| 25 February 2010
What’s The Goal of Your Client Relationships?
Are you becoming their “Trusted Advisor”?
“In the deepest and most complete trusted advisor 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”
(Excerpt from The Trusted Advisor by David H Maister, Charles H Green & Robert M Galford)
So what is the goal of your professional relationship with your clients. Are they just clients or is the goal to have a more trusted relationship? If your goal is to have a more trusted relationship what are you doing to support that effort?
“Those professionals who apply trust most successfully are those who are at ease with concepts like:
- Do well by doing good;
- What goes around comes around;
- You get back what you put in;
- Use it or lose it.
These maxims are ways of suggesting that success comes to those who have chosen not to make success the primary goal. The way to be as rich as Bill Gates is to care more about writing code than about being rich. And the way to be a great advisor is to care more about your client.”
(Excerpt from The Trusted Advisor by David H Maister, Charles H Green & Robert M Galford)
Here are some examples of attributes of a trusted advisor (as identified in the book The Trusted Advisor by David H Maister, Charles H Green & Robert M Galford)
- Have a predilection to focus on the client, rather than themselves;
- Believe that a continued focus on problem definition and resolution is more important than technical or content mastery;
- Show a strong “competitive” drive aimed not a competitors, but at constantly finding new ways to be of greater service to the client;
- Consistently focus on doing the next right thing, rather than on aiming for more specific outcomes;
- …Motivated more by an internalized drive to do the right thing than by their own organization’s rewards or dynamics;
- Believe that success in a client relationship is tied to the accumulation of quality experiences. As a result, they seek out (rather than avoid) client-contact experiences, and take personal risks with clients rather than avoid them.
Final questions: If you are not your clients “Trusted Advisor” then who is? If you are not the “Trusted Advisor” then would the existing advisor recommend you?
