Jiri’s Notepad

This book review is a part of the series on architects’ soft skills.

Most of us will probably feel credible and totally trustworthy at whatever is our specialisation. Because of that you are most likely to have some kind of intuitive understanding about what does what it takes to become trustworthy, but I bet not many of you have spent longer than 5 minutes at once. I certainly did not). The good thing is that David Maister, Charles Green and Robert Galford have done that and you can now take a short cut by reading their book called the Trusted Advisor.For most people, to be trusted means to be competent. Reviewing my earlier post on architecture leadership I mentioned credibility, expertise and proficiency sustained by relationships as the key to informal authority. The thing is that you cannot replace subject matter expertise with skilful communication (or worse with bluffing). At the same time you cannot get along only based on your technical competence. Developing trust requires both as it is both rational and emotional process.

According to the Trusted Advisor, customers will trust you when you can show you are credible (which is built on hard won competency) and reliable. But in addition to that, there are other, softer aspects, such as being can be personally close to them (which Maister et al. calls intimacy) and last but not least having the service mentality - being focused on customer’s and not your own interests.

Ability to develop trust comes as a result of the certain attitudes and consciously or unconsciously used strategies, skills and techniques. Some of these may look like a common sense, but for instance about how many of the following rules do you practice in daily work life: give first, illustrate rather than preach, listen to what’s different, be sure the client is ready to hear you, earn the right to give advice, don’t assume but ask, don’t be afraid to ask for help when you need it, show interest in person, compliment but don’t flatter and show appreciation?

Apart from explaining the trust chemistry, probably the strongest part of the book is its overview of the sequence of steps that can help you develop trust. This is not really a step-by-step manual, more a sequence of what things you should do, what skills you need to practice and what to watch out for in various stages of a typical consulting engagement, whose very abbreviated version is as follows:

• Engage: find out what is of interest to the client; create, find and give away valuable ideas
• Listen: listen, probe and empathise to understand the current situation in its full complexity
• Frame: correctly and tactfully formulate the social or technical causes of the problem
• Envision: envisage the alternate reality
• Commit: agree what is achievable, obtain commitment for realisation

This model is admittedly best suited for pre-sales and front-end of the lifecycle activities, but I would say it should be relatively easy to apply it to whatever phase in the lifecycle you operate in.

The steps above are not any kind of ‘get results quick’ 5 step methodology. I’d say it is a fairly elegant formulation of many things that you probably do already. It is kind of a book, after reading which you will have a feeling that what it says is 100% common sense, but which will still leave you wondering: “How is it I did not realise this earlier?” In summary, The Trusted Advisor is another great introductory (yet not trivial) book, which I would recommend every IT architect or consultant reads alongside Working the Shadow Side. Everyone who spent a considerable part of their career working for a consulting company will be able to relate to many things in it and I am quite sure it will be a useful guide to any IT architects in their daily job of selling ideas to a variety of business stakeholders.