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The Language of Moral Education in Business: a NYTimes Moment in Time

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Yesterday, May 2, the New York Times initiated an interesting global experiment: asking huge numbers of people, all around the planet, to take a single photograph—all at precisely the same time, 15:00 GMT. Read more about it here. 

A cool experiment? Indeed. Imagine the impression of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of photos, all of precisely the same moment in human history. I can’t wait to see it.

But that’s not what I want to point out. Because the way in which the Times announced the contest tells us about how to develop a sense of morality, a shared sense of ethics, in a large group: in this case, a world population.

Here’s that link again:

If you read it, you’ll be struck by the language, as were many of the early commenters on the article. Here is some sample language:

Do I have to take my picture at exactly 15:00?
No. We don’t expect atomic-clock precision. And we’d rather you send a good picture taken one minute after the hour than a mediocre picture taken exactly on the hour.

What if I cheat?
Come on. Why would you?

Look, we trust you. Besides, there aren’t enough cups of coffee in New York to keep our tiny staff awake for the time it would take to peruse the metadata in every single JPEG we receive. So we’re relying on you to understand that any significant departure from the benchmark hour only subverts the communal enterprise.

Of course, if we’re presented with evidence that your entry wasn’t taken close to 15:00, we’ll remove it from the gallery.

What about adding or subtracting or combining elements?
Again, don’t…

And if I do so anyway?
Really, why would you? We’re not going to pore over submissions looking for fakery and fraud. But we will remove any photographs that are demonstrably manipulated. Please, just spare us.

The Language of Moral (Business) Education

The Times is attempting to deal with a group. In this case, a remarkably global, diverse, and very loosely connected group. If even small numbers of people behave badly, they have the power to subvert the project.

I suggest this is a typical situation for moral education. What do you do to encourage members of a group to behave in a way that encourages the greater good for all?

  • You could simply depend on the free market of ideas, believing that if the photography idea is a good one, it will survive the market; and it doesn’t survive the free market, then it was a bad idea that didn’t deserve to live in the first place.
  • You could define a set of incentives to encourage the right group behavior, define metrics to measure the right group behavior, then tune the incentives to maximize it. 
  • Alternatively, you could enact a set of regulations about the contest. You could then have a government agency enforce them.

Or–you could choose the tools of moral education.

You acknowledge your powerlessness to compel the behavior of others. Instead, you appeal to their conscience.

What about cheating? You go directly to the potential cheater and say, ‘Really, why would you?’ What’s to keep someone from cheating? Again, make it personal: say, ‘Look, we trust you…We rely on you…to not subvert the communal enterprise…Please, just spare us.’

This is the language of moral education. Appeal directly to the individuals. Appeal to their innate sense of community. Acknowledge the absence of your power to compel their compliance. Indeed, acknowledge your dependence on their willingness to comply.

That’s the language of moral education. It’s disarmingly honest, transparent, and vulnerable. It acknowledges an individual conscience.

And it works.

Amazing, isn’t it, how infrequently we think of applying it to our challenging business situations.
 

Peter Firestein on Trust, Character and Reputation (Trust Quotes #4)

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Peter Firestein’s extraordinary career began in Indiana. He soon left for California, taught himself Spanish in a park in Mexico, learned commodities in Latin America, and has a unique resume, having worked for Michael Milken and advised the Brazilian Government on privatization of its national phone company.

Peter ended up counseling mega-global companies on corporate reputation and Investor Relations. His book ranges both wide and deep; you can’t summarize Peter’s insight and wisdom briefly. But I do try to pick out a few themes in this interview.

CHG: Peter, Let me put the onus on you: what strikes me most about the book is perhaps the role of personal character and of relationships in dealing with mega-corporate institutional relationships. It’s tough to summarize such a broad book, but how do you see it?

PF: You’ve actually done a pretty good job with your question, Charlie. I try to suggest in the book that the job of leading a significant company these days requires involvement of the whole person, not just the part of the person trained to analyze, fix, and build businesses.

People who’ve reached the point of development where they’re considered capable of leading companies are attuned to making decisions on the basis of metrics. You don’t get there unless you understand return on investment, for example. That’s always been true, and it’s never been more important than today.

But the world requires something more of you now. Modern information technology makes enormous amounts of intelligence on businesses available to anyone who can use a search engine. For companies, there’s no longer any place to hide. In addition, having information conveys to any citizen a sense of entitlement to register opinions and organize opposition to companies whose actions seem out of line with common values.

The good news: any manager with sufficient maturity to run a company also has enough life experience to understand how people outside the company feel themselves affected by its actions. But too many otherwise competent corporate leaders don’t understand that these two sides of life are not only connected—they’re inseparable.

