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Story Time: An Unexpected Way to Recover Lost Trust

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When it comes to trust-building, stories are a powerful tool for both learning and change. Our new Story Time series brings you real, personal examples from business life that shed light on specific ways to lead with trust. Today’s anecdote zeroes in on an unexpected way to recover lost trust and appease an unhappy client: listening.

A New Anthology

Our upcoming book, The Trusted Advisor Fieldbook: A Comprehensive Toolkit for Leading with Trust (Wiley, October 2011), contains a multitude of stories. Told by and about people we know, these stories illustrate the fundamental attitudes, truths, and principles of trustworthiness. In the coming months, we’ll share a selection of stories from the new book with you.

Today’s story is excerpted from our chapter on listening. It vividly demonstrates the value of hearing someone out, resisting the temptation to problem-solve too quickly, and being willing to always do what’s in your client’s best interests—even if that means letting go of the work assignment.

From the Front Lines: Listening to Recover Trust

Catherine Gregory, Senior Principal at SRA International in its Touchstone Consulting Group in Washington, DC, tells a story of the business value of listening.

“I had a team of four working on a long-term project with an important client who especially valued seeing the same faces year after year. In the course of three months, the entire team turned over. I had to deliver the bad news as each team member departed.

“After several turnovers, my client vented to me his frustration. I listened, and then listened some more, as he expressed his concerns and aggravation. He concluded with, ‘I know you are doing all you can. I just had to get that out.’ He was still unhappy and we were able to move forward together.

“Once things were stable with the team, I brought up the possibility of phasing out our support and letting him phase in a contractor who he felt would be more reliable. He didn’t want anyone else; he wanted our team.

“This experience proved to me without a doubt that listening is a critical business skill, and a way to recover trust in the face of challenging circumstances.”

—Catherine Gregory (Senior Principal, SRA International, Touchstone Consulting Group, Washington, DC)

Who in your life is waiting for you to give them a good listening to?

Now Presenting…Four Experts on Powerful Presentations

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I’ve been giving business presentations for nearly 20 years. The more I do it, the more I appreciate just how hard it is to do it really well. Today’s blog post features four resources to help with various aspects of speaking and presenting. Please add your favorites!

Get it Together

The same ol’ same ol’ approach to designing your presentation may not be getting the results you want. Nick Morgan (@DrNickMorgan) shares 5 Quick Ways to Organize a Speech.

Nick says:

“Too many people structure their presentations by pulling together slides and then assembling them like a deck of cards, in what seems like an OK order.  That usually means that no one except the presenter can divine where the speech is headed.

“That’s a bad idea.

“At the heart of a successful presentation is a clear structure.  Which one should you use?  The best structure for what you’re trying to do depends on the nature of your talk.“

Nick then shares five possible situations in the organizational world for which you might be called upon to present, with a suggested outline for each.

Present with Presence

Sims Wyeth (@simswyeth) writes regularly about a variety of delivery techniques like pausing as a presentation skill.

Sims says:

“Taking time to think when you’re on stage makes you more interesting to watch. It gives you presence and gravitas. It fills your body with a mysterious power-electric activity under the skin.”

Who doesn’t want a little mysterious power-electric activity under the skin!

(By the way, I recently signed up for Sims’ weekly Presentation Pointers and am really enjoying them. They are brief, insightful, and usable—a great combination.)

The One “Thing” to Avoid

Patricia Fripp (@PFripp) writes about the importance of being deliberate with the words we choose in How to Sound Intelligent in a Speech or Sales Presentation.

Patricia says:

“The one thing you should always avoid when you speak is—“thing.” What a fuzzy, flabby, non-specific word! Never be vague if you want to be believed. Use exact, precise words—words with power and value.”

Yes, ma’am.

Kill the Presentation Altogether

You wouldn’t treat a job interview like a sales presentation, complete with 40-slide deck, would you? S. Anthony Iannarino (@iannarino) turns our traditional ideas of how to conduct a sales call upside down in You Think You Are Presenting. You Are Being Interviewed.

