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Introducing the Trusted Advisor Mastery Program

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Our business at Trusted Advisor Associates is to help you become better trusted business advisors.

That started when I co-wrote The Trusted Advisor in 2000. It continued with my book Trust-Based Selling in 2005. In 2008, we added the Trust Quotient, a self-assessment survey which has now had over 14,000 takers.

Throughout, we have given practical, real-world advice to thousands of managers and professionals in major corporations throughout the world through our seminars, webinars, speeches and consulting.

On Monday November 15th we are beginning the first session of our new Trusted Advisor Mastery Program, and I want to tell you why we are excited about it–and why perhaps you should be as well.

What Will the Trusted Advisor Mastery Program Do for Me?

What Is the Trusted Advisor Mastery Program?

Who Should Consider Taking the Program?

What Are the e-Learning Modules About?

What Does the Program Include?

When Does the Program Begin?

How Much Coaching Does the Program Contain?

Who Does the Coaching?

How Much Flexibility in Scheduling Is There?

How Long Does It Last?

What Does the Online Learning Management System Do?

How Much Does the Program Cost?

How Do I Sign Up?

What Will the Trusted Advisor Mastery Program Do for Me?

It will make you a better trusted business advisor. That means:

Your clients/customers will be more likely to take your advice. They will be less likely to seek alternate providers. They become more likely to sole-source you going forward. Your opinions will carry more weight. You will be invited to discuss more open-ended issues than in the past, and invited earlier than before. You will get less price-resistance. Your repeat business, customer retention rates, and customer loyalty are all likely to increase as you become more trustworthy, and trusted.

Are these the kinds of benefits your business could use? What are they worth to your business? What are they worth to you personally?

What Is the Trusted Advisor Mastery Program?

It is a three-month program for cohorts of 5-10 people at a time. It combines e-learning modules with personalized coaching, group coaching, and a rich collaborative on-line environment. Each participant has a great deal of freedom to customize the program specifically around their very particular issues.

Who Should Consider Taking the Program?

External professionals (accountants, consultants, lawyers, etc.), internal staff professionals (HR, IT, Finance, Legal), sales and service people from complex product and services industries. The program is particularly attractive for those in smaller companies, including solo and partnership businesses that don’t have access to 20-30 person in-house training sessions in larger corporations.

What Are the e-Learning Modules About?

There are 20-plus modules, all delivered personally by me, Charles H. Green. All the content that I deliver to my major corporate clients I deliver here, in e-learning form, to participants, in ways you can rewind and read again. The materials are annotated, referencing two books, forty articles, and over 800 blogposts.

The modules dive deep into issues like creating trust in the sales process, understanding the dynamics of different trust temperament personalities, practical uses of the Trust Equation, the application of the four Trust Principles, trust-based leadership, successfully creating trust in conversations, creating trust in virtual teams, accelerating trust creation, recovery from trust loss situations, mitigating trust risk, asking difficult questions, and answering the most difficult sales questions.

What Does the Program Include?

You get:

· access to all online content

· 4 one-on-one coaching meetings, about an hour each

· 4 hours of group coaching (with other cohort members)

· unlimited access to the customized Learning Management System

· online forum conversations between your cohorts, coach, and myself

· copies of both books

· your own trust quotient and trust temperaments self-assessment.

When Does the Program Begin?

The first session starts November 15, and is fully subscribed. If you send an email to [email protected], we will notify you when the next cohort-session begins. (Your email will be used for no other purpose, and will not be sold or given to anyone else).

How Much Coaching Does the Program Contain?

Each participant gets 4 individual, one-on-one hour-long coaching sessions with a professional, Trusted Advisor Associates coach; either Stewart M. Hirsch, TAA’s head of coaching, or coaches under his guidance. The four group coaching calls include exercises and discussions on issues that arise in the online forum.

Who Does the Coaching?

Stewart M. Hirsch, Trusted Advisor Associates’ head of coaching, is the lead coach for the Trusted Advisor Mastery program; he does much of the coaching, and other qualified coaches work under his guidance. Stewart is a superb and experienced coach, steeped in the Trusted Advisor approach and dedicated to the success of all his clients.

How Much Flexibility in Scheduling Is There?

One of the most attractive characteristics of the Trusted Advisor Mastery program is the extreme degree of flexibility in scheduling it offers you. With the exception of the four group coaching hours, which require minimal coordination with other members of your cohort, you have great freedom. The online learning can be done 24-7; your individual coaching can be arranged at any time that is mutually convenient to you and your coach.

How Long Does It Last?

The program typically last about three months, though the precise beginning and ending, as well as the pace, are well within your control. The modules and online forum remain open for a total of five months, to allow discussion and learning to continue after the formal portion of the program is completed.

What Does the Online Learning Management System Do?

It is a customized environment, built on an Adobe LMS, the same kind of platform used by major universities for large scale delivery. This is not your retail-available webinar-online type software. It offers you forums, special readings, eLearning materials, webcasts, a diary function, and rich controls for customization and privacy.

How Much Does the Program Cost?

The material delivered in this program is exactly the same material we deliver live to groups of 20-30 in-house for major corporations–except that it is priced far less. By combining online learning with designed high-quality interaction and just-in-time coaching, we have been able to keep this program affordable, and yet very high value at the same time.

How Do I Sign Up?

The November 15 session is fully subscribed. We will be doing more programs in the future, though specific dates have not yet been set. To be notified when we schedule the next program, send an email to [email protected].

TrustedAdvisor Associates Workshops & Events, Fall 2010

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Join us this Fall at one or more of our 2010 TrustedAdvisor Associates events through globally accessed programs and webinars!  Topics include  the new Trusted Advisor Mastery Program!
 
We hope you’ll be able to attend and  look forward to seeing you!

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Mon. Nov. 15th        Global          Charles H. Green & Stewart Hirsch

We are launching a new program on November 15th! A three-month Trusted Advisor Mastery Program combining e-learning with one-on-one coaching, group learning, and more. Find out more by watching this video: http://bit.ly/a39Q19 and contact Stewart Hirsch, Practice Lead for TAA Coaching at 781.784.5280; [email protected].

How To Prove You’re Reliable

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Trust takes time. It’s one of those things we say without examination. Turns out it’s largely a myth.

Credibility. Reliability. Intimacy. Self-orientation. These are the four factors in the Trust Equation. Of these, we usually say that only Reliability takes time. Reliability lives in the realm of action, and because of that, repeated, consistent, predictable actions over the passage of time are required to show reliability.

But even that, on closer examination, isn’t always true.

On a recent trip I had a chance to see that Reliability can be demonstrated in a moment or two and needn’t always take time to prove. It was a taxi driver (why is it always taxi drivers who teach us so much?) who brought this point home.

A colleague and I were in Washington delivering a workshop and staying at a hotel “just across the parking lot” from the corporate center where the training was being held. Unfortunately, it was pouring rain, the parking lot was several football fields across and there were half a dozen different buildings to choose from. We knocked on the window of a waiting cab and asked if the driver would take us such a short distance, got an affirmative yes, and jumped in. And given the address, he knew exactly which building was our destination.

During the few minutes it took to get to the other building, the driver had a (hands-free) cell conversation with someone who had clearly ridden with him often and was booking an airport trip for the following day. When we got out and offered to pay, he wouldn’t take any fare but gave us his business card instead and suggested that we call him for our return trips out of Washington.

When we walked in the door, it turned out we had to go to yet another nearby address; this time an employee gave us a lift. To top it off, getting home had gotten a little more complicated: one of us was going to the airport, another to Union Station, both at different times and we weren’t 100% sure just where we needed to be picked up.

But when we were ready to organize our trips home, of course we called this driver. He’d already demonstrated his reliability. How?

It didn’t hurt that we were predisposed to like thim when he volunteered to run us across the football fields. It proved he wasn’t hungry for money or trying to take advantage of a couple of people who would have paid plenty to stay dry.

We heard him talking to someone who was clearly a long-time client. Must be reliable if a frequent traveler from the Washington area counted on him to help her make her flights on time. A big "R" there.

Finally, the business card. It suggested that he was serious about his work and made it easy for us to find him when we were ready to go.

Indeed, he found us at the new building at the right time, took my colleague to the airport and made it back in plenty of time to pick me up and get me to my train. 

All of which reminded me: even Reliability doesn’t always take time.

Becoming trusted is less about logging more hours—and more about the quality of our relationships.

TrustedAdvisor Associates Workshops & Events, Fall 2010

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Join us this Fall at one or more of our 2010 TrustedAdvisor Associates events through globally accessed programs and webinars!  Topics include  "No Trust, No Team: Building Trust in a Virtual Setting," and the new Trusted Advisor Mastery Program!
 
We hope you’ll be able to attend and  look forward to seeing you!

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Mon. Nov. 1st        Global          Charles H. Green & Rick Lepsinger

In conjunction with OnPoint Consulting, Charlie will be hosting a free webinar entitled "No Trust, No Team: Building Trust in a Virtual Setting," with Rick Lepsinger, President of OnPoint Consuting, focusing on virtual team collaboration and effectiveness through trust. 12:00pm EST, 9:00am PST. System requirements: PC based attendees–Windows(r) 7, Vista, XP or 2003 Server. Macintosh(r) based attendees: Mac OS(r) X 10.4.11 (Tiger(r)) or newer. Click here for more information and to register.