That’s what I mean when I say that, in the end, it’s all personal. In a post-modern world where everyone seems not only to have an opinion, but the eloquence to express it, being the boss doesn’t make you immune; it makes you vulnerable. The moment you take that to heart, you’ve made your first step toward resolving conflicts with your antagonists. Leading is, first of all, listening.

CHG: One thing that struck me was the insistence on reputation as being built inside out: the only sensible strategy is to be the company you want your stakeholders to see.

PF: One of the book’s early titles was “The Glass House,” meaning, of course, that you can’t fake things for very long any more. Just thinking about the failed obfuscations attempted by some big corporations in recent years can bring actual, physical pain.

When I say you have to “build reputation from the inside out,” I mean that managers have to create reporting and communications structures that not only disseminate values throughout the organization, but absorb the workforce’s on-the-ground experience all the way to the top. Every action the company takes, therefore, represents its core value system. And the workforce’s day-to-day reality informs senior decision-making.

I call this “vertical communication,” and I think it reduces the likelihood that a CEO will wake up some day to find that a regional manager has been found to have bribed a government official, or a sub-contracted factory is discriminating against female employees, or an accidental dump of toxic waste has disappeared from company records somewhere down the line.

There are few small failures in big business. In fact, the depth of failure often presents a mirror image of success that preceded it. True vertical communication that extends throughout the organization helps you spend your life thinking about other things.

The legal disclaimer on any financial offering warns that past performance does not indicate future results. With human beings, it generally does.

CHG: Since this blog focuses on trust, please tell TrustMatters readers how you see the relationship between trust and reputation?

PF: If there’s a difference between high trust and strong reputation, I’m blind to it. Both trust and reputation—whether high or low—are expectations of future experience based on what is known about the past. That’s how people differ from markets. The legal disclaimer on any financial offering warns that past performance does not indicate future results. With human beings, it generally does.

CHG: You provide a very real-world example of exactly how a big company should go about recovering from a reputational slip, and what impressed me about it was your recommendation of aggressive, pro-active engagement. Say more about that?

PF: Here’s how pro-active you ought to be. You start preparing for the next crisis five years before it happens. And you don’t need a crystal ball for this. If you’re a multi-national company of scale, it’s impossible to avoid reputational mishaps. Some day, somewhere, someone will—intentionally or by neglect—commit a reputation-compromising act in your name. The inevitability must be an integral part of your thinking. So, you have to have a culture in place well in advance that enables you to respond appropriately to events that never crossed your mind before they happened.

People call it crisis communications, but it’s much more than that. Communications, by itself, never fixed anything. People also call it crisis management. But the crisis has already occurred, so the opportunity to manage it is past. You could call it management of the aftermath, and the only way to manage the aftermath effectively is to participate in it.

Which means, to some degree, participating in the emotions of those you have harmed. Referring to a person in the CEO position, the corporation becomes the person, and vice versa. If, as an individual, you have empathy toward a family who’s lost a father or a mother, you have to show that same empathy as a corporation.

Beyond this, the best piece of advice available on the subject is to resist the temptation to let your lawyers protect you. They can’t. There’s a short list of companies that have come out of disasters with stronger reputations than they’d had before. In all cases, they did so because they were able to identify with those who were angry with them. Enlightened leadership means understanding there’s no Plan B.

CHG: Let me challenge you on one small item: you assert that the most important constituency is investors, though you also advocate systematically managing a wide variety of stakeholders. Isn’t investor turnover increasing radically these days? Does that diminish your point?

PF: The building of reputation can’t be about anything but what motivates management – and that has to do with investors’ willingness to value the shares at higher levels. Turnover? If someone’s selling, someone else is buying.

There’s no altruism in business, nor should there be. But the cold fact these days is that sustainable behavior means supporting legitimate social interests. You don’t have to like it, and you don’t have to take a “nice” pill to do it. It’s just business, but business has changed. Here’s where investors’ interests enter the social sphere: A company facing a social and regulatory headwind is likely to have higher capital costs and less-than-certain chances of strategy execution.

Investors don’t like that. It’s not the job of a corporation to address social interests—except where doing so is the only avenue to making business successful. And that’s already become the normal condition in most industries. I just read a wonderful quote by a Canadian union official named Stephen Hunt who, in a speech about social responsibility in mining, could have been referring to any industry when he said: “A mining company is only as good as its opposition.”

CHG: You’ve dealt with dozens, maybe hundreds, of CEOs. What has been the most common blind spot or weakness you have seen regarding good reputation management?

