#123 Stuck? Unlock Trust to Get Approval!

Are you a customer experience leader facing roadblocks when trying to get your initiatives approved?

 

In this episode, Mark delves into the power of trust with Charlie Green, co-author of "The Trusted Advisor," to uncover strategies for breaking through bureaucratic walls and fostering buy-in.

 

Key discussion points include:

• The importance of building strong relationships with your leaders and understanding their priorities.
• Why expediency can backfire and how taking the time to connect with stakeholders can save you time in the long run.
• The Three Levels of Listening: Learn to listen beyond the facts to uncover the context and emotional meaning behind what others say.
• The Trust Equation: Discover how credibility, reliability, intimacy, and self-orientation impact your trustworthiness and how to identify areas for improvement.
• Practical tips for building intimacy and creating a safe space for open communication.
• The significance of role-modeling trustworthiness .css-j9qmi7{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:row;-ms-flex-direction:row;flex-direction:row;font-weight:700;margin-bottom:1rem;margin-top:2.8rem;width:100%;-webkit-box-pack:start;-ms-flex-pack:start;-webkit-justify-content:start;justify-content:start;padding-left:5rem;}@media only screen and (max-width: 599px){.css-j9qmi7{padding-left:0;-webkit-box-pack:center;-ms-flex-pack:center;-webkit-justify-content:center;justify-content:center;}}.css-j9qmi7 svg{fill:#27292D;}.css-j9qmi7 .eagfbvw0{-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;color:#27292D;}

Episode Transcript

(00:02):
Welcome to the Delighted Customers podcast. I am so
excited to have back on my show. I think this must be the third
time. One of my favorite people, one of my
mentors in life and in business,
the author of the Trusted Advisor, one of the co authors
of the Trusted Advisor original book and the 20th edition that came

(00:23):
out a few years back, the author of Trust Based Selling, co
author of Trusted Guide, field book speaker,
founder of Trusted Advisor Associates,
Charlie Green. Welcome back to the show. Thank you so much. Pleasure to be back
here always. I love, I love to have you love our
conversations. We're talking all things trust today

(00:46):
and in particular, I work a lot with customer experience,
people in the profession, leaders and people
who are maybe not exactly in the profession in customer success or
some other area connected to a customer experience. And one of the
challenges that I hear a lot is I
hit obstacles. I'm having trouble making the change. I'm running

(01:08):
into the bureaucratic wall. And we seem to
get, you know, have some early energy and
then everything seems great. We're in a honeymoon
period and then things start to
start to slow down and start to stall. So today I'd
like to see if we could pick your brain a little bit

(01:30):
and get some answers for these
questions. Related. So let me throw out the first scenario, which
is let's say to me, mark, I need your help.
I'm having trouble. I keep hitting a wall. We're trying to get these
initiatives done. It's common sense. We're just trying to improve the
customer experience. I mean, how much more common sense can it be? Can

(01:53):
you help me out? What am I doing wrong?
Good question. And I guess the
usual attempts are improve the business
case, get more commitments up front, all that stuff. That's not
really, I think either you or I have much to add.
I think we discussed this briefly before the call. One of

(02:16):
them is to ask yourself, how good is my relationship with my
own leaders, the people I'm reporting to? Maybe one reason
you're getting turned down is you're just not having any personal connection
with the people from whom you're seeking approval. Well, that's
not going to help things understand. Find out
what's their interest, what are their priorities, and make sure that whatever you

(02:39):
propose or suggest has something to do with what
they're trying to get done. If you haven't done that, you know,
shame on you. So establishing this personal
connection, I think that's a big, big part of it. You know,
I think one of the things that we
can fall into the trap of and Maybe it's because we

(03:01):
get caught up in expediency and trying to move things along
and we have this, our own sense of urgency. But either
one, I've convinced myself that a head
nod was agreement and buy in, right.
Or. Or two, I just, I don't have time. I've got most of the people
saying, yeah, I've got this and we've got to push it through. What would you

(03:23):
say to that expediency argument?
Say it again. The expediency. So I just don't have time to
build the relationships with each one of these people. Like, I got to
get stuff done. I would say that's ridiculous.
You are forging a relationship every time you have an interaction or
fail to with these people, you are sending a message. You're building

(03:46):
it or you're not. Building isn't a question of time. It's a question
of how you conduct yourself. If you've got 10 minutes meeting
with a boss, how do you spend it? If it's nine minutes talking about you
and your programs, maybe not so good. If it's
eight minutes talking about them and their interests and their priorities and only two
minutes about you, that's got a much better likelihood

(04:09):
to improve things. And it's not a question of
time. I hear that a lot. I don't have time. Trust takes time. No,
it doesn't. It arises almost
naturally. Trust or the lack of trust arises
naturally out of the quality of the interactions that we have with other people.
I just don't buy that. It's a question of time.

