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The Trusted Advisor

🚀 The Book in 3 Sentences

This book is about consulting. The book highlights that a consultant is not a seller, but rather an advisor who should be a trusted part of a company. The tools and ways for a consultant to gain this trust are discussed in this book.

🎨 Impressions

The importance of gaining trust is all that this book gives. As a consultant, you are hired for your expertise but retained because of the trust the client has in you to do what is right for the client. You are not always there to deliver a product (competence) but rather to help the client reach their business goals. Relationships are the building block of a consultant.

✍️ My Top Quotes

  • *We then focus on three basic skills that a trusted advisor needs:

    • (1) earning trust;
    • (2) giving advice effectively; and
    • (3) building relationships*

  • *The more your clients trust you, the more they will:

    1. Reach for your advice
    2. Be inclined to accept and act on your recommendations
    3. Bring you in on more advanced, complex, strategic issues
    4. Treat you as you wish to be treated
    5. Respect you
    6. Share more information that helps you to help them, and improves the quality of the service you provide
    7. Pay your bills without question
    8. Refer you to their friends and business acquaintances
    9. Lower the level of stress in your interactions
    10. Give you the benefit of the doubt
    11. Forgive you when you make a mistake
    12. Protect you when you need it (even from their own organization)
    13. Warn you of dangers that you might avoid
    14. Be comfortable and allow you to be comfortable
    15. Involve you early on when their issues begin to form, rather than later in the process (or maybe even call you first!)
    16. Trust your instincts and judgments (including those about other people such as your colleagues and theirs

  • If we are to develop our trust-building skill, we must be honest with ourselves about how good at it we currently are. Many people assume they are better at winning trust than they really are.

  • Trust can be earned by the simplest of gestures. David has a dentist, named Andrew, who, early in the relationship, recommended that David permit him to perform various procedures on his teeth. Like many clients, David was not sure whether Andrew was recommending additional procedures because they were really needed or because he was just trying to increase his revenues

  • At its core, trust is about relationships.

  • Many professionals approach the task of giving advice as if it were an objective, rational exercise based on their technical knowledge and expertise. But advice giving is almost never an exclusively logical process.

  • It is not enough for a professional to be right: An advisor’s job is to be helpful.

  1. That you have listened to what the client has said?
  2. That you appreciate the importance that the client assigns to what they have been saying?
  3. That you understand the unique aspects of his/her situation? 4. That you understand his/her business?
  4. That you are going to be a comfortable, supportive person to work with?

  • Before you go into any meeting with a client (or prospective client), figure out the two or three things you want the client to absolutely believe about you by the end of the meeting.

  • The Italians have an expression for people who behave otherwise. They call them the falsi cortesi (or the fake courteous).

  • “You’ll have more fun and success by focusing on helping other people achieve their goals than you will by focusing on your own goals.”

  • Common source of trust problems. We have already noted the common temptation, in a client conversation, of jumping too soon to “the answer.”

  • Insecurity (the opposite of self-confidence) is a common source of trust problems. We have already noted the common temptation, in a client conversation, of jumping too soon to “the answer.”

  • There is an old saying, “It is amazing what you can achieve if you are not wedded to who gets the credit.”

  • Reliability in this emotional sense is the repeated experience of expectations fulfilled.

  • The most common failure in building trust is the lack of intimacy. Some professionals consider it a positive virtue to maintain an emotional distance from their clients. They work hard at being “aloof.” We believe that they do so not only at their own risk but also their clients’.

  • Business can be intensely personal. There are obvious human emotions around such charged issues as promotion, compensation, hiring and firing, reorganization, and other forms of decision making.

  • Practice a little. No, you can’t practice spontaneity, but you can practice phrasing. Rob often writes down two or three ways of asking difficult questions or delivering difficult messages, testing and trying them out before actually using them.

  • Don’t Overrate the Downside Risk. What exactly are you afraid of? Sometimes we’re afraid of saying something because we think it will put the business at risk. But if we’re honest, we often find what is at risk isn’t the business itself, it is our own personal comfort with expanding the bounds of intimacy.

  • ENGAGEMENT, THE FIRST STEP in trust building, is the stage where it first occurs to the client that maybe, perhaps, somehow, the person standing here in front of him or her might be able to help in finding a solution to a (specific) problem. This can happen in either a new or existing client situation.

  • One major consulting firm built its success on a strategy of carefully selecting the target new clients it pursued, and before making even the first contact with the target client, it did a thorough analysis of the industry.

  • A trusted advisor might say, “What I like about your idea is X; now help me understand how we can use it to accomplish Y.” Through such language, the advisor constantly lets the client know that the client is respected and that the two of them are free to discuss with great candor the specific merits of the idea at hand.

  • A useful technique for emotional framing is a technique that we call naming and claiming.

  • *Naming and claiming is characterized by three factors:

    1. An acknowledgment of the difficulty of raising the issue
    2. An acceptance of the responsibility for raising it
    3. A direct statement of the issue itself*

  • Trust is enhanced by the advisor’s openness and candor. The advisor is providing an education, based on his or her experience, about something the client has perhaps never been through before.

  • There are four reasons why advisors jump to action too soon:

    1. The human tendency to focus on ourselves
    2. The belief that we’re selling only content
    3. The desire for tangibility
    4. The search for validation.

  • After all, as the Sicilian proverb says, “Chi gioca solo non perde mai,” or “If one plays alone, one never loses.”

  • Work in advance on what is different about this client, and what might be different about you in this situation.

  • Are there any topics I should avoid because they are too delicate to discuss in a large forum?

  • Are there any topics on which the views of your colleagues are significantly divided?

  • Where are we likely to encounter the most resistance?

  • Do you have any initiatives already going on that might interact with the discussion of this one?*

  • *2. As you look at a client, force yourself to ask three questions:

    • What is the client’s prevailing personal motivation?

    • What is their personality?

    • How does the state of their organization affect their worldview? Having answered these questions, force yourself to address the question, “How do I adapt my style and approach to deal with this person as he or she likes to be dealt with?”*

  • When thinking about a client’s prevailing personal motivation, which of the following comes first?

    • the need to excel?
    • the need to take action and achieve results?
    • the need to understand and analyze before deciding?
    • the need to drive consensus?

  • Highly rational people place disproportionate emphasis on framing, whether it is rational or emotional.

  • Emotional framing is appropriate where people are feeling conflicted, frustrated, wildly happy, embarrassed, or carefree. It can be done directly, but it should often be done in private, with care. While

  • Pogo’s dictum: We have found the enemy, and it is us.

  • We must always keep clients in the loop regarding our progress. We should not wait to bowl them over with blinding insights at the end. Chances are, the insights won’t be that blinding.

  • Blowing a deadline that’s important to the client. Even if it’s an artificial deadline, even if it’s arbitrary, it’s their deadline unless they explicitly say otherwise.

  • Tell your romantic partner how much he or she is appreciated. Do it today!