I just led a program called Being a Trusted Advisor for a global consulting firm. The list of collective “ahas” that was generated at the end of class is worth sharing. As always, the beauty lies in the simplicity of each item on the list; the mastery lies in their application. Here’s a Top 12 list, in no particular order, with a little bit of voice-over added:
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.
Charlie Green, co-author of The Trusted Advisor, has just released a compilation of his best blog posts in a great little e-book called The Trust Matters Primer: The best of the Trusted Advisor Blog.
We just completed our second delivery of BossaNova’s Advanced Facilitation Skills for Consultants program. We saw once again that a consultant’s biggest fear when it comes to facilitating client events is, hands-down, dealing with difficult group dynamics – you know, managing the client who’s overly talkative, highly argumentative, prone to ramble, stubbornly skeptical, and the like.
Charlie Green and I just led a two-day program that we call Trusted Advisor: Walking the Talk. I was struck by the list of “one big ahas” that participants created at the end of the program. The beauty lies in the simplicity of each item on the list; the mastery lies in their application. Here’s a Top 10 list, in no particular order, with a little bit of voice-over added:
Welcome to the July 2008 Carnival of Trust! The Carnival of Trust is a monthly, traveling review of ten of the last month’s best posts related to various aspects of trust in the world. My job this month was to pick those ten posts for you and provide an introduction to each post that makes you want to click through and read more. How’d I do?