(04:32):
Yeah, I think, I think I'll share one failure of
mine if it's okay. Sure, I'll share one of mine.
Yeah. In the, in the class master
class I teach, I share this, the Trusted Guide
roadmap. And, and it's this true story about one of
the. I, I try. I was trying to create an index for the bank where

(04:55):
I worked that was called the Customer Engagement Index.
All of the other data that was available to us through our
voice of the Customer platform was more predictive in
nature. It was around things like,
would you be likely to recommend our product? The Net promoter score question,
which is really. It's a gauge, it's directional, and

(05:18):
it's also predictive. It's not. What did you do? So
this metric was designed specifically for
bankers because bankers don't like change
as much or more than most people. So this
is hard data on what people did with their feet,
customers did with their feet. And

(05:40):
I thought I had the buy in of all the line leaders, we had
the equivalent of a governance CX governance council and we had like 15
line leaders and one, one guy in
particular, I had that head nod. I thought he
agreed but it turned out no.
Underneath it, when I got into a conversation like he was the no vote

(06:02):
if you will, at the moment of truth he was a no vote.
I went back to him and I said what happened? He said,
well yeah, I can't control how much of how
many I'm going to leave the product. Product A
gets sold, I'm product B, so I can't hold my
people responsible for it. I can't measure it, I can't manage to

(06:24):
it. And in that moment he didn't care about his corporate hat as
a senior leader of the organization
but he did care about his own ability to control the
outcome and what he and his team would be measured on.
And so that caused this whole initiative because

(06:45):
of the, the decision making process to
go sideways for three years. So I was
trying to be expedient. I'm the guilty one who asked you the question.
And it cost me so much time in the long run
that I had to meet with him several times, work on just focusing
on building my relationship with him and explain and

(07:08):
understand what his goal like where he was coming from in order to redirect
and say wait a minute, you're not going to be evaluated on this.
You and no one on your team. We're not going to tie this to incentive
bonuses, performance metrics. This is really
a gauge for the organization to understand the health of the
customer base. Right. So

(07:30):
wow, did I screw up in that? Interesting. Well, good on you
for taking responsibility. What are your lessons that you took away from
that? Next time that happens, what will you do? Yeah, so next
time what happens is I will. And in the
course we go through a specific model on how to go
deeper into getting to know the other

(07:52):
person. It's more, it's somewhat tactical in nature. It's like
a multi step process and it has to do with
the guide versus the hero
and how do I become a guide? And one of the ways of becoming a
guide is to really understand who their villain is. Like
what is it they really you can come with

(08:14):
alongside them with and battle against this thing. It's not a
person but it's this thing that and you have to
understand what their internal, their external, the philosophical problems
are. And that could take a two minute conversation or could
take a series of meetings to get together but at the
end of the day you're working on building that relationship.

(08:36):
So for me it's understanding that if I can't
answer some of those questions, it means I don't
know the relationship not built well enough. I don't know enough about that
person. All I know is I want to achieve.
Yeah, well, well seen and well said. I, I think
that's a good self diagnosis. It reminds me of, you know, some

(08:59):
of those simple truisms like people don't care what you know until they know that
you care or people are not going to trust you until you trust
them. People are, you know, it's enough in the sales
world about borrowing analogy here. Turns out
that if you the distinction between needs and wants,
people may say they need this but if you get a hold of them on

(09:20):
the basis of their wants, that's often sufficient. You don't even have to give
them what they want. You know, they need things like ROI
budgets, you know, sales goals, what they want. They
want to be liked personally, they want to be successful, they want to have future
career for the kids. You don't have to give them all that. It's sufficient to
say that you recognize their wants for people to say, oh, okay,

