We were honored to collaborate recently with Trusted Advisor Associates on a series of blog posts devoted to selling in down times, organized by the Four Trust Principles. Use these links to access about 50 suggestions for developing business in tough economic times:
Thanks go to President Obama for timing his first major Presidential misstep to coincide with my delivery of a “Being a Trusted Advisor” workshop.
In class, we had been talking about human nature and the gravitational pull to avoid admitting culpability and generally looking bad when—voila—there appeared the perfect teaching point on the front page of the New York Times.
Tiziana Casciaro and Miguel Sousa Lobo wrote in “Competent Jerks, Lovable Fools, and the Formation of Social Networks” in the Harvard Business Review (June 2005) about how people choose who they work with.
“In most cases, people choose their work partners according to two criteria. One is competence at the job…the other is likability.”
Next week we’ll be unveiling our new white paper called Learning that STICks – a practical guide to avoiding disappointing returns on soft skills training.
Learning that STICks is learning that is Sustainable, Transformational, Intelligent and Collaborative. STICky learning is flexible; it can expand or contract to fit time, budget, and resource constraints. But in every case, being STICky pays off.
To give you a taste of what Learning that STICks is all about, here are some examples of quick ways to implement STICky learning:
In our Trusted Advisor workshops and coaching engagements, we spend a lot of time on listening. Why? Because not listening is one of the top two causes of trust breakdown. (The other — accelerating too quickly to a solution – is another form of not listening.)
Listening is critical to advice-giving because it’s through listening that we earn the right to offer advice.