My mother always told me that bad luck comes in threes. At the risk of pushing my luck, I’m going to disagree with her–at least when it comes to trustworthiness. Here are three phrases, each three words long, that are an essential part of any Trusted Advisor toolkit: “That makes sense,” “Tell me more,” and “I don’t know.”
At first blush, intimacy is a strange word to use in a business context. “What, I’m supposed to intimate with my clients?” In the sense that being intimate means being familiar, informal, and emotionally connected…yes, indeed.
Intimacy is one of the four components of the Trust Equation and it usually gets the short-shrift. For most, it’s more natural to build trust by increasing credibility and reliability. And yet, without intimacy, business transactions are just that–transactions–and the “safe haven” experience that is the hallmark of Trusted Advisor relationships is a pipe dream.
My mechanic taught me something the other day about being a Trusted Advisor. He screwed up in a big way. And I ended up trusting him more as a result.
I’ve been reading Trust Agents by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith.
I was particularly struck by the way they tell 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.
I recently ran for a seat on the condo board of the brand new community I live in. I lost. In front of about 60 people.
My reaction was a mixture of gratitude (“I think I just got spared a LOT of work”), huffiness (“How could they pass ME over?”), and a dash of embarrassment (“Oh no, I think I just looked like an IDIOT in front of a large group of people”).
In reflecting on what worked and didn’t about my little platform speech (I had three minutes to pitch myself to the group), I realized there are some important lessons about trust-based selling to tease out of my defeat.