(09:41):
I'd rather do business with you. You know who I am, you get me.
So I think it does boil down as you suggested,
very much to getting a better relationship with the people you're trying to
convince. It's insulting if you don't in some level.
Charlie, one of the things that I learned from you that I would,
I think the audience would really benefit from is years ago

(10:04):
I was on, I was part of your team part working with trusted advisor associates,
doing some of the training which in this particular
model that you, that I'm about to share is not something
that I, that is in all of your books and it's also not something
that I teach in any of anything that I teach. But
it's connected to what we're talking about now. So I'm going to bring it up

(10:26):
and wonder if you could elaborate on it. And that is the three levels of
listening. I haven't looked at that one in a while. Yeah, bring it
up. You know, so the, the, the what I'm talking about is, is
understanding what they're their different problems are at these different levels and
who the villain is. But in order to get that, I think sometimes we take
things at face value at the surface of what people say

(10:47):
and we think we know them. But this, this idea
of three levels of listening about the facts and the
context and you know, the Deeper meaning. Could you share some more about how
that might work? Yeah, but can you put up a graphic? Do you
have it there? I haven't actually looked at that. I was going from memory, I
don't know. And most people listening will be just listening while they're driving. So they're

(11:09):
not. Yeah, okay, fair enough. Fair enough. Well, let's see.
Geez, I'm trying to. You may remember it better than I do. I certainly remember
the intent of it. Let me walk through it. Maybe we can go ahead,
role play or something for people. So the first one is
listen for the facts because they're saying something. And this is the part
that maybe we do get. Okay, we do. It's on the surface. I

(11:31):
need, I need to get this
report done by Tuesday. Right. That's all I know.
Two is the context. Like you talk about. Well, how
big a deal is. This is like a little deal. Is it
the double last year, Is it triple
last year, or is it this less than last year?

(11:53):
What is it? And then the third thing you talk about was the
meaning. So this is like, what's, what's the
meaning behind what they're saying? Yeah, what's behind that? What are they
not saying? Or what is. Can you read between the lines? What,
emotionally, what does it mean?
So I just love that model. Yeah, it is,

(12:16):
it is good. I think what it gets to is that we
live in a business world that is heavily driven by
behavioral empirical measurements, metrics.
You know the saying, if you can't measure it, you can't manage it. It's false
on the face of it. There are plenty of ways to manage without measuring,
but we live in a world that's default driven that way. Data, data,

(12:38):
data. Measure, measure, measure. And I think what that model points out very
simply is that we're still human beings.
You know, if you. I'll give a simple example. My daughter, when she had
her first child, you know, first time
parents, the kid's a week and a half old and suddenly the kid's colicky
and crying and has a temperature and everything. Well, you call up the

(13:00):
pediatrician and you know, imagine two scenarios. Scenario
A, you go in, the pediatrician says, yeah, we're seeing a lot of this go
around, you know, take these two pills, call me tomorrow, she'll be fine. Bye.
That will not work with my daughter. And my daughter's not unique. That does not
work with many mothers. You know, new mothers. It's like, come on, I looked at
Google and you know, what about restless baby leg syndrome and what about this? What

(13:23):
about that? What about the other? The second approach, which fortunately is taken by
most pediatricians because they know this is, the pediatrician
says, oh my goodness, really? How often does this happen? What happens when you do
this? Have you noticed this happening? Ah, interesting.
Yeah, I think this is a case of what's going around. Take these two pills.
This should help it. Call me tomorrow. I'll make sure. That is a

(13:44):
personalized approach that is getting to. This is a new mother I'm
dealing with. She's educated, she's smart, she's probably all over
Dr. Google. You know, I take this into account. Tell me about your
kid. It's not that people are unwilling to accept that there's something
going around. And maybe this is an example. If that's all you
get, all you get is the expertise, then you have depersonalized the

(14:07):
situation. Suddenly my baby doesn't count. My baby's just one of a thousand.
A statistic. And we don't react well to that. We don't respond.
What we do respond is when a doctor says, oh, let me look at your
kid. Let me hear from you. What do you think? What do you see?
Suddenly it makes all the difference between accepting an advice and not
accepting it. That is powerful. There's