Anthony says:

“Don’t get me wrong, there are times when you absolutely must present your company using your standard slide deck and when you must share some basic history. Even then, that presentation should not dominate your time with your dream client.

“Your dream client considers you a candidate for hire. They are considering making you part of their team and giving your responsibility for some outcome. The reason they need a dialogue instead of a monologue is because they are trying to get to know you. They are trying to make a good decision.”

Goodbye presenting, hello listening.

Acceptance Is an Active Act

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Usually “acceptance” means giving in to some over-powering force–grudgingly.  Active acceptance is not part of the basic toolkit of trust, but it belongs in the advanced course. If you can learn to actively accept, you will gain unheard-of levels of trust.  Not to mention, you’ll be a lot happier.

Accepting a Smoker

My wife-at-the-time helped me quit smoking by accepting me as a smoker. She told me that while she wanted me to be healthy and live a long life, she more wanted me to live my life on my terms, and she’d do everything to help me with that.

“If you want to smoke in the living room, the bedroom, the kitchen, whatever,” she said, “It’s OK.”  She once rerouted a joint long plane trip into two so I could get off and have less time without a cigarette.  (Hey I was hooked).

About two weeks after she made that offer, I quit on my own.

Acceptance is Not Defeat

Don’t confuse acceptance with surrender under protest.  It’s not giving in.  It’s not something you do as a last resort.  And if you’re “accepting” with fingers crossed, eyes rolled, and resentments intact—that’s something else entirely.

Acceptance is a positive. It’s an affirmation of the other party.  It’s a commitment to support them, despite some fairly significant differences in world-view. Acceptance goes beyond “tolerance”—it’s a statement of the other’s legitimacy in the world.

If it’s a client or a buyer that you’re accepting, it means acknowledging them as equals, and not as parties whom you succeed or fail in selling to or persuading to do your will.

Acceptance is Paradoxical

Much like trust, when you accept another, odd things happen. Accepting someone’s foibles–as my wife did mine–often results in a reciprocating counter-offer from the other party. Unless, that is, you were secretly trying to get that result, in which case you jinxed the deal.

The best way to change someone is, sometimes, to give up trying to change them, and to change yourself instead.  Specifically, to change your attachment to achieving your change.

Don’t ask yourself, “Who needs changing?” or “Who needs to get better at accepting?”

Instead, ask yourself, “Whom do I need to accept?”

The September Trust Matters Review

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Trust Equation

Kristi Hedges applies the Trust Equation to Oprah, explaining how Oprah hits each part of it.

Is it lack of trust that causes problems between China and the EU? China’s Fu Ying thinks so.

Barbara Kimmel looks into how trustworthy companies perform compared to the overal market.  Cold hard dollars perform.

Historian Kenneth Davis puts our current societal lack of trust in historical perspective.  Does history teach that there hope for America?  Read and find out.

Kristi Hedges (again) offers concrete advice on how to win over someone who doesn’t trust you.

Dr. Bjornstrom investigated the effect of trusting your neighbours on health.  It’s what you probably expect, but what’s interesting is the effect of money on trust.

Scott M. Fulton III discusses the effects of hackers attacks on the company that issues SSL certificates, the anchor of trust in the web.

Paul Zak thinks Oxytocin, the “empathy” molecule, could be the key to restoring trust in our world.  Is a chemical the solution to global trust issues?

Fourty-three percent of people won’t tell their doctors about symptoms of depression.  It’s a trust issue, but perhaps not the one you think.

Anthony Iannarino writes about how to deal with customers who have been burned by other salespeople, possibly from your company.  They don’t trust you: how do you change that?

The Trust Matters Review highlights the best articles and posts on trust our research has turned up in the last month.

For a live stream of our trust research, follow our team on Twitter: @CharlesHGreen, @AndreaPHowe, @StewartMHirsch, and @SandyStyer.

If you’d like to share a great article about trust, let us know on Twitter or in the comments here.

For more links to outstanding articles on trust, see:

 

SEO and Content-free Content

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I had a delightful Notting Hill lunch this spring with Sonja Jefferson, of Valuable Content fame. I suggested the word “content” itself, in an era of content farms, sounds content-neutral, even content-free. Hence the challenge:

How to think about quality content in a content-challenging age?

