Who Are the Ultimate Trusted Advisors?
The following was written by Sarah Agan and published as a guest blog on February 24th on the Trusted Advisor website; this version has been edited to provide additional information about the Trust Quotient (TQ).
Who Are the Ultimate Trusted Advisors?
What profession do you think has the most ultimate trusted advisors per capita? Consultants? Doctors? Financial planners? I now know where my vote goes. PICU nurses.
A Child in Intensive Care
I spent the first ten days of 2011 coming from and going to the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU). Our six-year old niece “Abigail” (not her real name) was critically ill (she is better now.) It was a once-in-a-lifetime scary 10 days for our family. During this time I observed—and experienced—the PICU nurses as they did their jobs. Obviously, education, training, and technical expertise are required to work in PICU, but what blew me away was the dedication, passion, commitment and ultimate customer service that everyone showed, to a person. Their every action was executed with love and care. Each time they touched Abigail or did anything to adjust her equipment or medications, they told her what they were doing (though she was totally sedated): “Abigail, I’m going to suction you now, honey,” They showed the utmost respect for her as a patient and as a human being. It made me re-think what it means to be of service.
I emerged from this rough week with a fresh appreciation for what it means to be dedicated to clients and love what you do. I found myself wondering whether anything I had ever done could come even remotely close to what these PICU nurses do every day. I’m not trying to compare apples to oranges (e.g. I am an organizational performance consultant, not a nurse), but I think there are some apples-to-apples lessons to be learned here.
Applying PICU Lessons to Consultants
I live in Washington, D,C,, a town brimming with consultants. Just one search command reveals plenty of consulting firms claiming to be trusted advisors. A few years ago, through my longtime friend and colleague Andrea Howe (bossanovaconsulting.com) I had the pleasure to meet and work with Charlie Green. Charlie wrote the best-selling business book The Trusted Advisor and is the head of Trusted Advisor Associates. Charlie has created a successful business and brand around trust and what it really means to be a Trusted Advisor. One of the models he created is the Trust Quotient (TQ). The TQ essentially measures how trustworthy someone is. Any service provider knows that one’s level of trustworthiness is directly related to one’s ability to be successful. The quotient includes four components:
- Credibility. This has to do with my qualifications, my experience, expertise, as well as how I come across to others; do they believe I know my stuff.
- Reliability. Essentially, do I do what I say I will do by when I say I will do it? Can people count on me and do I honor my word?
- Intimacy. Intimacy in this context has to do with caring. Do I really care about what I am doing? Do I care about my clients or the person on the other end of the product or service I am providing?
- Self-Orientation. This has to do with ego. Am I more focused on myself than the person to whom I am supposed to be providing the service? Am I willing to subvert my ego in service of the other? NOTE: because Self-Orientation is in the denominator the value needs to be low (regardless of how strong the values are in the numerator) otherwise the overall level of trustworthiness decreases.
T = C + R + I
_________________
S
PICU nurses may be the ultimate trusted advisors. They are experienced, technically skilled, and have a high degree of credibility. They have to be reliable; if they don’t show up on time to replenish a medicine the patient could die. In many ways they have to subvert their egos and have a low self-orientation to be of service to the patient.
In fact, can they do their jobs if they don’t care? I concluded maybe they could execute the task-oriented aspects of their jobs without caring. But the love and care they put into their work, which drives the intimacy component in the Trust Equation, may be a critical part of the medicine and treatment for the most ill.
The Power of Care
Some studies show that the hormone Oxytocin (dubbed the “trust or bonding hormone”) is released with human touch and stimulates feelings of serenity, happiness, and love, dampening fear and stress and nurturing trust and security. While our niece lay in a medically induced coma for days, one of the nurses on the midnight shift took the time to carefully comb through Abigail’s long, tangled hair and then put it into two braids.
When her mother awoke in the morning she was moved to tears to see that while she slept in the room in a rather uncomfortable chair, someone had shown her daughter the love and care that often only one’s mother can offer. How might this display of intimacy have contributed to Abigail’s healing process?
Lessons for Advisors
Abigail was hooked up to advanced machines, and pumped full of life-saving medicine. She received world-class health care. But she also was cared for by perhaps the ultimate trusted advisors. We’ll never know the full power of the PICU antidote that brought Abigail back to full health, but we might take a few lessons from them:
- Know what your client needs and then deliver it
- Communicate straightforwardly (never lie or sugar coat anything)
- If necessary, under promise and over deliver
- Allow yourself to bring humanity to what you do, knowing that this may be what makes the biggest difference
- When you say you are going to do something, deliver on your word
- Never, ever let your ego get in the way of doing your job.
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