The New Rules of Trust (Part 1)

For anyone classing themselves as a trusted advisor or thought leader there's a problem. Actually this applies to experts and business owners, too. Anyone offering intensive, high-ticket services.

And the problem is this...

Personal face-to-face contact.

It's a massive bottleneck.

Or rather you are the massive bottleneck. There just aren't enough of you.

How many times have you joked about wanting to clone yourself? (Be truthful.)

When the Covid pandemic ripped face-to-face contact completely out of the business equation things got even more depressing.

Instantly my inbox was full of questions from friends and contacts around the world.

From lawyers and accountants. To engineers, scientists and project managers. From HR professionals to coaches and consultants. All people involved in deep interpersonal work.

These are people who – without face-to-face contact – believed they would now struggle to build the essential foundations of a relationship (based on trust) with their clients, patients and customers.

I shook my head at the scale of the problem. They were all asking the same question.

How do you build trust in a vacuum?

There would need to be new rules of trust, I said to Jacqueline Moore, my wife and business partner, early in 2020.

‘You should write that down,’ she said. ‘It sounds like a good book title.’?

I wrote it down, diligently, and in spring 2025 – five years since coining the phrase – I’ll share the book with you. It’s called (shocker) The New Rules of Trust (though there's a story about the title, too, which I'll save for another time).

In short, I believe the issue of trust (or the collapse of it and what that means to you) is more relevant than ever for trusted advisors and thought leaders.

But we're making a big mistake

In a world where social media in 2024 has more grip than ever – on who’s in and who’s out (and what’s in and what’s out) of the business agenda – we seem to be making a big mistake.

And once again, it's especially those of us who see ourselves as thought leaders or trusted advisers.

What mistake are we making?

Some of us, post-pandemic, are trying to go back to an old-world, old-school, face-to-face way of building trust. We may be ignoring what we've started to learn about building trust in a permanently networked, always-on world.

We need to learn the New Rules of Trust.

‘Trust has an economic value’

Why is trust so important? Well, as you dig into the research you discover a whole raft of important work on how trust drives prosperity on business.

Francis Fukuyama, for example, in his doorstopper ‘Trust’ points out dozens of example of where trust is central to the economic prosperity of nations. And it starts with shared values, he says, at every level in firms. (More on the values=trust continuum soon, stay with me.)

‘Out of such shared values comes trust,’ he says, ‘and trust has a large and measurable economic value.’

It’s a long and beautiful argument which repays careful reading, but his conclusion is killer. ‘Trust leads to friction-free economies,’ he says on p149. Love that.

Who do you trust?

Moving to trust at the individual level, a classic example you’ve probably come across is the so-called ‘prisoner’s dilemma’, from game theory. It shows that people who trust each other all do far better in economic terms. It pays to trust. ?

Of course it breaks down all too often, as it does in the hilarious and embarrassing ‘Meet the Fokkers’, when Jack Byrnes (Robert De Niro) declares at the drop of the slightest hat that his putative son-in-law Greg (Ben Stiller) is either in (or out) of the Circle of Trust. Depending on how De Niro is feeling at the time.?

A threat to the Speed of Trust

With the deep science as context, let me point you to one of the two pragmatic, down-to-earth pieces of work on trust that’s well worth revisiting.

First is Stephen Covey Jr’s ‘Speed of Trust’. Take a quick look at the contents and Covey shows interpersonal behaviours are critical to trust. (This is probably the best known of the behavioural models of trust).

When you take face-to-face contact out of business – when there's a pandemic, say, or when someone retires from a partnership, or when you just want to pull back a little to save your sanity – two things immediately become extremely concerning in Stephen Covey's world.

The quality of relationships with existing clients fades and weaken. Projects seem to shorten and collapse more often and regular contracts are just not renewed. You saw that yourself during Covid, I’m sure.

But even more importantly the quality of relationships with NEW clients just fails to build.

Or it fails to build as fast as you’d like. Your pipeline isn’t as full as it once was. And it's all down to the lack of trust in you and your services.

But it's not your fault.

The very brilliant David Maister, the doyen of the professional service firm, shows us where the problem is, in his very readable title, ‘The Trusted Advisor’, written with Charles Green and Robert Galford.

?

Strong hint: read ‘The Trusted Advisor’ if you haven’t already (and re-read it if it’s been a while). ‘The Trusted Advisor’ is baked full of checklists and quick reminders. It’ll take you no more than an hour to skim through this, maybe two if you’re taking notes.

Now the area that Maister highlights where we’re likely to fall down in the absence of face-to-face contact is intimacy. Not personal intimacy but professional intimacy.

Just to be clear, Maister classifies professional intimacy as trusting someone enough to ask and answer difficult questions. This is the essence of being a trusted advisor isn’t it? To have enough faith in someone that they will be capable of helping you with the most difficult questions you face.

And this is where the last few years have been cataclysmic for old world trust-building.

Because the question now becomes very, very simple.

How do you build intimacy without face-to-face contact??

Hold that thought.

• The New Rules of Trust (Part 2) drops on Thursday 7 November 2024 at 0900 GMT