(14:28):
a gem in there. I hope so. I want to
pull that out though. That's the idea of listening not just for the
facts, but also for the context and really the
meaning or the emotion behind what they're saying. Yeah. And also I would
say I think I had that tagline in that model. Listening to
be understood. Listening so the other person

(14:51):
feels understood. Your goal is not to extract the
facts. Your goal is to establish a relationship where the other person is,
ah, you hear me, you see me, you get me, you understand me. Now I'm
willing to listen to what you have to say.
So I think back to the model, the trust equation
model, and it's striking me

(15:13):
that trustworthiness equals credibility plus reliability plus
intimacy over self orientation,
which we want to be low. And the two
variables on the right side of the equation are intimacy and self orientation. I know
you know this, but for those listening who aren't as familiar,
the self, self orientation, intimacy tend to be the more

(15:36):
emotion based parts of the equation. And as you're sharing
this three levels of listening we're talking about, the model seems like it
really hits on those two in particular. I mean, yes, self orientation
is to be low when, if you're willing to be that curious and listen, but
the intimacy piece, there's a good opportunity for you to connect
on a more intimate level. Absolutely. You're forcing yourself to

(15:58):
listen for the me not just what they're saying, but the meaning behind what they're
saying. Right, right, right, right. And by the way, the
trustworthiness trust equation, the trustworthiness equation that you cited
there, there are other models of trustworthiness and they all
differ a little bit, but they all have two things in common or one thing
in common. All of them have at least one variable that represents the

(16:19):
rational, empirical, behavioral, analytical side of trust,
which there is. And they all have at least one variable that speaks
to what you call the emotional side of trust. In our model, it's intimacy and
low self orientation. Other people have different words for it, you know, empathy,
vulnerability, all that stuff fits in there. But trust between human
beings is partly emotional and partly rational.

(16:42):
And in my work with mostly professional services and
B2B salespeople, that's the one that they fall down on.
They have no trouble grasping, you know, reliable, dependable track
record, credentials, expertise. They have a lot of trouble grasping. It's
their professional job to establish a feeling of intimacy
with that other person. And it's squishy, it's hard to measure,

(17:05):
you know, it's in the firmness of your handshake, it's whether you wait half a
second before responding. Stuff like that. We all feel it
deeply. We learned that in kindergarten, if not before, but we've forgotten
it because we've become so well educated, over educated
in terms of all the quantitative stuff.
So let's give some

(17:27):
context to the equation
which, the trustworthiness or trust equation and the
three levels of listening model that we just talked about and then
put it back to what we talked about at the top, which is Charlie, I
just care. I said, Mark, but Charlie, I just can't get my, my
things approved, my initiatives approved and I'm stuck. And

(17:48):
it seems to be the same people. And I,
I'm wondering what advice we could give to people or you could give to
people who are stuck. And we talked about the, the
relationships. How, how well is your
relationship? What might be a prompter question for
that, like how would I, what would I want to ask myself? Yeah, good

(18:11):
question. Well, one way is you just go, you know, check off the
list on the trust equation if I think you know, and ask yourself
what, which one am I having a problem with? Is it credibility, reliability, intimacy
or self orientation? Well, if you have a problem with credibility,
you run the risk of being perceived as a blowhard.
You know, you keep saying you're great on everything, everything else, but your credibility is

(18:33):
low. Why? Because, I don't know, you keep saying things that are
unprovable or matters of opinion, or you're asserting and people don't think you have the
right. So that's not a hard one to fix, although it's obviously
important. What if your problem is reliability? You know, let's say you're great
on credibility, intimacy, low self orientation, but you're not very good at
reliability. You know, we have a word for that, it's called a

(18:55):
flake. You know, he's just flaky, you can't depend on
him. You know, definitely the right person, smart, etc. Etc. Gets along with people.
Great, just flaky. And what if you have a
problem with intimacy, which is the most common one?
If that's missing, you run the risk of being perceived
as a dork, a dweeb, a nerd, you know,

(19:17):
soulless, impersonal, you
know, you can't connect with them as a human being, might as well be dealing
with a bot, that kind of thing. And the fourth one, if you have a
problem with low self orientation, in some ways that's the worst of all.
You'd be perceived as devious. Who's he in it for? What's
he trying to get at? What's he angling for? Who's he in this

