The Trusted Advisor: 20th Anniversary Edition

by David H. Maister

you don’t get the chance to employ advisory skills until you can get someone to trust you enough to share their problems with you.

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 this client.

it must always be borne in mind that trust results from accumulated experiences, over time. There is no quick fix.

“institutional trust” is an oxymoron. We don’t trust institutions, we don’t trust processes, we trust people.

It is not enough for a professional to be right: An advisor’s job is to be helpful. David had to develop the skill of telling clients they were wrong in a way that they would thank him for giving helpful advice!

Critiquing one’s clients is, by definition, a part of every professional’s job. Suggestions on how to improve always carry the implied critique that all is not being done well at the moment. Yet it is the person hiring you who is often responsible for the current state of affairs.

it is an essential part of the professional’s craft to reveal nuances, problems, barriers, and issues of which the client is unaware. If these are not conveyed with tact and skill, the client could easily believe (however unfairly) that, rather than relieving fears and being helpful, the professional is creating complications.

What clients frequently want is someone who will take away their worries and absorb all their hassles. Yet all too often, they encounter professionals who add to their worries and create extra headaches, forcing them to confront things they would prefer to ignore.

Explain it to me in language I can understand. Help me get it! Your job is not just to assert conclusions, but to help me understand why your recommended course of action makes sense. Give me reasons, not just instructions!

should act as if we are trying to advise our mother or father. If we are trying to convince Mom or Dad to do something, we are more likely to find the right words to convey our point so that it comes across with great respect, so that any implied critique is softened as much as possible.

The principle here is that the successful advisor assumes responsibility for the proper mutual understanding.

a lecture is the fastest means known for getting ideas from the notes of the teacher into the notes of the student without passing through the minds of either.)

The most effective way to influence a client is to help the person feel that the solution was (to a large extent) his or her idea, or at the very least, his or her decision.

If you can’t deal with client politics, you cannot be an effective advisor.

summary of what was decided. People often leave the same meeting with different impressions of what was decided. Building trust also requires reducing ambiguities.

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. Then, figure out, in advance, precisely how you are going to demonstrate that you are those things. Don’t tell them, show them. Don’t “wing” it. If the client is to be convinced of something, you need to be very prepared to demonstrate it convincingly.

Demands are usually resented, while requests for help usually evoke a positive response. It is an interesting comment on the human condition that we often resent those who have done us a

and to whom we owe an obligation. In contrast, we feel kindly disposed to those we have helped.

“The truth is, you can fix the content thing better than you can fix the collaborative thing. For some people with process consulting backgrounds, content can be tough. But in general you can train for content better than you can for collaboration.”

a murder trial, the defense attorney was cross-examining a pathologist. Here’s what happened: ATTORNEY: Before you signed the death certificate, had you taken the pulse? CORONER: No. ATTORNEY: Did you listen to the heart? CORONER: No. ATTORNEY: Did you check for breathing? CORONER: No. ATTORNEY: So, when you signed the death certificate, you weren’t sure the man was dead, were you?

CORONER: Well, let me put it this way. The man’s brain was sitting in a jar on my desk. But I guess it’s possible he could be out there practicing law somewhere.

The invitation to discuss an agenda, even if only for sixty seconds, sends a powerful signal at the outset that the meeting is being run for the mutual benefit of all present and is not the closely held property of one person or segment of the meeting.

all rational framing consists of distilling a complex set of issues down to a few critical variables.

the human mind has limitations on the amount of information it can process.

Advisors sometimes stress too much the need to create (and protect) proprietary framing methodologies or models. We think this concern is misplaced. There are relatively few great truths in life. The effectiveness of the advisor does not lie so much in the invention

of the next (proprietary) paradigm as it does in finding the way to lead a particular client, with a particular problem, into seeing the relevance of an old (or new) paradigm.

we have all learned that solving clients’ problems, in every profession, means helping the client (or the client’s organization) solve not only the technical aspects of the problem but also the very real emotions that surround any kind of significant decision making.

this is usually about framing the client’s emotions (and not ours!).

Blame truly gets in the way of effectively framing the issue. In

Blame is a defense mechanism protecting the ego of the one doing the blaming. As such, it is just another form of self-orientation.

Not taking a position sacrifices an enormous range of options for helping a client.

To cling to a wrong idea for the sake of “credibility” is also the height of self-orientation, because it’s all about us, and not at all about the facts or the client.

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

A New York Times survey showed the same result. Sixty percent of Americans said that you couldn’t trust most people, but only 20 percent said they couldn’t trust most of the people they knew. In other words, the more we know someone, the more likely we are to assume that we can trust him or her.

ONE OF THE DANGERS of writing, speaking, and teaching on the topic of trust building is the tendency to overgeneralize about clients and assume they are all alike. It’s

tempting, but it’s dangerous and it’s wrong.

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?

the best selling technique is to not sell, but to commence the service process.