Trusted Advisor: 12 more ways to walk the talk

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:

I screwed up

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.

Zen and the Art of Trusted Advisorship

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.

Trusted Advisor: 10 ways to walk the talk

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: