Chapter 13
Element 5: I Trust You
You Have My Best Interests at Heart
War raged in the Middle East as Operation Iraqi Freedom worked to root out Saddam Hussein and his Ba'athist regime in April 2003. General Tommy Franks initiated the invasion by sending sortie after sortie of planes to rain munitions down on the Presidential Palace. Then, shortly after dawn the day after the invasion, he commanded coalition troops to pour into the Basra Province from jumping off points near the Kuwait border. At the same time, a sea landing of Royal Marines, U.S. Marines, Polish commandos, and Seal Teams 4, 6, and 8 secured Iraq's only deep-water port as well as its oil and gas assets. This was followed by waves of additional air strikes against Hussein's command and control apparatus. The operation was a success, with Baghdad falling on April 9.
Both U.S. and Iraqi troops fought under very difficult circumstances that included the constant threat of chemical weapons. Yet, while the U.S. soldiers pushed forward relentlessly, the Iraqi soldiers retreated and surrendered in great numbers. As the fighting began, Dr. Lenny Wong, a retired lieutenant colonel working at the Army's War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, saw an opportunity. Military leaders are interested in knowing why soldiers fight. Because the combat was fresh and there were so many prisoners of war, he decided to quickly interview both U.S. and Iraqi troops and compare their motivations. Had they fought out of patriotism, in pursuit of justice, for money, out of revenge, or because they were being forced to? Did a difference in motivation account for differing behavior?
His research team flew to Iraq and traveled first to Camp Bucca in Umm Qsar, where they spoke with captured Iraqi soldiers. Then they went to Baghdad and Al Hillah where they interviewed members of the 3rd Infantry Division, the 101st Airborne Division, and the 1st Marine Division.
Their results were striking, “For Iraqi regular army soldiers, it was coercion,” Dr. Wong writes. They fought because they were scared of what would happen to them if they did not.
But for U.S. soldiers, Dr. Wong and his team saw something different. “The most frequent response given for combat motivation was ‘fighting for my buddies.’ Soldiers answered with comments such as, ‘Me and my loader were talking about it, and in combat the only thing that you really worry about is you and your crew.’”
These findings are consistent with similar studies done during the Vietnam War, World War II, and even the Civil War. Human beings will storm a fortified hill or charge out of a foxhole, bayonets fixed, less for a larger cause and more out of loyalty to their friends. Their friends are ultimately the people who cause them to fight with ferocity, even to the point of making the ultimate sacrifice.
This begs the question: Why do troops fight more for their buddies than they do for God, country, or money?
Dr. Wong's team surmised two reasons. “First, because of the close ties to other soldiers, it places a burden of responsibility on each soldier to achieve group success and protect the unit from harm. Soldiers feel that although their individual contribution to the group may be small, it is still a critical part of unit success and therefore important. As one soldier put it, ‘I am the lowest-ranking private on the Bradley [fighting vehicle]…I did not want to let anyone down.’ One Bradley commander (BC) spoke of the infantrymen in the back of his vehicle and the responsibility he felt for them: ‘You have two guys in the back who are not seeing what is going on, and they are putting all their trust into the gunner and the BC. Whatever objects or obstacles or tanks or vehicles are in front of you, you are taking them out, because they don't know what is going on. They are just like in a darkroom. They can't do nothing. Having that trust…I guess that is one thing that kept me going.’”
The second reason men fought so hard for each other was that watching each other's back was a form of self-preservation. Said one U.S. soldier, “If you are going to war, you want to be able to trust the person who is beside you. If you are his friend, you know he is not going to let you down.…He is going to do his best to make sure that you don't die.”
Trust
The notion of trust in others is ancient. It allows one buddy to lean on another. It is the sinew that binds communities together, enabling them to do together what they cannot do as individuals. It makes the group more powerful and protects individuals from outside threats.
Kent Grayson, a professor of marketing at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, studies trust. For him, trust between people in a commercial setting involves three elements:
- Competence
- Honesty
- Benevolence
This closely tracks with what we said in the last chapter, namely that when we speak about trust, we often are saying either:
- I trust you will get the job done (what Grayson is calling competence).
- I trust you have my back on this, where “have my back” means a potential client thinks you are honest and looking out for their interests (in Grayson's terms, honestly and benevolence).
One is a “head” judgment. We talked about this in the previous chapter and called it respect for your work—the belief that after reviewing the evidence, such as your credentials, your track record, and your references—you are likely to get the job done. This kind of trust is an intellectual weighing of the evidence out of which a buyer makes an informed judgment, predicting a partner's future behavior.
“I think it always comes down to trust,” says Graham Anthony, the principal and founder of Anthony Advisors. “Does [a consultant] have the ability to do a good job? Clients are trusting that if they come to you with their problem, you will help them solve it.”
The second half of trust is a “heart” judgment. Here you are not asking if a practice lead can get the job done, but if they will put your interests first. Graham says, “Do you trust the person wishes you well?”
The consulting firm Bain describes this second form of trust this way: “Everything we do is guided by our True North—our unswerving commitment always to do the right thing by our clients, our people, and our communities.”
When clients hear and feel this in their consulting and professional services partners, they are reassured that the firm they are hiring will act in the clients' interests. They believe their consultants are true agents for their interests and therefore trusted extensions of their reach and impact.
It is axiomatic in the consulting profession that the consultant is the least important person in the room. It is the clients' interests that matter. The consultant must always act in the best interests of the client and must never do anything that could harm or damage the client.…Consultants are in a privileged position: they have access to a great deal of inside information about the client and they also have a position over the client company and its key decision makers.…They owe it to the client to ensure that a) they do no harm and b) they serve the client's interests at all times.
—Morgen Witzel, Management Consultancy
Professor Grayson from Northwestern says trust is broken in cases of information asymmetry when either the buyer or the seller takes advantage of that asymmetry. The CEO of a biotech firm wants to figure out the best way to include a broad swath of middle managers in the long-term value they are helping to create. She hires an expert in compensation who has particularly strong experience in setting up stock option programs. Our client is at an information disadvantage. She is hiring a consultant because she doesn't really know the ins and outs of stock options. Trust would be broken if the consultant recommended a long, involved study of what options entail in order to increase the ticket price of the engagement, knowing that for the company in question there are really only two choices.
Trust Is the Whole Ball of Wax
Clients need to trust that we will do the right thing by them for three reasons:
- The leap of faith is large.You are expert at computer security, but your clients are not. That is why they are asking for your help. If they had spent a lifetime studying cyber security and had seen every kind of hack imaginable, they wouldn't need you. But they aren't experts, and that's why they are considering engaging with you. That, though, requires a leap of faith. In fact, if you think about it, the less they know, the bigger the leap. The bigger the leap, the more they feel a kind of I-could-lose-my-job fear that makes them gnash their teeth and sleep poorly at night. That fear can be partly lessened by lots of confirming data—the kind of data that leads to respect—but they also need a sturdy bridge built out of trust before they can fully commit.
- It gets everyone past conflicts of interest.Closely related to the need to trust your abilities is the need for a client to trust you've steered clear of conflicts of interest. A true professional would never recommend a software solution for a company on whose board of directors they sat without disclosing it. That would be a conflict. Nor would an attorney represent two parties in conflict with each other. Whose side would the attorney be on? One of the key pieces of knowing that someone has our back is the bedrock confidence we have that our consultant isn't secretly “working for the other side.”
- It drives better performance.Clients know, even if subconsciously, that teams bound by trust are more effective. To worry about intentions acts like sludge in the drivetrain of commerce. “Trust is the lubrication that makes it possible for organizations to work,” wrote Warren Bennis and Burton Nanus in Leaders: Strategies for Taking Charge. “An organization without trust is more than an anomaly, it's a misnomer, a dim creature of Kafka's imagination.”
Tactics—What Works
Here are seven proven trust-builders to keep in mind as you build your network:
Time
Time is your ally when building trust. All things being equal, we trust people we have known for a long time more than people we just met. Repeated exposure to an expert builds familiarity, which builds trust.
One of the rainmakers that we interviewed for this book was Don Scales. Don was Doug's boss at A.T. Kearney where Doug got his start right out of B-school. Scales, currently the CEO of Investis, has had a more than thirty year career in management consulting. To Don, trust is an essential asset that takes a long time to earn. He offered this advice to those getting started:
Trust is built up one successful transaction at a time. If you're selling for the first time to a new client, then trust is going to be your biggest challenge. You have to make sure that you're transparent, you're communicating all the time, and that the client can see what's going on. If you have a good transaction the first time, then it's a little bit easier the second time, and then a lot easier the third time, etc. It's all built one good transaction at a time.
Just like a central element of respect is the ability to predict how someone is going to perform on the job, the ability to predict whether or not someone has your back drives trust. Humans are pattern recognition animals, and the longer someone has had your back, the more clients are likely to extrapolate that pattern and trust you going forward. This is why pros in the consulting and professional services business tell us that the simplest business development advice is to do quality work because once in the door, trust acts as a barrier to entry for your competition.
Of course, trust takes patience.
I cut my teeth in Australia and Asia back in the day when Asia wasn't really on the map for anybody here. I always advise Americans not to be too quick to try to get to the end. Americans are like the culture of just, “Let's get down to business,” versus being willing to spend the time and effort to get to know people. I think Americans need to take a deep breath and just spend some time building relationships.
—Peter Bryant, managing director, Clareo
Friends of Friends
New business for consulting and professional services firms comes from three places—repeat projects with existing customers, people who recommend you, and new clients with whom you have no relationship at all.
Harry Wallace is fond of saying, “If you had to generate business in the next thirty days, you would always start with your current or past clients.” Trust is a gate a new service provider must hurdle. If time is short, you would call the people who have worked with you and who already trust you, saving yourself what might be the most difficult step. Likewise, most practice leads understand that if they don't know someone working at a potential client, it's tough to get a foothold.
Somewhere in between is the world of referrals, where a client mentions an able vendor to a friend over cocktails. Some consulting and professional service providers have built robust practices by simply never leaving a conversation with a client before asking, “I am trying to expand my practice. If you feel we have done good work for you, with whom should I be speaking? Would you mind if I used your name reaching out to them?” Says Jeff Denneen, a partner at Bain, “It is all about referrals for us. We are the firm that invented the net promoter score after all.” The net promoter score is a measure based on asking customers, “How likely is it that you would recommend our company/product/service to a friend or colleague?” It is primarily used as a proxy for quality—customers who give vendors high promoter scores are satisfied with what they have received—but it also highlights the fact that embedded in quality delivery is the potential to mine referrals.
Easier still is staying in touch when someone you have worked with as a client leaves their company. Help them with their job search if appropriate. It builds trust. What says “you have their back even when it is not in your immediate self-interest” more than helping someone find their next gig?
Working Shoulder-to-Shoulder
The benefits of consulting and professional services are not easily described. They are better demonstrated. Smart practice leads look for opportunities to work alongside people, knowing that it is a chance to show competence and that character is revealed in those long hours in the windowless conference room or chatting back and forth late at night.
Doing the Right Thing
This seems obvious, that you should always do the right thing for your client, but in the real world “the right thing” can often come in varying shades of gray. Making the call on what is right and what is wrong lives at the margin. This is why it's important to land on the side of protecting your client whenever the call is close.
Clients have to trust you. They have to trust that you will do the work, you'll put in the work, and that you'll do what you say you're going to do. They've got to trust that you've got honesty and integrity on your side…so that what you deliver is truthfully what you said you would deliver and the best that the market can provide.
—Sarah Arnot, formerly of Accenture and Spencer Stuart
Remember, clients are watching you, taking your measure, one small decision at a time. Trust is the accumulation of those impressions.
- Did you report bad news quickly?
- Did you call in reinforcements on your dime when the unexpected arrived?
- Did you cut short your vacation to accommodate a presentation that was important to your program manager?
- Did you stay someplace reasonable and not dine at the most over-the-top restaurant in town?
- Did you absorb the unexpected expense of turning your crew around mid-flight to correct a problem?
- Were you mindful of your stakeholder's need to manage their internal politics?
- Were you discreet, keeping all confidences?
- Did you put your client's needs first?
Like a poker player studying how you respond to cards, clients read how you will likely act in the future. In each case, how you answer the questions above is a character tell.
A senior McKinsey partner shared this story with us:
We were approached by the client about a particular topic. But as we did the early thinking about what was our unique value proposition, we realized two things really quickly. One, it wasn't actually going to be worth their time or money to do this with us, and that there was actually a better business partner who happened to be a competitor of ours. We went back to them and said, “We don't think we're the right people to serve you on this, but here are the three things that we do think you should be thinking about and we'd be happy to work on the third [piece].” The client was taken aback because they were ready to sign on the dotted line. This was not a competitive proposal, they were, like, “We want you to do this. Come on in and start this.” But the partner actively turned it down. It's what we call at McKinsey a “values moment,” and I was super-inspired by this. And then over the period of time, we earned a sort of a trusted adviser status with them. They trusted us because we didn't force our services when it would have been easy to just make the money.
Screwing Up
Screwing up on an engagement is never good. It involves mea culpas, embarrassment, lost time, hours that cannot be billed, and hard conversations with your team over stiff drinks. But it comes with a silver lining. It's a chance to promptly and without equivocation accept full and complete responsibility. It's also a chance to make good on what is bad.
Tom used to be the chief operating officer of a bread store franchise, Great Harvest Bread Co. He remembers how owners of those stores would call people who returned poorly baked bread “breadboard angels.” Store owners would tell him that when someone returns bread, it is a chance to tell them, “Thank you for caring enough about this store and our product to let us know,” and it gave them a chance to give the customer a “Ten Loaves for Free” card, turning lemons into lemonade by creating a raving fan out of someone who thought they were complaining.
The same goes for screwups on the job. They are inevitable and at the same time a golden opportunity to communicate to your clients that you care, you have their interests at heart, and you will not chisel them but rather hold the relationship as something that is precious and to be protected and invested in for the long term.
Good Intentions
You can talk about the behavior that engenders trust all day long, but in the end, it is your heart that really matters.
If you go into it trying to sell a product or an engagement or a project singularly, I think you will fall down. It is about trust, it is about relationships, it is about caring, caring for the business, and caring for the person that really carries the day. If they can see that you care, you will earn trust.
—Dave Smith, senior managing director, Accenture
Caring is the one thing you can't fake. It is a window into who you are. When clients feel you care, that you live your life treating others like you would like to be treated, they trust you to be their extensions into the marketplace, to advise them on their most vexing problem, and to be their agents in fixing what's wrong. Seeing that you care is a prerequisite to trust.
Face Time
Human beings are animals that drink in their surroundings by hearing, touching, smelling, tasting, and seeing what is around them. They take each's other measure by being with each other; indeed, there is a growing body of research that suggests that they “thin slice” judgments of each other using information gathered from all the senses simultaneously. We are fans of the phone and video conferencing, and they work to build trust as well, but building trust over phone and video takes more time than face-to-face. Sitting down and sharing a meal with a potential client is one of the oldest and most reliable ways to build trust with them. That said, don't rush things. Trust cannot be expedited. Talk on the phone once or twice, then ping them with “I'm going to be in San Diego. I'd love to put a face to a name. Are you open for lunch?”