Mon. Nov. 15th        Global          Charles H. Green & Stewart Hirsch

We are launching a new program on November 15th! A three-month Trusted Advisor Mastery Program combining e-learning with one-on-one coaching, group learning, and more. Find out more by watching this video: http://bit.ly/a39Q19 and contact Stewart Hirsch, Practice Lead for TAA Coaching at 781.784.5280; [email protected].

How to Convince Your Boss You’re Right

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Your boss gives you an important job to do. You are good for the job, you know what you’re doing, and you’re clear about the right answer. And then–your boss won’t go along with it. 

Worse, you’re really qualified to make this judgment call. And your boss’s logic is goofy. His/Her reason boils down to ‘we’ve always done it that way,’ or ‘just do it by the book,’ or maybe just personal preference. Your boss won’t listen, just digs in his/her heels.   

And it’s getting really irritating.

What can you do to convince your boss you’re right?

Surprise surprise, there is no guarantee.   But you can dramatically improve the odds. Here’s how.

Convincing Starts with Right Thinking

You start by getting really clear on two ideas—in your own head.

Idea 1. You are not the boss of your boss.   Your boss is the boss of you. So if it ever really comes down solely to who’s got the power, you can hang it up. 

Deal with that.

Idea 2. You will rarely convince anyone—particularly your boss—that you are right, as long as that equates to convincing them that they are wrong. If “I’m right” rhymes with “you’re wrong,” you can also hang it up.

Are we clear? 

If so, then you’ve figured out that “How do I convince my boss that I’m right?” is entirely, 100%, the wrong question. Really—completely wrong. If you got sucked in by the title of this blog, then you have to do some re-defining of your objectives—right now.

Think about it. If your objective involves “I’m right” then you’ve got an ego problem. I mean, why is this all about you? If you’re a serious team member, shouldn’t the question be “what’s the right answer” rather than “who’s got the right answer?”

And if your objective involves “convincing someone else” then you’ve got a control problem. I mean, why should you assume the issue is one of changing someone else to think like you, rather than of creating new joint collaborative thinking?

Redefine “Convincing Your Boss”

Imagine—even though it’s extremely unlikely—that, just for the sake of argument—your answer isn’t fully perfect. And imagine, though equally unlikely, that you actually could convince your boss of the correctness of your flawed recommendation. That would not be the optimal ending, would it?

That’s one small reason for you to engage in a dialogue, rather than a wrestling match. But here’s a much bigger reason.

The Paradox of Influence

It turns out, one of the best ways to convince someone is to listen to them first. That’s the gist of what a world expert on influence, Dr. Robert Cialdini, has to tell us. If you listen to someone first, the tendency of humans is usually to reciprocate—which means, to then listen to you.

But this reciprocal listening must have a genuine quality about it. It can’t be just, ‘OK I’ll let you blab for a while as the price for letting me give my pitch, so let me just grit my teeth, OK off you go…”

It actually has to be a genuine act of respect. It has to come from true curiosity, not from a kit-bag of carefully pre-designed questions. You actually have to, for lack of a better word, care.

To Convince Your Boss, First Give Up on Convincing Your Boss

If you want to increase the odds of convincing your boss, first—give it up. Completely. Give up on the objective of ‘convincing your boss.’

In its place, commit yourself to an attitude of curiosity. Go ask your boss:

Boss, I know we’ve been cross-wise on this one. And you know what, I have to admit, I could, of course, be wrong. And if so, I probably don’t even understand how I’m wrong. So please, do me a favor. 

I would really appreciate it if you’d tell me all about how you see this issue—from start to finish. I want to completely understand how you come at it, and how you came to see it that way. I am truly curious, and want to know.

And that’s it. If all we do here today is help me learn from you how to think about this, it will have been a great day. Period.

Then listen. And plan to say ‘thanks,’ and walk away. 

Yes, walk away. 

Because if your boss has any interest in discussing your point of view, (s)he will ask you about it at this point. And if they don’t have any interest, go see Ideas 1 and 2 at the outset of this article, the part where it says they’re your boss, not vice versa.

Here’s the paradox. Assuming your idea really was pretty good, going through this process will considerably increase the odds of it being accepted by your boss. But only—only—if you are willing to completely give up your objective of bending another person’s will to the force of yours.

If you’re willing to give it up, you’ll increase the odds of getting it to happen.  The secret is: It’s not about you.