Becoming a trusted adviser: A procession of faith

Keywords: adviser, clients, trust

Take Home Messages:

• Advice giving is almost never an exclusively logical process, rather it is almost always an emotional “duet” played between the advice giver and the client.
• The key to your professional success is your ability to earn the trust and confidence of your clients.

Introduction

In today's fast-paced networked economy, professionals must work harder than ever to maintain and improve their business skills and knowledge. But technical mastery of your discipline is not enough. The key to your professional success is your ability to earn the trust and confidence of clients. The creation of trust is what earns the right to influence clients; trust is also at the root of client satisfaction and loyalty.

The workings of trust are even more critical in the new economy than in the old.

The terms “trust” and “adviser” are seemingly small words, but they have meanings with layers and complexities.

The trust formula of credibility, reliability, intimacy and self-orientation provides a neat summary for the benefits and application of effective inter-personal skills.

Perspectives on trust

Three basic skills that a trusted adviser need are:

• Earning trust
• Building relationships
• Giving advice effectively

Why strive to be a trusted adviser?

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

• Reach for your advice.
• Be inclined to accept and act on your recommendations.
• Bring you in on more advanced, complex, strategic issues.
• Share more information that helps you to help them, and improves the quality of services.
• Lower the level of stress in your interactions.
• Give you the benefit of the doubt.
• Forgive you when you make a mistake.
• Protect you when you need it.
• Warn you of the dangers you might avoid.
• Involve you early on when their issues begin to form, rather than later in the process.

From a client’s perspective, trusted advisers share the following characteristics;

• Are consistent, we can depend on them.
• Don’t try to force things on us.
• Help us think things through (it’s our decision).
• Don’t substitute their judgement for ours.
• Help us think and separate our logic from our emotion.
• Don’t pull their punches (we can rely on them to tell us the truth).
• Give us reasoning (help us think) not just their conclusions.
• Challenge our assumptions (help us uncover the false assumptions we’ve been working under).
• Make us feel comfortable and casual (but they take the issues seriously).
• Act like a real person, not someone in a role.
• Are reliably on our side and always seem to have our interests at heart.
• Have a sense of humour to diffuse (our) tension in tough situations.  

Becoming a trusted adviser is a process – from being a subject matter expert to being an adviser. This is best demonstrated by Figure 1.

Figure 1. The process of becoming a trusted adviser

In this journey, the nature of the relationships changes, as demonstrated in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Relationship changes in the journey to trusted adviser

Ten attributes of trusted advisers

    1. Have a predilection to focus on the client, rather than yourself. Have:

• Enough self-confidence to listen without pre-judging.
• Enough curiosity to inquire without supposing an answer.
• Willingness to see the client as a co-equal in a joint journey.
• Enough ego strength to subordinate their own ego.

    2. Focus on the client as an individual, not as a person full-filling a role.

    3. Believe that a continued focus on problem definition and resolution is more important than technical or content mastery.

    4. Show a strong “competitive” drive aimed not at competitors, but constantly at finding new ways to be of greater service to your client.

    5. Consistently focus on doing the next right thing, rather than on aiming for specific outcomes.

    6. Be motivated more by an internalised drive to do the right thing than by your own organisation’s rewards or dynamics.

    7. View methodologies, models, techniques and business processes as means to an end. They are useful if they work, and are to be discarded if they don’t - the test is effectiveness for your client.

    8. Believe that success in client relationships is tied to the accumulation of quality experiences. As a result, seek out (rather than avoid) client-contact experiences, and take personal risks with clients rather than avoid them.

    9. Believe that both selling and serving are aspects of professionalism. Both are about providing to clients that you are dedicated to helping them with their issues.

    10. Believe that there is a distinction between a business life and a private life, but that both lives are very personal. Recognise that refined skills in dealing with people are critical in business and personal life; the two worlds are often alike but they are different, and for some, they overlap to an extraordinary extent.

Giving advice

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. Rather it is almost always an emotional "duet" played between the advice giver and the client. If you can't learn to recognise, deal with, and respond to client emotions, you will never be an effective adviser.

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

Clients frequently want someone who will take away their worries and absorb all their hassles.

Too often they encounter professionals who add to their worries and create extra headaches forcing them to confront things they would rather ignore.

Since clients are often anxious and uncertain they are, above all, looking for someone who will provide reassurance, calm their fears and inspire confidence.