(19:38):
for? Has he got my back or not? And as I
said, the most common one is the intimacy one. But
I think that's one way to approach it. Say what am I most likely guilty
of? And as you know, we also had a self assessment
tool to do exactly that. People could take it for free
and get an objective reading based on 20 questions and

(20:01):
100,000 other people have taken it as to what their least
likely, their most likely weakness is.
Yeah, and by the way, I'll put that in the show notes for those of
you listening, a link to that. So let's just say it is intimacy. Let's
say I have this sense that
Joanne, who is one of my key

(20:22):
stakeholders and I, she
doesn't think I have a high level of intimacy. First of all, what does, what
do we mean by intimacy and what are some things I can do to overcome
that?
The single best thing you touched on it is listen,

(20:43):
listen again, not with the intent, you just learn the facts,
but listen so that you understand where the other person's coming
from. I mean, everybody will say that we should all be better listeners. Well,
it's true, but we don't all Practice it. So listening is
certainly one. Charlie, let me interrupt you
because. So I just wanted for the audience, we're not talking about the romantic kind

(21:05):
of intimacy. Thank you for pointing that out. It's a provocative word.
We kept it in despite it being. Or maybe partly because
it's provocative. It gets people to think. It's like, do I feel safe and
secure sharing stuff with this person or do I think
they're going to blab it to everybody? Or they're going to, you know, violate my
confidences? Do they even understand where I'm coming from? You know,

(21:27):
we're hesitant with people that we don't feel connected to. And so there's a
reason that when we meet people, we say, oh, you went to, you know, Northwestern,
so did I. Or did you know so and so. Or, oh, wow,
you live in San Diego. How cool. I was there, you know, once years
ago, and da, da, da, da. There's a reason we do that, to get some
kind of traction, some kind of personal connection with people. And

(21:49):
there are a thousand ways to do that. Gee, I noticed you have this interesting
thing on your desk. Tell me about that. Or I noticed in looking over your
LinkedIn profile, you did this. It may not even be
directly relevant to the business issue. It's just a nice way of
opening. I noticed you were on the swim team. Boy, you must be a good
swimmer. What stroke did you do? What distance? You know, people
appreciate that kind of. Even if it feels mechanical.

(22:12):
It's not if you do it with sincerity.
So. So I'm thinking about this intimacy one, because I
know that it is, because you've told me
and you've shared some of the data you mentioned. A hundred thousand people have taken
it, and intimacy ends up being the highest correlated to
trustworthiness review. Yeah, that's actually a statistical

(22:35):
correlation. You run a regression analysis on it, and intimacy is the one that comes
out number one by a slight margin.
It's worth trying to be good at it, be
better at it. And so you mentioned this idea
of listening, and I may have
trouble. So there's three levels of listening, which is listening for the facts,

(22:58):
listening for the context, and listening for the
meaning of it. And if I'm doing all those, well,
it should improve my intimacy, shouldn't it? Yes, it should.
And internally does. I mean, if you understand
somebody on a fundamental level to where they go, yeah, this guy gets me.
That's what you want. The feeling of this guy gets me. Then they become

(23:21):
willing to open up and share with you. Another way to do
that is take a little bit of a risk, by the way, if you take
a risk, that's what initiates trust. If all you do is sit
around and be trustworthy, it's a passive kind of a virtue, like
aggressively waiting for the phone to ring in the sales arena. But if you
take a risk either by saying, hey, you seem a little hesitant, that's an

(23:42):
observation about them, it's a little bit risky, but, you know, it
shows you're interested or about yourself. I gotta tell you, I'm a little bit
hesitant to get in this conversation because I don't know this about that, I don't
know about the other. So forgive me if. But you know, and then
you go on to it, so acknowledging some personal component
of yourself or the other. Yeah.