Sonja herself offers insights in Are You Content With the Word ‘Content?’

Harvesting Content in an Age of Content Farms

First, some background. We all like to believe quality (or art, truth, beauty, love) is its own reward.  Unfortunately, living costs money.  And it’s nice if your labor of love can pay the rent. Enter SEO (Search Engine Optimization), a way to have your baby pay for itself.

If you think search doesn’t drive buying behavior big time, think again. Your fantastic content will only attract buyers if they can find it. Hence the classic tug of war between art and advertising, pathos and product placement, literature and mailing lists.

Google et al are not stupid; they won’t let you just pile key words onto a blog and earn high ratings. But the robo-marketers are no dummies either.

Richard MacManus wrote two years ago in The Age of Mega-Content Sites:

…to succeed in the content business on the Web, you should pump out hundreds of pages of content every day – preferably thousands.

The two main players in what became known as the “content farm” business—Answers.com and Demand Media—used either user-generated content or cheap free-lancers.  Basically, they wrote vacuous “articles” containing key words that then increased the search ranking of sites using those words.  (Remember those ads on CNBC and Bloomberg offering to raise your search results, “without paying a penny for clicks?”  Content farms).

If that formula sounds familiar, think Reality TV, term papers for sale, or even automated article-writing software. You no longer have to wait eons for a monkey to type Hamlet; a virtual monkey can concoct a simulated Hamlet, Cliff Notes version, right now.  It’s literary carpet-bombing; blitzing the world with what looks like meaningful words, which are in truth full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Last year, Google’s famed (in some circles) Panda algorithm upped the ante by taking on the most egregious offenses, aiming at extremely low levels of originality.  Suddenly, some big names got caught with their SEO pants down.

We’ve always been in a world where art and commerce coexist uncomfortably. But the tools of commerce have been so radically increased in recent years that we are now re-defining an old word: content.

Content Then, Content Now

Journey back just 9 years. I searched (Google) for the term “content” from all web sources from 9/1/2001 and 9/1/2002.  Here are the top five entries:

The Web Content Style Guide
www.gerrymcgovern.com/web_content_style_guide.html
“The Web Content Style Guide is a valuable resource for anyone involved in creating content for the Web.” …

The Model>Content Standard:Summary
www.intime.uni.edu/model/content/cont.html
The content of education is, of course, of extreme importance to the future of our society. Fortunately, in recent years, content standards have been developed for …

CityDesk – Introducing CityDesk 2.0
www.fogcreek.com/citydesk/
Usability guru Joel Spolsky and the team at Fog Creek Software have created a stunningly easy to use content management system that runs on Windows. …

Reading in the Content Areas: Strategies for Success, Education…
www.glencoe.com/sec/teachingtoday/educationupclose.phtml/12
Rather, content teachers should understand that the difference between successful and unsuccessful readers is the ability to effectively apply strategies to …

Wood Equilibrium Moisture Content Table And Calculator
www.csgnetwork.com/emctablecalc.html
Apr 1, 2002 – Wood Equilibrium Moisture Content Calculator, included is a table of data.

Here are today’s top 8, by comparison:

Content – Define Content at Dictionary.com

Content – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Content (media) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Content – definition of content by the Free Online Dictionary

Questionable Content

Content » News [Cory Doctorow]

Generated content, automatic numbering, and lists

Content Marketing in a Blink: The Content Grid v2 [Infographic …

Content Then was a term used in specific contexts: water content, web writing style, educational content.  The term “content” simply did not appear without an adjectival phrase to give it contextual meaning: the content of education, the content of a dictionary, the content of a movie (“content management system” was the exception). “Content” had no meaning absent the adjective that bounded it. Context added meaning.

Content Now is unleashed. It has become a standalone noun, needing no modifier.  The assumption—and it’s true enough—is that content is now widely transferrable across containers.

Indeed, the boundaries between books and eBooks and CDs and screenplays and movies and cellphone ads is blurred beyond recognition.  And so we need a word to describe that which remains constant across all contexts.