PF: It may be my sunny disposition, but I can’t remember at the moment meeting a business leader who wasn’t driven by earnest good intentions. Sure, I’ve known my share of indicted folks; but I liked them, too. There’s something about giving yourself over to a goal that’s not that different from love of family. It’s personally attractive.

I had the great good fortune to grow up in the Sovereign State of Indiana, and it wasn’t until I was in my thirties and working in a New York trading company that I came to realize that high intelligence in a person does not necessarily equate to noble intentions.

Because you are using the world to build wealth, the way you treat that world will follow you.

The most common blind spot (since you asked) is a lack of balance, which I guess can be closely associated with laser focus on a goal. Perhaps a better way to describe it is to call it a lack of context. Because you are using the world to build wealth, the way you treat that world will follow you. It wouldn’t hurt us to remember once in a while that American native populations held profound respect for the game they had to kill in order to live.

I once sat down to a dinner meeting between a CEO and equity analysts in an elegant New York hotel. The CEO was among the most prominent European industrial titans of the last half century (a client). His dozen or so guests were invited there to eat and ask him questions. He opened the conversation this way: “My father taught me,” he said, “that to make a living, you have to rub other people.”

He was assuring them of his accessibility. There was no imaginable reason for him to endure their earnest self-importance had he not wished to. He didn’t need them. But hosting them reflected his idea of how the world worked. There was no amount of esteem or money that could free you from the need to engage.

CHG: You have a fine sense of the historical about you. We’ve been through this kind of business reputation downturn before, certainly in the US. What’s different this time? What should we learn from the past?

PF: The past can be a deeply misleading subject because there isn’t much that hasn’t happened in it. If we’re talking about the past experienced by those of us who have come of age since World War II, in which America emerged triumphant in an otherwise devastated world, there’s a strong argument suggesting that’s the most unrepresentative of all the pasts available for our consideration.

One thing we’ve learned from the past is that the notion that things are different this time provides an assured road to ruin—as does a sense of invincibility and the belief that we’re smarter than those who have come before.

The reputation of business—as cyclical as anything else—will continue its descent until a new ideal appears to propel it upward again. Perhaps the last ideal that floated the reputation of business involved the building of the industrial world and the opening of the West. Dust from the explosion of that ideal is still settling around us. Perhaps the next upswing will come from the ideal of restoring the environment—in other words, from respect for the same earth the last ideal wrecked.

It is certain that we don’t get to decide these things for ourselves. In trying to come to terms with the cycles of sentiment, I have taken comfort in a phrase coined by New York Times Columnist David Brooks. The term is “epistemological modesty” and refers to the inescapable fact that, no matter how hard we try, we really don’t know very much. Everyone’s familiar George Santayana’s saying: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Not being much of a comedian, Santayana forgot his punch line: “So are those who can remember it.”

CHG: Let’s imagine this blogpost got forwarded to 50 CEOs. On the whole, on the average, what are the top 2-3 things CEOs need to hear?

PF: Sir or Madam CEO: I have nothing but good news for you. It is this: You have more control over the fate of your company, your reputation, and your career than you imagine.

Do you look at your critics—the trigger-happy media, activists with a bone to pick, investors and analysts who just don’t get it—and tell yourself that not one of these people has ever run a company for a day? So, how could any of them understand what you’re trying to accomplish?

In their lack of fairness lies your advantage. During the latter part of the 20th Century, when anti-tobacco activists tried everything they could think of to put cigarette makers out of business, their nearly constant companion was a Philip Morris public affairs executive named Steve Parrish. He spoke at their conferences and kept in close touch with the principals of organizations that opposed him.

While absorbing all their slings and arrows, he offered them a continuous flow of new information about the manufacture of smoking products, including the companies’ efforts to reduce their deadliness. He discussed regulation of the industry, which eventually came to pass. The result was that—whether we like it or not—tobacco companies survive as a highly-profitable business.

Parrish’s strategy was to increase his adversaries’ knowledge of the tobacco industry—a counterintuitive approach if there ever was one. The byproduct of this flow of information was that he continually moved the goal posts on them, preventing closure of the argument despite an extraordinarily hostile environment and an enormous consensus against him.

CEOs have at their disposal one of the modern world’s most powerful weapons: Information. Gifted corporate leaders will use it to engage adversaries, induce them to invest in dialogue to the point that it cannot reasonably be abandoned, and, by that route, achieve a workable consensus. If companies whose products kill you can do this, why can’t anyone?

CHG: How much difference can individuals make?

PF: Excluding natural disasters, change comes from nowhere but individuals. Historical forces, wars, financial trends, market bubbles and collapses, the discovery of penicillin, and the invention of cheap global digital communication as well as post-modernist art can all be summed up in single word: Behavior. Even mass behavior has to start with an individual—a notion that may lead us to one definition of leadership.

