egyii blog

Welcome to the April 2009 Carnival of Trust.

Our theme for this carnival is ‘soften up’. I don’t mean allow others in business to take advantage of you, or place your trust in everyone without thinking. I do mean that in today’s changed business world, go ‘soft’ to create hard business results.

The public and our customers are fed up with macho chest-beating and claims of quality, caring and trustworthiness by business leaders. This carnival presents blogs which talk about trust in terms of simple human qualities like relationship building, putting your faith in others, and making yourself vulnerable.

It’s with these personal and interpersonal behaviours that we can gradually rebuild the trust that we have lost, and slowly but surely create the new world of business where trust is at the centre of decision and action.

I make no apologies for starting this carnival with the word  ‘love’, emphasised by John Assraf of One Coach as the key to getting hard business results in his blog The New Mantra: Love and Service. If your strategy is about “high leverage, high profit and high payoff” then you just may be a has-been in the new business world of empathy and care.

John Assaraff correctly makes the point that softening your hard business shell and approaching business growth from a sensitive, human relations standpoint may be just what you need to climb out of the crisis and prosper in tomorrow’s world.

Paying attention to your softer side may be one good business decision, while harnessing technology to create  trust is another good business decision. Ken Fischer, in Exploring the Economic Impact of Social Media, believes that although social media may be destructive to traditional industries such as advertising and retail distribution at this time, it will provide the engine of growth for new businesses as well as the economy in the future.

This is technology powered by and used to for interaction, connection, trust and relationship building. Another glimpse into the new world of business that we are all going to have to join sooner or later.

Peter Bregman makes no bones about the secret of great leadership and management: it’s trust. In The Real Secret of Thoroughly Excellent Companies, he takes you intimately into his conversations with leaders in a five-star hotel and shows, line by line, exactly how trust is engendered, built and applied to achieve competitive advantage. It sounds so obvious and so simple.

The story called Trust Management by Andrew Miller, of a change project gone bad, exemplifies the destructive force of self-serving leadership at the expense of the good of the whole team.

The irony in this story is that the leadership agreed to a set of rules which brought everyone together as equals in a creative, team-based activity, and which produced remarkable results through trust. But just before the project was finished, the leadership changed the rules to fit with their own ideas.

The resultant broken trust had a consequence far beyond the confines of the project they were working on.

The sense from the previous blog is that the leaders were unwilling to give trust away, as Dov Siedman explains. His message in Trust Me, It’s Time to Fill the Certainty Gap is that while all along leaders have expected their people, their suppliers and even their customers to earn their trust, he suggests that these leaders should actually give it away.

When we give away trust remarkable things happen: transactions costs decline; co-operative, value-crating behaviours start; and at a higher level, even the national rate of investment and GDP growth rise.

But giving trust away requires that you make yourself vulnerable – are our leaders of today ready for this change? Or do we need to look for a different kind of leader?

Robert Ambrogi is absolutely clear about the reason for online networking: to build and strenthen trusted relationships. In Why Bother with Online Networking? he advises us that for lawyers, the most effective way to create new business is through client referrals and recommendations.

With consumer choice at an all-time high and trust in brands shaky, this advice can well be applied to all our businesses. Why not build a powerful online network through social media and create the trusted relationships that will be the engine of growth tomorrow?

Connecting with customers through online networking is one marketing strategy. Another is connecting customers.

In Don’t Sell the Product, Sell the Ability to Connect Customers,  Graham Brown shows us the way to market our products and services to the Youth Market through platforms, by enabling customers to connect with each other through events and other opportunities that bring them together as a society. As each brand adds value to their customers by building around their social fabric, trust is created.

Couldn’t we learn from the youth market?

Brands: Measured by Trust, the blog of Mark Ritson of Branding Strategy Insider, says that in today’s market “Can I trust you?” is the single most important brand differentiator.

This is not the trust that was formerly the backbone of brand equity, such as reliable product performance and consistent service. Today this is not the issue. A company that wants to create brand equity today needs to prove that the personal integrity of its people, and hence all it’s actions, are above reproach.

To me, this seems like an enormous opportunity for those companies that truly care about their customers.

Today we need to go through a metamorphosis from being a salesperson to being a trusted advisor if we are to hope to connect with the sentiments of today’s client.  According to Ramon Vela in What My Daughter Taught Me about being a Trusted Advisor, the key action necessary to accomplish this is ‘sharing’.

Sharing our knowledge and expertise through white papers, blogs and so on not only creates trust through establishing an identity as an ‘expert’, but by making ourselves vulnerable in this way engenders another, deeper level of trust that is more personal.

Apin Talisayon bring us an Asian view from the Philippines in his blog A Value Driver behind Relationship Capital.

As a fitting end to this carnival, Apin tells us in no uncertain terms that ‘trust’ underlies the efficient operation, or threat of collapse, of our global knowledge economy. And never has there been a more important time to take this concept seriously and develop a new science and technology to understand and manage trust.

This must be our purpose and direction if we are to climb out of the crisis and enter a new world of trust-based business.