“Content” has become that word. It is the least common denominator of what seeps across platforms. I’m no semiotician, so I’ll say this metaphorically:

What remains as “content” is the first derivative of a symbol.

Sorry, I know that’s pretty abstract. How about this:  “content” loses something in translation when it becomes un-anchored from context.  It leaves us with zero-content content.

Zero-Content Content

Shared mass cultural references, shards of musical hooks and riffs, Kato Kaelin and Paris Hilton; these are examples of “content” freed from context. Famous for being famous; out of context; sound bites; Pavlovian triggers. Symbols which have become famous for being symbols.

Think of a Tolstoy novel moving to a made-for-TV movie, to a trivia question on a quiz show, to a re-tweet of an aggregator’s inclusion of a “Best of Talk Soup” special about quiz shows.

Repurposing content is like pinging on an old analog tape recorder—the sound signal degrades after several bounced tracks, and keeps on degrading. Except in this case, it’s the “meaning” signal.

It’s what happens when bloggers—and hey I’ll be the first to admit it’s a constant temptation—let the siren call of SEO turn a message into “content” so it can fill up an empty space, rather than make the message speak for itself.

Is it any wonder that we like the old “content” better than the new stuff? Opie on Andy Griffith had more meaning than Snookie on Jersey Shore, and we know it.

Monkeys may still have trouble writing Hamlet. But when monkeys write everything Hamlet-related that shows up on a Google search about Hamlet—and nobody cares about “the original”—well, Houston, we have a problem.  A problem of meaning.

“Alas, poor Yorick; I knew him, Horatio,” said Hamlet. You can tag “Yorick,” you can index “Horatio,” you can even hyperlink “alas,” but it won’t get you one step closer to Shakespeare’s meaning.

Content minus context means no meaning.

Content Now isn’t free–it’s loose.

Putting the Meaning back in Content

It’s not hopeless.  You yourself can help.

Sonja Jefferson’s thoughts in Are You Content With the Word ‘Content?’ are right on.  Her definition of “content” includes:

…the unique message you shape for your clients and customers. For your business it’s a body of work that will define what you do.

That definition of content insists on uniqueness at the client level, and on meaningfulness.  That’s precisely right.  Absent such meaning, “content” is just fodder for robo-marketing, a kissing cousin to spam.

What can you do to help? I welcome your thoughts.  Here are a few to prime the pump:

  • Don’t just produce content—say something.
  • If your content doesn’t have a message, it’s just content.
  • Don’t be content with “just content.”
  • Content is less than the sum of the words; meaning is greater.
  • When you write, speak or sing; do it with a particular real person in mind.

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Oops, one of our service providers had a hiccup last week on the “Advertising” post:

“You may have experienced links…incorrectly redirecting to a page that you didn’t designate from Tuesday, September 6th at 5pm PT through Wednesday, September 7th at approximately 10:00 am PT. This was due to an incorrect database update on our part. On top of it, the link re-directed to an anti-phishing website which probably added concern and confusion to the problem. We want to personally say that we’re sorry for this incident.”–our service provider, NetResults.

Trusted Advisor Associates is Finally on Facebook

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We’ve gone and done it.

Trusted Advisor Associates is on Facebook.

We wanted to take the time to officially announce our “big opening” on Facebook. Even with the release of Google+, Facebook is still a great source for building a community within social media.

And that’s precisely what we want to continue to do.

In addition to Trust Matters, Twitter, and Google+, we’re expanding our breadth and giving out useful thoughts, advice and tips on trust in business, society and life.

On Facebook we’ve already started a few running themes and topics that distinguish our presence from what we deliver on Trust Matters.  Some new items you’ll see:

  • Trust, Treps and Twenty-somethings: new advice and information for entrepreneurs and small business-owners
  • Trust Us, It’s Good: great new recommendations spanning the arts
  • Trust-related articles, tips and advice—direct from the horse’s mouth (hint: that means from our talented team here at TAA).

So, go ahead, Like Us on Facebook today.

And, by liking our page, you will also be entered to win a copy of Charles H. Green and Andrea P. Howe’s new book The Trusted Advisor Fieldbook: A Comprehensive Toolkit for Leading with Trust (Wiley, October 31, 2011).

