The Trusted Advisor

Additional The Trusted Advisor Information

In today's fast-paced networked economy, professionals must work harder than ever to maintain and improve their business skills and knowledge. But technical mastery of your discipline is not enough, assert world-renowned professional advisors David H. Maister, Charles H. Green, and Robert M. Galford. The key to professional success, they argue, is the ability to earn the trust and confidence of clients. The creation of trust is what earns the right to influence clients; trust is also at the root of client satisfaction and loyalty. The workings of trust are even more critical in the new economy than in the old.

Maister, Green, and Galford enrich our understanding of trust -- yet they have also written a deeply practical book. Using their model of "The Trust Equation," they dissect the rational and emotional components of trustworthiness. With precision and clarity, they detail five distinct steps you must take to create a trust-based relationship. Each step -- engage, listen, frame, envision, and commit -- is richly described in distinct chapters. The book is peppered with pragmatic "top ten" lists aimed at improving advisors' effectiveness that can be put to use instantly. It also includes a trust self-diagnostic in the appendix.

This immensely readable book will be welcomed by the inexperienced advisor and the most seasoned expert alike. The authors use anecdotes, experiences, and examples -- successes and mistakes, their own and others' -- to great effect. Though they use the professional services advisor/client paradigm throughout the book, their prescriptions have resonance for other trust-reliant situations -- selling, customer relationship management, and internal staff functions like HR and information technology.

The result is a tour de force -- brilliant, penetrating, unique. It is essential reading for anyone who must advise, negotiate, or manage complex relationships with others.

What Customers Say About The Trusted Advisor:

This book is right on target. It would have explained much about the success I had with clients as well as the failures that I suffered. I have found this simple equation to be most useful in gauging the strength of relationships built over the years.

From the outset the authors hook the reader by establishing the three basic skills that a trusted advisor must have: (1) earning trust; (2) giving advice effectively; and (3) building relationships. Those who have difficulty maintaining long term solid relationships with friends or clients would do well to check their self-orientation. Anyone who desires to develop lasting relationships with clients will want to read this book.

It also explains how frustratingly easy it is to lose the trust we've built up. And it gets better as the book progresses. The concept of building trust is brought home in a succinct equation: T = (C + R + I)/S where T is trust, C is credibility, R is reliability, I is intimacy and S is self-orientation.

It is highly likely, if you're honest with yourself, that you are pretty much motivated by your own self-interest and that will come through to clients and friends - regardless of the words you speak or protestations to the contrary.I wish I had come across this book (and the follow-on book by Charles Green, Trust-based Selling) years ago. This book will move the successful mentor/coach from the level of conscious incompetent to conscious competent and on to the ultimate goal of unconscious competent.

This is THE best book about professioanl selling skills I have ever read. Step by step, it guides you into making youself a very real trustworthy advisor in front of your client.

A colleague of mine suggested I buy this book. For some reason, I could not get past the endless number of lists, checklists, etc. I will confess, I never made it to the end. All of the content seemed like a great deal of common sense to me and I eventually lost interest in continuing.

It reads well and we chose it for the required reading for a class for new consultants that join our company because it teaches everything we want them to strive to be. The basic message seems to be listening skills, so we also paired our training with some listening lessons and exercises. I would highly recommend this book to any consultant - new or experienced.

David is the written word authority on professional advisory services. The trusted advisor is a book, I first read when it was published and I find myself returning to it and sharing it along with other works of David's again and again. But if you can read just one and want to balance learning with the enjoyment of the read, I recommend The Trusted Advisory for all consultants and service industry professionals.