I hope you have enjoyed this carnival. Thank you Charles H. Green for allowing us to host this carnival, and thanks Ian Welsh for your help.

(For the link to Charlie’s blog, Trust Matters click here!)

James Irvine, Team Egyii, Singapore

In his new book Branding Only Works on Cattle, Jonathan Salem Baskin says, “Today’s guerilla branding…(is) about giving consumers the reason and confidence to act, and the best way of doing this is by showing them behaviour that they can understand and trust. It’s all about doing things, not about saying things.”

In the ‘old world’ of business, branding was about communicating images, concepts and messages that will hopefully create an emotional connection with the audience and lead to brand loyalty. In the ‘new world’ business, according to Jonathan Salem Baskin, this just doesn’t work. People are too suspicious of your messages, and they have no interest in just listening to what you have to say. This means nothing to them without action.

In the ‘new world’ of business that we are now entering, brand loyalty rests on behaviour. Prove to your customers that you are real, authentic, and able to deliver what they want. Show, don’t tell.

This line of reasoning has a direct link to Private Wealth Management in banking. If Private Banks ever hope to win back the trust of their clients and hopefully, win over even more from competitors, then they had better shut up. Don’t make grandiose statements about your heritage, reputation and trustworthiness. Nobody’s going to listen.

To win in this new world of business, Private Banks are going to have to behave their way back to credibility. A bit like a wayward husband who has to seduce his wife all over again. Not with promises of fidelity, but with hour-by-hour actions that reveal his true intent. That’s why the future success of Private Banks is in their people, especially the people who interact and build relationships with clients. It’s in these people’s pure intent and concrete behaviours that the seed of new growth lies. It’s time for these venerable institutions to decide what specific new behaviours will win the trust of their ‘new’ clients.

So forget about designing a fancy ad campaign, or delivering a message of assurance from up on high. Get down and dirty with the specific actions your people can take to woo your clients minute-by-minute.

James Irvine, Team Egyii, Singapore 

The Kapuas mud snake (Enhydris gyii) is a native of Borneo, and can change its colour spontaneously… Today’s business turbulence is the greatest opportunity of the last five decades. If today’s business leaders can learn to behave more like the the Kapuas mud snake, we might see nothing less than the passing of the ‘Old World’ of business into a ‘New World’ of business.

The Old World of business may have been saying ‘customer first’ and ‘relationship management’, but the truth is that the approach to winning more business never really changed. Sales executives, relationship managers and leaders are still taught that the key to revenue growth lies in going through a ‘scripted process’ that everyone can apply equally effectively. All you really have to do is find out your customer’s recognised and unrecognised needs, present your ‘tailored’ solution, and hey presto!

This approach to business growth is just one symptom of a general malaise where everyone is at the ‘front line’ (whether in product development, operations or sales) rushing to meet perceived customer needs. This rush to perform means that little real thought is given to other, possible underlying drivers of business success which ultimately determine whether these ’front line’ strategies will work. 

For example, a relationship manager in a bank will have been taught a set of behaviours that are predicted to lead to increased investments from customers. These behaviours will probably include questions to ask the customer, ways to gain agreement, and how to present a product solution. But these ‘front line’ behaviours only scratch the surface of the potential relationship between relationship manager and customer. And so the customer leaves the meeting feeling a bit deflated without knowing exactly why. Certainly, the meeting will have made no progress towards establishing trust.

Now is the time to move into the New World of business success and take a step back from this ‘front line’ thinking. Let’s not rush to be at the front pushing, pushing, pushing. Yes, targets are important, but businesses will never reach them from a position of desperation and impatience. It’s not about facts. Facts about what the customer wants. This is easy. No, today it’s about giving the customer what she wants from the very first second she lays eyes on you. These are not facts which can described. They are underlying drivers of human interaction which are working second by second in a dance as the relationship manager leads the customer through a melody of turn-taking. And there’s no end to this dance. It continues through the end of the meeting and into the conscious and unconscious thoughts of the customer all the while she is walking away and going about her business the next day and the next. And if you want to build a relationship of trust and loyalty, you had better make sure this dance continues on and on and on.

So much for ‘scripted’ behaviour. If you don’t enter this dance as a unique individual with your own way of expressing yourself and your own personal way of responding to every tiny signal your customer sends you, then your authenticity will be lost and your customer will be left in neutral about you. And you’d better treat every customer as a unique individual too. No two dances can ever be the same. Each time you engage with a customer you embark on a journey of exploration and discovery. How exciting!

These are things that cannot easily be reported back to a department manager in a weekly submission. They are not easily listed and analysed. But they are the ‘back office’ of business success at the front line. It’s time that business leaders put more challenging thinking into their behaviours – that they stop and try to really understand what drives people, rather than relying on age-old prescriptions that come to them without any effort.

So, welcome to the New World of business. We’ll never regain our customers’ trust if we apply Old World thinking and practices. Those businesses that take a step back, have some patience, and look beneath the surface will find opportunity in abundance in today’s turbulence. Just pay attention to the human being  in human beings for a change, and watch the results roll in.