CHG: In your book, you carry on an extended discussion about how very good companies, at least for a period of time, seem to lose direction. Merck during its Vioxx episode is one example you explore. You also suggest a concept called “Structural Corruption.” What’s this about, and what insight can you offer about the mechanism by which some companies seem inexplicably to turn south?

PF: I use Merck as an example because it was a fantastic company for over a century and is a truly admirable one today. But Merck’s Vioxx interlude, during which it seemed to want to overturn the last 400 years of the scientific method by subordinating disclosure of pharmacological research to the desires of its marketing department, shows how even great companies can become confused when they allow commercial factors to cloud their judgment.

The scientific method says you base conclusions on observed fact. Merck hid harmful side effects of its drug in order to sell more of it. I maintain that the people inside the company would never have behaved this way in their private lives. Their judgment suffered from an insularity within the company that distorted their frame of reference. There was a kind of “echo effect” at work in which people gradually talked each other into highly inadvisable actions—and many inside and outside the company suffered.

I came up with the term “structural corruption” to describe an impossible situation in which managers sometimes find themselves when their industry’s fundamental business model goes illegal. This describes parts of the insurance industry a few years ago when Marsh & McLennan enrolled its competitors in a scheme to rig bids for big institutional contracts and pay out illegal commissions. You couldn’t compete unless you played the game.

So, imagine a manager who’s invested his or her life in building a career in that sector, and has done so by behaving ethically, and then has to contemplate giving it all up in order to maintain a hard-won reputation. Imagine a similar manager trying to win a contract in a foreign country in which he or she is competing against a company domiciled in a place where the government winks that the payment of bribes to win business.

The concept of “structural corruption” is useful in distinguishing the dynamic in which even managers with the highest standards of conduct can become victimized by secular ethical trends. The questions people face in such circumstances can be life-changing. One secular ethical trend lies behind the Great Recession that began in 2008 and whose end is not yet convincingly in sight. But that’s another story.

+++++

CHG: It’s been a real pleasure meeting and talking with you; anyone interested in buying Peter’s book, which I recommend can find it here: Crisis of Character: Building Corporate Reputation in the Age of Skepticism

This is number 4 in the Trust Quotes series.

The entire series can be found at: http://trustedadvisor.com/trustmatters.trustQuotes

Recent posts in this series include:
Trust Quotes #3: Dr. Eric Uslaner on the Nature of Trust
Trust Quotes #2: Robert Porter Lynch on Trust, Innovation and Performance
Trust Quotes #1: Ross Smith of Microsoft

Do You Trust the Taxi-Driver? Or Not?

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I spent last week in Denmark, 40 miles outside of Copenhagen. While nearly every Dane speaks near-perfect English, I of course stand out as an American.

I took a taxi from a resort hotel venue to the local train station. The fare was 70 kroner (about 15 dollars). I gave the driver a 200-kroner note. He gave me back 30 kroner change.

So here’s the question: If it were you in that situation, what would you instantly assume about what is going on?

Trusting vs. Being Trustworthy

Much of what we usually talk about on Trust Matters is trustworthiness, as opposed to trusting. They are not the same thing; in fact they are quite distinct.

The ability to trust strangers (as will be described in this week’s Trust Quotes interview with Eric Uslaner—tune in Wednesday) is instilled in us when we were young, and does not change easily. Trustworthiness, on the other hand, feels less risky and is more teachable.

The taxi driver incident is about trusting, not trustworthiness: and it offers a quick litmus test of your propensity to trust. Which do you instinctively assume:

  1. You assume that obviously the taxi-driver made a mental slip, thinking you had given him a 100-kroner note, rather than a 200-kroner note. It is early in the morning, perhaps he hasn’t had his coffee. You politely point out you had given him 200.
  2. You momentarily think, “What is going on here? Why did he do that?” and then just as quickly assume he probably just had a momentarily lapse. Since the 200-kroner note is still in his hand, you are comfortable pointing at it and smiling, so that he will notice his error.
  3. You are mildly annoyed: you think, “He can’t be pulling this move, can he?” You quickly realize, however, there is no risk here; you simply point out the 200-kroner note still in his hand, somewhat clumsily sitting on his lap. “I gave you 200,” you firmly point out, realizing also he had plausible deniability—if pressed, he’d almost certainly insist it was an honest mistake.
  4. Adrenaline rises in you instantly: you think, “What do you take me for, some naïve foreigner you can hustle? No way, Jose, are you getting away with this crap—not with me, you don’t.” You point directly at his hand, still guiltily holding on the to the 200-note, and say grimly with clenched teeth, “You’re short, buddy; give me the other 100, and you can forget about a tip.”