Dealing with client politics – effective advice requires an ability to suppress one’s own ego and emotional needs. The most effective way to influence a client is to help the person feel that the solution was (to a large extent) their idea:  

    1. Give them their options.

    2. Give them an education about the options (including enough discussion for them to consider each option in depth).

    3. Give them a recommendation.

    4. Let them choose.

Building relationships

Key principles of relationship building:

    1. Go first – the person you are influencing must visibly perceive that you are willing to be the first one to make an investment in the relationship, in order to earn and deserve the relationship

    2. Illustrate, don’t tell – be very prepared and demonstrate convincingly

    3. Listen for what’s different, not for what’s familiar – as you talk to clients, ask yourself what makes this person different from other clients. What does that mean for what I should say and how I should behave? Create situations where they will tell you more about their issues, concerns and needs

    4. Be sure your advice is being sought – develop the skills and behaviour patterns that ensure that you provide affirmation, support, approval and appreciation along with your advice – learn to hold back from saying “I know how to solve your problem”

    5. Earn the right to offer advice – understand the situation, understand how the client feels about it, convince the client that we understand the situation and how they feel about it

    6. Keep asking – ask a lot of questions, shut up and listen

    7. Say what you mean – never assume that the other person is a mind reader

    8. When you need help, ask for it – anyone who tries to appear as the individual with all the answers, is more likely to evoke precisely the opposite response (“Who is this person trying to kid?”). Giving advice is a duet, not a solo performance

    9. Show an interest in the person – keep them talking about themselves, learn as much as possible about the person

    10. Use compliments, not flattery – be specific enough to make sure the compliment is not puffery

    11. Show appreciation – expressing appropriate appreciation goes a long way in cementing a relationship.  

To be trusted – you have to trustworthy

To become a trusted adviser, you need to be authentic – you need to be trustworthy. You need to role play and model the behaviours you are advising people to adopt. So look after yourself and build your own resilience so you can help yourself and your client to get through the “good” and “bad” times.

There are many ways to develop resilience. My experience indicates that some of the more effective ways include:

Acceptance

• Sometimes in life, if it looks like a dog, barks like a dog and smells like a dog it’s a dog, not a cat, and needs to be dealt in that manner. Accept where you are in life and what life is throwing at you. Become adept at knowing what you can control as opposed to wasting energy on what you can't control. Be realistic about this. One of the first questions you must ask yourself and your clients when you are going through challenging times is “what can we do about this - or at least parts of this?’. We might feel overwhelmed, but are there parts we can address to get some positive return for our efforts? 

Listen to your inner voice

• This is a big one. Quick, think about the worst situation you have experienced in your life! What was it? How did you respond? What was your self- talk - in other words, what did you hear yourself say when you were being challenged? I bet you were thinking about yourself in negative terms. If you were, this ‘self-talk’ is likely to have influenced your actions and influenced how other people interacted with you. 

Change your self-talk

• When you are undergoing change, listen to how you and others talk about yourselves. If this self-talk is negative, as it almost invariably is, challenge it and where possible reframe it. Is there another way of describing the situation to yourself?  What would that sound like? Simply reframing your self-talk won’t make the problems or challenges go away, but a change in self-talk may move you away from flight/flight/freeze responses to problem-solving behaviour. 

Stay involved

• Relative isolation is one of the challenges facing people in regional and rural Australia. Look for ways of being connected with the community through work, volunteering, sporting clubs, charity clubs and so on. Get your mates involved in the clubs and activities too.  

People commonly withdraw into themselves - for a wide range of rational and irrational reasons -  when they experience bad times.

Some of the people I work with have withdrawn because they are ‘ashamed’ of where they have ended up; believing they are weak and that no one else has ever experienced this situation. Wrong! It’s critical to keep involved for many positive reasons - the ability to contribute, to be valued and, critically, to maintain perspective. The more people you interact with, the greater the likelihood that you will meet people who have experienced, survived and grown through similar experiences to those you are experiencing.

Get comfortable with feelings

This applies especially to us men. We all go through good and bad times - a recurring theme of this paper – and it is important that we can articulate our emotions through these times, whatever they may be.

There are heaps of self-help books on this topic and the techniques are simple, but I need to say they are still hard to do. However, it is just so beneficial for everyone to learn and get comfortable with their feelings and be able to express them.

Surround yourself with positive people

Individuals have the ability to either build people up or drag them down. Which are you good at and what type of people do you have around you? I am often challenged by my clients asking why they are surrounded by negative, sad people. My answer is because they are sad and negative. One of the amazing things about life is that positive people attract positive people, with all the benefits of that, and negative people attract negative people ... and everything that goes with that! Make the choice to be positive and reap the benefits.

Look after yourself

If you can’t look after yourself you can't look after your family, your mates, your family or the business. This is a basic truth. Look after your health. As you get older you realise that your parents knew what they were talking about - your health is your most important asset.

Do the simple things we all know about. Try to get enough good-quality sleep. Don't smoke. Do exercise, drink water, watch what you eat and have a couple of alcohol-free days a week. (No need to go absolutely ‘on the wagon’ - unless you want to, of course).

These are just some ways to build emotional resilience.

As a final note: maintaining this is an ongoing exercise. Having a plan and looking at it once is not enough. It needs to be part of your life and that of your partner, your clients and others in your life who you value. 

References

Information contained within this paper has been adapted from Searl Street Consulting, www.searlstreet.com.au, GPO Box 2084 SYDNEY NSW 2000 

Contact details

Dennis Hoiberg

Lessons Learnt Consulting Pty Ltd

1300 365 119

dennis@lessonslearntconsulting.com.au