

Trust-based Leadership – the Program 

We’ve had this program in development since early summer 2012, and it’s finally ready. A one-day program, it’s almost entirely experiential. It is aimed at supervisory to mid-level  groups in all kinds of businesses and organizations. It comes with diagnostics and sustainment plans. See more details here.

It is based on material contained in The Trusted Advisor Fieldbook. Trainers have been certified, the program has been piloted (to rave reviews), and it’s available for train-the-trainer for larger organizations, starting now. (Available at first in the US only; but stay tuned).

Email me [email protected] or call me directly at 1-855-TRUST01, ext. 1001 (that’s 1-855-878-7801, ext. 1001) for more information, and I will reply to you personally. I’d like to talk more with you about this exciting new program.