There is no right or wrong answer here, there are simply degrees of propensity to trust. Whether your answer is ‘smart’ is also situational; you may answer differently in rural Denmark at 9AM than you would in downtown Hamburg or Detroit at 2AM (and if not, you’re naïve).

Given that, if your answer is:

  1. You are very trusting, more so than the average person in the world. Depending on the situation, you may be too trusting, in fact, for your own good.
  2. You make a distinct choice to note your suspicions, but to act as if you do not have them; people read you as responding from trust, though you haven’t given up your objectivity about risk.
  3. You’re a bit suspicious. While most would not take offense at your response, neither are you likely to take advantage of some opportunities presented in life. Your basic response to life is one of caution.
  4. You believe you don’t have much control over your life, and that others know it and are out to get you before you get them. You expect little of others, and are rarely disappointed.

The interesting thing about trusting-ness is that it is catching. The way you behave toward others influences the way they respond back to you.

Whether you expect the worst of people, or the best of people, you’ll pretty much be right.

Act accordingly.

The Vocabulary of Trust on Twitter

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iStock Texting in meetingTrying to define the word “trust” is a bit like defining obscenity. As former Chief Justice Potter Stewart said about the latter, you can’t define it, but you know it when you see it.

My favorite example of this is, “I trust my dog with my life—but not with my ham sandwich.” It’s a joke we all get; but it does wreak havoc with a straightforward definition of the word.

To put it another way, the meaning of the word is contextual.  A dictionary is not a book of symbolic logic; it is an anthropological document. It tracks how real people in the real world use real words.  And the more contextual the word’s meaning, the more we have to rely on straightforward anthropology.

One of the real worlds of today is Twitter land. For about two months now, I have been tracking the use of the word "trust" as it is used in various conversations on twitter. It is interesting to see how the language used by real people and unconscious conversation tracks very neatly with the usages of "trust" identified previously in articles and blog posts on this website.

The Several Meanings of "Trust"

I have suggested elsewhere that we sometimes talk about trusting, and other times we talk about being trusted, or trustworthy. There are other times when we talk about trust per se, meaning the state that exists on both trusting and being trusted are present. Following are some examples of each (typos left in for authenticity).

Examples of trust meaning "trusting"

  • what i learn from @utterperfect : Never trust anyone a 100%. You’ll never know what the people around you are capable off.
  • Posted my favorite butternut squash ravioli recipe. Trust me, it’s worth the effort.
  • Better of with just friends with benefits. Bc I don’t trust no1 anymore!
  • @Antoniogreen Yeah I trust in God & I’m not scared to die, I’m just scared to die in pain you know.
  • damn. people suck. no wonder its hard for me to trust people. Now i can’t tell if there telling the truth or not.
  • i have trust issues
  • Preview: Luke 17:3-4; When I have forgiven I will trust ..
  • Have Rules But Trust People you can’t have a rule for every situation.

Examples of trust meaning “trustworthiness”

  • RT @amlibraries: Top 100 health websites you can trust
  • @craigbutcher @paulums never trust french hosting
  • @NICELOOKNINA girl never trust annnyone who’s nice to everyone.
  • @sydsouthworth The externals work great for storage just don’t trust it only. Use other media as well like DVDs
  • Some trust in silver and some in gold some in chariots and horses but ill put my trust in the LORD for in HIM is safety and security.
  • @Mister_Magister Did I or did I not make you tofu you actually liked? Always trust a foodie 😀
  • Never trust anybody who says ‘trust me.’ Except just this once, of course. – from Steel Beach
  • @BillyTheBrime Trust me, I’m an expert ma’am.
  • And it backs up my view that you should never trust the moral right;)
  • Ok, we’ve had booby-trapped shoes and undies. Which piece of clothing will imperil lives next? I don’t trust cufflinks.
  • "Man made alcohol, God mad marijuana, who do you trust?"

Examples of trust meaning “a state of trust”

  • Talk it out. Come to a compromise. Don’t just keep someone around and then cheat on them. You risk your reputation as a person. No trust.
  • RT @DIJONES82: In my world trust is more important than love.
  • Another thing lacking in the Black American relationship is communication which breeds trust
  • Sugar Mtns 7 brand tenets: Trust, Clarity, Experimental, Intelligent, Remarkable, Consistently Good, Full Flavored.
  • It takes years to earn trust, and just moments to break it.
  • Is trust as important as commitment in marriage? After all, marriage is a covenant, right?