(24:04):
So we could be having a conversation and I
could say, I notice you use the word
really three times.
I notice that you, like you mentioned before, hesitated
before you answered that, or

(24:24):
you look distraught when you talk about your
mother. And it could just
be that kind of acknowledgment. Right,
right. And people hesitate to do that, I mean,
for several reasons. One of them is just simple fear. They're
fearful of getting into a personal conversation

(24:47):
because, you know, the other one which is related to that
is people confuse it with professionalism. They think, well, I'm a professional,
I'm a lawyer, I'm an accountant, I'm a banker,
and we don't get involved in people's lives. It's
unprofessional for me to do so. Well, no, it's not. It's
unprofessional for you to behave like a bot. That's what's

(25:09):
unprofessional. Your customers are human beings. So are you.
So when are we going to admit it? You know, years ago, I'll date myself.
There was a famous self help book called I'm okay, you're okay.
But I've often thought somebody ought to write a book called I'm an idiot, you're
an idiot, let's get past it and move on. Let's
acknowledge we're both human. I

(25:30):
think as we're talking about this, what comes to mind is
if you're asking these questions and you're capturing this information,
the next time you see that person, or if you want to follow up, to
remember what they shared with you and
bring. Bring it up. Oh, how's your son doing? I remember last time we were
together, he was absolutely right. Yeah. And you

(25:53):
think about, you hear that so much about very famous leaders like Bill
Clinton was off scale, good at that. You know, I remember reading
some New York Times article. He was visiting India and some woman in the
crowd, he was passing by in the. The woman said, he looked at
me and I felt like I was the only person in the world he understood
who I was. Jesus, he's doing it in India of all with

(26:14):
strangers. Well, some people are really good at that. You know, no matter what you
may say about Bill Clinton, he had that skill. Yeah.
Remembering names, all that kind of thing. No question about it. No question.
So I think one of the things that we covered here today
is if you are that person and you're stuck and you're trying to lead
change in an organization, number one, kind of do an inventory

(26:36):
of the people who you need to
build your guiding coalition with
and ask yourself these hard questions, honestly,
about how well have you established a
relationship with these people, how well would they view your
trustworthiness? And if you haven't gone

(26:59):
there, you may think it's not expedient to do so, but
spend some time trying to get to know those people, what
their problems are, trying to solve who their villain is
and get the context of the issues. Right.
And then start to do that one by one with the people
that you know. And we just share with you three levels of listening and how

(27:22):
to understand at a high level the trust equation. Some
tips on how to get there, right, Charlie? Yeah. Yeah.
I would add one other thing if I could. Yeah. That what in
your original question of, you know, if I'm a CX leader and I'm trying to
get, you know, approval for my program. Well, in your role as leader,
one of the things you have to do when it comes to trust is

(27:44):
to role model the behavior of someone who is trusted and
trusting and so forth. There are lots of things that you may
advocate for and you may fall down on, you know, in your own
execution, but trust better not be one of them. If you're telling
people behave, be trustworthy, be trusted, and you don't do that
yourself, you're a hypocrite. And people smell that out in no time like

(28:06):
blood to a shark in water. Right. So recognize your
role as role modeling. This stuff that we're talking about here, it
isn't just for you. It's to communicate to all the people who
follow you. This is how one does it. And I do it right. To the
best of my ability. Right?
Yeah. Yeah, you're a master at it.

(28:32):
Well, good, good stuff here. I. And I, just as you're
talking I was thinking about one point, which is that doesn't mean
you abdicate your responsibility to do the nuts
and bolts of the job. For example. Yeah. You do need to speaking
their language. I mean, that's part of low self orientation. Is their language
is. Is more about revenues and costs and profit

(28:55):
and share of wallet and whatever. Then you need to convert your language into
their language. Yep. As part of the low self orientation. And
you, you do need to make the business case for what it is. I'm going
to assume for a minute that people listening to this are smart
enough to know how to, how to do that and that they need
to do that. But this piece of it may. And, and you

(29:17):
know, in most cases, Charlie, I think people
are less inclined to tell you that
they're. They don't trust you or you have a low trustworthiness. Sure.
You never know. Right. Yeah. Nobody,
none of us like to, you know, critique other people for that. It
feels too confrontational, too aggressive. So we need to

(29:39):
be able to seek it out ourselves and find out for ourselves.
Excellent. Well, great conversation as
usual. I thank you so much for being on the show.
Such a pleasure. And sharing all these gems once again.
And I'll put in the show notes the
trust quotient assessment that you can take and look forward

(30:02):
to having you back on the show again sometime, Charlie. Great. Always a pleasure. Mark.
Thank you so much. Thank you.