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Resources Articles SIGNPOSTS by Charlie Lang What do managers, sales people and life partners have in common? They all need to be trusted in order to build successful relationships with their subordinates, customers and significant others. So, the question is, how can we get others to trust us? One of my coaching clients, Peter, a senior manager of a financial institution, complained that his employees often didn’t tell him bad news. He frequently needed to firefight situations that could have been avoided had he known about their difficulties earlier. He was worried that there might be problems he never heard about that may be affecting his business results. Since Peter’s problem may be traced to his subordinates’ lack of trust in him, let’s look at what constitutes trust. Years ago, I learned in sales training that trust = rapport + competence. While I could see that these seemed to be necessary ingredients to be able to trust someone, I thought something was missing. During our seminars, we regularly ask the participants to think of two people, one from their personal life and one from their workplace, whom they trust deeply. Then we ask them to think of common attributes and behaviour that make them trust these people so much. Here’s a selection of typical answers:
It occurred to me that the missing element was care. So, the magic formula is: trust = care + rapport + competence. If you check the list above, you’ll see that all of these items can be related to either rapport, competence and/or care. In the past couple of years, I performed this exercise more than 20 times and I can always relate any statements made by the participants to at least one of these three elements. Obviously, if we want to be trusted, particularly at work, then we need to develop the necessary competence in that field. Care is perhaps the simplest (but not necessarily easiest) element to apply in relationships as it’s just a choice we can make at any time. Everybody knows how to care, so we just need to make a conscious decision to care. Perhaps we need to learn how to better express our care but that’s usually not a big problem. Building rapport, however, is something some people are naturally good at while others have problems with it – especially when dealing with a range of people, particularly those who are different from them. Luckily, there’s a Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) tool that can help you build rapport with anyone you like: it’s called matching. Matching means that you try to adjust yourself to get into the zone of the person you want to build rapport with. There are several modalities of rapport such as voice (pace, pitch, volume), language (formal/ informal, dialects), body language, interests, beliefs, dressing and so on. If you have difficulties building rapport with a person, it’s usually because you mismatch in one or several modalities. You can scan for such mismatches and then make an effort to move your zone closer to the zone of the other party while staying within your natural range of behaviours. It’s important that you don’t mimic the other person; but instead make them more comfortable. For example, if you notice that the other person speaks quickly and your preferred pace is considerably slower, then you might want to speed up a bit to better match. Peter realised that his employees lacked trust in him because they felt that he didn’t really care about them, only about business results. The rapport with two of his younger subordinates was weak because he used formal language whereas they were more comfortable with a more easygoing style of communication. After realising these issues, Peter decided that he genuinely wanted to care more about his people and made some adjustments to the way he communicated with the two younger employees. Within two months his staff became more comfortable in sharing bad news, which allowed him to avoid further problems and worries. Charlie Lang is executive vice-president of the Hong Kong International Coaching Community (info@coachinghk.org)
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