What Meaning do Trust Measures Assume?

When you think about trust patterns or read statistics about trust, ask yourself: what meaning is being measured?

• Is it the trustworthiness of someone or some institution? (Typical question: how much do you trust banks to do the right thing?)
• Is it the ability of someone to trust? (Typical question: do you think people are generally trustworthy?)
• Is it the state of trust in general? (Typical question: Is this a high-trust environment around here?)

Are you measuring changes over time (longitudinal)? Or are you thinking of contrasting levels (used car dealers vs. lawyers vs. nurses)?

Patterns of Trust on Twitter

I have not yet systematically analyzed the data, but I can make a couple of generalizations.

  • The word "trust" gets used very frequently; at 11PM (US EST) on a weeknight, about 100 tweets every 7 minutes employ the English word “trust.”
  • On Twitter, as compared to business, the meaning “trusting” is probably more common, and the meaning “trustworthiness” is probably less common.
  • The most common usage is probably the imperative “trust me,” closely followed by the imperative “don’t trust ___.”
  • There is an emerging meaning: the word by itself, as in “it’ll all work out: trust,” or “keep the faith, baby: trust.” It has a combined sense of “trust me” and “don’t worry.”

 

Was It Something I Said? The Trap of High Self-Orientation

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It happened again yesterday. It happens about once a week, though I don’t generally notice it until later.

I had a proposal phone call with a potential client. It went well, but they came back a few days later with a concern. I responded at length in an email. The day ended. Another day passed. By then, it had begun to happen.

I started thinking, “Was it something I said? I’ve probably blown it. I knew I should have done X, I shouldn’t have done Y. On the other hand, maybe I should have…” and so on. You probably know how it goes.

I once kept track of these episodes for a month. There were ten of them in that month. And in 9 out of the 10 cases, the result was: the other person was just busy, that’s all. They weren’t thinking those negative things about me, in fact quite the contrary.

9 out of 10 times I was wrong. And not just about what they were thinking, but about how much time they spent on it.

Self-Orientation in Trust

The denominator in the Trust Equation is self-orientation (the numerator factors are credibility, reliability and intimacy). The higher your self-orientation, the lower your trustworthiness. The logic is simple: if you’re paying attention to the other person (client, customer, friend, spouse, whatever), then you’re probably interested in them, care about them, and have some positive intent toward them.

By contrast, if your attention is devoted inward, you will not be trusted. Why should you be? You’re obsessed with yourself. We trust people who appear to care, and who demonstrate that caring by paying attention. He who pays attention largely to himself is not the stuff of trusted advisors. (Note: you can take your own Trust Quotient quiz at the upper right of this page.)

Get Off Your S

For those of us who need catch-phrases to remember (count me in), here’s one: Get Off Your S. That is, stop being so self-oriented.

Here’s the psychology of it. You’re not as good as you think you are, you’re not as bad as you think you are–you just think more about yourself than others think about you. To live between your ears is to live in enemy territory. You empower what you fear. If you have a foot in yesterday and one in tomorrow, you’re set to pee on today. Blame is captivity. It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.

Here’s the spirituality of it. To give is more blessed than to receive. To get what you want, focus on getting others what they want. Treat others as you’d wish they’d treat you. Pay it forward. Put change in a stranger’s parking meter. Do a good deed a day. Humility doesn’t mean thinking less of yourself, it means thinking of yourself less. Fear is lack of faith.

Here’s the business of it. Never Eat Alone. Listen before making recommendations. To get tweets, give tweets. Inbound marketing not outbound marketing. Customer focus. Customer service. Samples selling.

———

Oh, and my potential client? They were just busy. They’re going to buy, they always were.

It’s not about you. It never is.

 

What Introductions Can Teach Us About Trust

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parachute jumpersI’m in Washington, D.C. this week, giving a Being Trusted Advisors training session along with the rest of our staff. There is an exercise I like around introductions.

Rather than the usual ‘let’s go around the table and introduce ourselves,’ we ask people to quickly state their company (or title/role if it’s an internal training), followed by two questions:

1. Tell the group how many months you’ve been with (company name), and
2. Tell the group an interesting tidbit or factoid about yourself—something a little bit unusual, quirky, interesting, not an every-day business fact about yourself.

I ask everyone in the room in random order to quickly answer the two questions. The debrief is then: why do you think I asked us to take X minutes doing this?

The usual answers are to establish a group identity, to begin creating trust, to get people focused in on the room. True, true, and true.

Then I’ll stand behind one person and ask the group: “how many months was Joe here with his company?” A few people remember; often they remember different numbers.

I’ll then ask, “What was Joe’s interesting tidbit or factoid?”