Three-Word Tort Reform: Common Sense

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I confess: I’m not one to read directions. Ever.  But while hanging a mirror recently I happened to glance at the instructions on the back of the OOK package for picture wire (Will not fray!  Will not rust!).  I saw the best instructions ever:

Use Common Sense when hanging your pictures.

So simple.  So elegant.  “Use common sense.”  What would it be like if we could use this as the advice on everything?  Three-word tort reform.  No more fine print disclaimers.  And a vote for self-confidence, trusting our tummies.

Common Sense Tips

Herewith, an offbeat and highly personal collection:

Still, here’s one common sense rule you won’t find in any of these other blogs or books:  “Do not leave the settlements without a suitable gun, and experience in using it.”

From now on, let’s just preface our instructions, fine print and disclaimers with this simple three-word phrase:  use common sense.

Advertising on Trust Matters Blog?

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I’d like some readers’ advice.

I received the following email:

Hello!

I’m contacting you on behalf of a client who is interested in making a contribution to help support your site in exchange for a simple contextual link of a word or phrase somewhere within trustedadvisor.com

Let me know if you offer these types of arrangements and if you have any rates. If you’re unsure, please ask and I would be happy to provide specific details and an offer. The link would be natural and be to a useful resource.

Thank you,

[Name]

And here’s what I wrote back:

Dear [Name],

Thanks for the offer, I appreciate the recognition.

As a site whose subject matter is trust, we have to be cleaner than Caesar’s wife. I have decided, at least thus far, that the easiest way to do so is to simply not accept advertising in any form.

I appreciate the offer, but we’ll have to pass.

Sincerely,

Charlie Green

Now, there’s nothing wrong with advertising.  Nor with affiliate marketing, nor with sales commissions, or any of hundreds of other commercial relationships.  This is not a holier-than-thou blogpost.

Having the no-ads principle has certainly made things easier. As with all values, having them greatly simplifies decisions.

But the truth is, I look wistfully at some sites that do quite well, even extremely well, by the added revenue they are able to generate.  It would be nice.

I like to think there are lines that can be drawn.  For example, the pay-for-contextual-link proposition above could pretty easily be a slippery slope unless you DRINK DIET COKE LIKE I DO ha ha. (Actually just the lime kind, and only occasionally).

In fact, there are probably some commercial links that would represent a positive benefit to the readership of this blog. Or so I think I could argue, though no examples come immediately to mind.

And I also feel no great need to take a ridiculous pledge of no advertising forever, because I’m not so smart as to think I know everything; I reserve the right to get smarter as I get older more experienced.

Your Advice

So I’d like your advice. Is it a good thing to keep this page pristine non-commercial?  Do values have to be absolute to be of value?  Is this a brand thing?

Or are there reasonable approaches to integrating commerce to a website (mainly the blog) based on trust?  Can I get a little mortgage money goin’ here, huh? Can useful lines be drawn?

What do you think?  I really do value your perspective and advice.  Thank you in advance.

Six Risks You Should Take to Build Trust

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We’re pleased to announce the release of our latest eBook: Six Risks You Should Take to Build Trust.

It’s the third in the new Trusted Advisor Fieldbook series by Charles H. Green and Andrea P. Howe.

Each eBook provides a snapshot of content from The Trusted Advisor Fieldbook, which is jam-packed with practical, hands-on strategies to dramatically improve your results in sales, relationship management, and organizational performance.

Six Risks You Should Take to Build Trust reveals:

  • How taking risks actually reduces risk
  • A powerful tool for making difficult conversations easier
  • Six ways to build your risk-taking muscle

P.S. Did you miss out on Volume 1 or 2 of The Fieldbook eBook series? Get them while they’re still available:

Take a look and let us know what you think.

Labor Day

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In honor of the US Labor Day holiday, we are not posting content today.

Instead, we recommend you take a moment and read the Wikipedia entry for Labor Day.

Have a fine day, and put away your whites.  We’ll return you to our regularly scheduled programming tomorrow.