legal sanity

In this post on lawyers as trusted advisors, I discussed how trust infuses the delivery and consumption of legal services.

Lately, I’ve noticed a lot of commentary on the importance of trust in building and sustaining business.

In a post (excerpted from an upcoming article) entitled Are Law Firms Manageable, David Maister proposes that “problems with trust” are one of the variables that keep lawyers from “effectively functioning in groups.” And, Maister continues, the individual lawyer’s tendency to mistrust is only fueled by the law firm milieu. He says: “Unfortunately, in many of today’s firms that have been cobbled together from lateral hires and newly merged practices, the personal history that forms the basis of trust is often missing, as is the confidence that everyone will be practicing together for a long time.”

Maister senses that this trust deficit will grow and wreak havoc until clients start pressuring firms to “act as firms” rather than “bands of warlords, each with his or her followers, ruling over a group of cowed citizens and acting in temporary alliance—until a better opportunity comes along.”

Maister delivers a potent message here; one that threads through a recent post from the blog Synergy [as tipped by the folks at Be Excellent]. In it, Steve Sherlock asks “What is Great Leadership?” His answer is an enthusiatic “Trust makes a leader great!” Elaborating on his conclusion, Sherlock asserts: “A leader can be anointed or appointed but will only become great by building the trust of their followers or collaborators.”

Trust – specifically trust-based selling - is also the subject of an interview with Charles H. Green, Maister’s co-author on the terrific book, The Trusted Advisor. Highlighting one of the hallmarks of this approach to fostering business realtionships, Green states: “You have to trust that, if you keep doing the right thing for the client, in the end, that will be in your best interests too.” He also assures us that taking the lead in building trust connections usually pays off since “80-90 percent of the time people respond in kind” when we “behave in a trustworthy manner.”

The interplay of trust and consumer fidelity is detailed in this post from customer experience crossroads captioned Do Your Customers Trust You? Referring to a recent global trust barometer study(pdf), Susan Abbott writes: “If people lose trust in your company, they won't purchase your products or services (70-80%), they'll tell other people bad things about you (70-80%), they won't invest in your shares (65-75%), and they won't even work for you (40-50%).” Those are some eye-opening statistics.