The whole group responds immediately: “Arrived late to his own wedding,” or “chickened out parachuting last weekend,” or whatever.

We have a good time with that one, talking about why we remember personal tidbits more than we remember data. But what’s really interesting is: so what?

What should we do with the observation that people remember personal quirks and stories and anecdotes more than they do objective data?

What should a client relationship manager do with that observation? A salesperson? An accountant?

What should you do with that observation? 
 

A Story About the Power of Stories

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The power of stories is well-described in the business literature.  Some of the most famous are stories about story-telling: 1001 Arabian Nights, Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, and its American version, It’s a Wonderful Life.
The why of stories is also well-explained. One author suggests that stories are powerful because they plow common ground, create meaning, build community, and are memorable.
There is, however, another reason why story-telling is so powerful. Let me illustrate by, of course, a story (thanks to Charlie Ortman).
A man was shipwrecked on a desert island. Years went by. A decade. Then another. 

One day a rescue ship arrived. The rescuers found the man healthy and happy. “Is this your house?” they asked, pointing to a comfortable dwelling the man had constructed. “Yes,” he said.

“And this lovely hut over here?” 
“That’s my church,” the man said.
“And what’s this?” the rescuers asked, pointing to a somewhat disheveled, faded hut.
“Ah,” said the man drily, “that’s the church I used to attend.” 

I’ll resist the temptation to say what my interpretation was. Later, I realized it could have been interpreted in another way–at least one other way.

Stories Permit Influence without Rejection

It’s my observation that generally the worst way to get someone to do something is to tell them that they should do it—and then try to justify the advice. There is a human built-in resistance to taking advice, unless accompanied by a serious attempt to first hear out the advisee.

Stories provide a powerful supplement to the critical role of listening in this reciprocal dance.

There is something Teflon- and Rorschach-like about stories. In their telling, the fingerprints of the story teller are removed. The listener hears largely what (s)he wants to hear, without the usual baggage of resistance against the advisor. This is often true even when the teller’s intended meaning is clear. 

Consider the story of the shipwrecked man. 
What meaning do you hear in that story? 
Please add your comment below—so we can all see how our own meanings differ.   
 

When Empathy’s Not Enough

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I remember a dialogue once about empowerment with several people. The general consensus was that empowerment was, generally speaking, a good thing.

One person, however, made a simple point. “It’s only as good as the people you empower,” she said. “If you empower stupid people, you deserve what you get.”

Fair enough. A similar cold-water dash in the face comes from Sam Bloomfield. The issue this time is the equally ‘soft’ and ‘good’ value of empathy.

What could be wrong with empathy, you ask? Well, not that there’s anything wrong with it, but there’s a danger of forgetting the ‘and also’ aspects. The correlate to the ‘stupid people’ problem with respect to empathy, Sam suggests, is the presence or absence of action taken:

A recent Harvard Business Review piece [Why Small Companies Are Better at Customer Service] addressed how large companies can learn about productive customer service from small companies. The article’s author related his personal experiences about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ customer service. The author concluded from those experiences that smaller companies have a lot to teach larger ones because the people in smaller companies can “empathize” with the customer and therefore deliver better service. And large companies need to learn to empathize more.

In fact, while empathy helps, it simply is not enough. The cited examples also showed, although not observed explicitly by the author, that smaller companies were able to resolve the problem – produce a satisfactory result for the customer. In the small company examples, the employee did not just empathize, s/he also satisfied our author. Those results I would suggest are the key to effective customer service and experience.

So empathy is fine – up to a point. When a customer service representative does not help you resolve your problem empathy alone loses its currency.

Also, large organizations trying to appear more empathetic often devolve into a ’script’ or canned responses like “I am so sorry” or “I apologize”. We simply don’t trust that they mean it, until we see what they can do for us. You can’t institutionalize caring, trust or empathy because those traits, if they are genuine, are not just words but sincere feelings. I would suggest that this customer in the article was ultimately really satisfied because of the actions taken.

Empathy, Sam’s suggesting, may or may not be a necessary condition, but it is surely not a sufficient condition.

He’s certainly right about one thing. On some level it’s obvious, and not surprising; there aren’t that many pro-empathy people who really think empathy alone is sufficient.

But that’s not the bigger problem Sam’s pointing out. That problem, I think, is businesspeople who don’t understand empathy, and who think that a little slathering of empathetic trappings can keep the customer complaints down.

As Sam puts it:

Large companies are usually effective at creating processes that standardize activities for large numbers of interactions with repeating patterns. But they often fail at creating a standard process for establishing a trusting and sincere relationship with their customers, the very foundation upon which rests all successful call center interactions. In short, one cannot create a process to elicit a sincere human emotion.

