Consultants of any type don’t get the chance to employ advisory skills with their clients until they can get someone to trust them enough to share their problems with them. The key to professional success is not just technical mastery of one’s discipline, but also the ability to work with clients in such a way as to earn their trust and gain their confidence.
Ambitious professionals invest tremendous energy in improving business skills, including sharpening their specific expertise, gaining experience, broadening their knowledge, and “networking”, all requiring hard work. However, seldom do they give enough thought to creating trust relationships with their clients. The trusted adviser acts variously as a mirror, a sounding board, a confessor, a mentor, and even at times, the jester or fool. In the deepest and most complete trusted adviser relationships, there are few boundaries within the relationship, little separation between professional and personal issues. Both members of the relationship fully know about each other and understand the role the other plays in his or her life.
A common trait of all trusted adviser relationships is that the adviser places a higher value on maintaining and preserving the relationship itself than on the outcomes of the current transaction, financial or otherwise.
At its core, trust is about relationships. “I will trust you if I believe that you’re in this for the long haul, that you’re not just trying to maximize the short term benefit to you in each of our interactions. Trust is about reciprocity: you help me and I’ll help you. But I need to know that I can rely on you to do your part, and that our relationship is built upon shared values and principles.” (David Maister, The Trusted Advisor, 2000).
Here at Genesis Business Advisers we don’t want our clients to be interested in us as a means to an end, as a destination for their own purposes; we want them to be interested in us as fellow-voyagers, people who care about us enough to go on a journey with us.
A common trait of all trusted adviser relationships is that the adviser places a higher value on maintaining and preserving the relationship itself than on the outcomes of the current transaction, financial or otherwise.
At its core, trust is about relationships. “I will trust you if I believe that you’re in this for the long haul, that you’re not just trying to maximize the short term benefit to you in each of our interactions. Trust is about reciprocity: you help me and I’ll help you. But I need to know that I can rely on you to do your part, and that our relationship is built upon shared values and principles.” (David Maister, The Trusted Advisor, 2000).
Here at Genesis Business Advisers we don’t want our clients to be interested in us as a means to an end, as a destination for their own purposes; we want them to be interested in us as fellow-voyagers, people who care about us enough to go on a journey with us.
RSS Feed