I don’t know about you, but it bugs me when a customer service rep leads with “Oh I do apologize for that, Mr. Green.” 99 times out of 100, the rep of course had nothing to do with the problem. It’s fine to say, “ouch, that’s certainly not right, and we’re sorry you had this problem—what can I do to help?” But don’t apologize!

Good apologies require some standing of responsibility. I don’t want an innocent bystander to apologize for hitting my car, I want the apology from the texting-cellphone-jabbering idiot that hit me!

There’s empathy, and there’s empathy.  The harm done is not using too much empathy—it’s using it badly, sloppily, and without clean intent.
 

Trust and Golf: How Neither Makes Sense

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I’ve been reading Trust Agents by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith.

I was particularly struck by the way they told Robert Scoble‘s story (a success story, but not usually painted as a trust story).  They call Scoble one of the first trust agents ever on the World Wide Web. 

Though hindsight is 20-20, many people watching Scoble’s moves at the time would have labeled him at best irreverent, irresponsible, and committed to career suicide … at worst a complete idiot. But looking at him through the lens of what it takes to become trustworthy, I’m siding with Brogan and Smith—what he did was brilliant.

The Scoble Story

In 2004, Scoble, then a Microsoft employee, took to blogging about serious issues Microsoft and its end users were experiencing. He even candidly sung the praises of Firefox, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer competitor.

Not only did Scoble not get fired, he got readers. And Microsoft got business. Brogan and Smith report, “People began eating up everything he said. If his very next blog post had praised Notepad as ‘the best app ever,’ his readers probably would have said, ‘You’re so right!’”

Scoble attributes part of this phenomenon to something he learned when he helped run retail stores in the 1980’s. If he told a customer that a competitor had a better selection, they often came back and asked to do business with him anyway, “’cause I like you better.”  (Maybe he got it from the Macy’s Santa Claus in Miracle on 34th Street, who recommended competitor Gimbel’s on occasion).

What’s Golf Got to Do with It?

One of the reasons trust is so hard to get a grip on is that it’s rife with paradox. For example, the thing we’re most afraid to say or do is precisely what will build the most trust. Or, in Scoble’s case, the best way to generate sales is to have the courage to be brutally honest about your product’s weaknesses and your competitor’s strengths.

Here’s the link to golf (pardon the pun): I am not a golfer. To me, the only logical way to get that tiny little ball to travel hundreds of yards off the first tee towards that tiny little cup is to hit it as hard as possible. If you’re a golfer, you just shook your head in dismay because you know what my strategy will yield: a nice left hook into a thick forest of trees.

Scoble came to be seen as someone who could be trusted because he knew that building trust is like a golf swing: hype your product and you hook the ball; be honest and land it square on the green.

Golf Aside, Motives Matter

Leaving the golf metaphor behind for a moment, it’s important to remember that motives really do matter. Buyers have a sixth sense for manipulation. Had Scoble been talking trash about his products with the intention of closing deals, his strategy would have backfired. Which leads us to another paradox: the more you try to build trust with the intention of closing deals, the less deals you close.

Take a look at your business model. How might the lessons of golf—and Scoble—improve your game?

October Carnival of Trust is Now Being Served

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Scot Herrick, author of the delightful blog Cube Rules, is this month’s host of the Carnival of Trust. 

For those who don’t know, the Carnival of Trust is a monthly collection of the most interesting and noteworthy posts from the Kingdom of Blogs over the past month.  Each month, the Carnival is hosted by an experienced blogger–not myself.  The definition and selection of "interesting and noteworthy" is left to the host; each host infuses the selection and commentary with their own point of view.  The result is a great chunk of reading for you.

This month Scot has collected some terrific blogposts that answer the following questions:

– Would you rather fix your customer’s problem, or be right?  Think carefully now…

– Can you break promises with your employees, or not?  And if so, how many?

– What’s a great acronym for remembering the components of RESPECT?

– How can you get your parents to trust you?

– Would you rather hire a relative, be hired by one, or recommend one?

– How can you market yourself as being trustworthy?  (It’s not a trick question).

 You don’t get this much concentrated good stuff anywhere else.  Treat yourself to a choice bit of edutainment; you’ll love the way it tastes, honest!

Many thanks to Scot Herrick for hosting this month.  If you liked this month’s Carnival of Trust, you might enjoy looking at past Carnivals as well.  And if you’d like to see your blogpost up there in the lights, please do contribute your blogpost (or someone else’s you’d like to nominate) at this site. 

Again, enjoy the October Carnival of Trust.