“There’s nothing to fear but fear itself.” – Franklin D. Roosevelt
Photo courtesy of Christopher Michel.
Recently, our team read a fantastic book – Getting Naked, by Patrick Lencioni – that explores the journey from superficiality to deep empathy that amazing human relationships usually take. Amazing consulting relationships, being just one kind of human relationships, also follow this journey, starting as professional engagements and becoming meaningful relationships of loyalty and trust. The book explores why.
It turns out that consulting relationships that stay superficial in the name of looking “professional,” never move a consultant from a vendor to a trusted partner. This is a book that goes deep into the simple but powerful insight that growing a relationship – any relationship – is about becoming vulnerable. For a consultant, this openness results in a better understanding of the “whole,” enabling us to understand their business better by understanding their motivations, their strengths, their weaknesses, in short, their true needs. It is about a humble approach to consulting where you open up completely and show your human side. It is in this zone of humility and openness that loyal and sticky relationships can develop. The book is a call to open up by facing three fears that prevent us from building deep relationships.
The concept is surprisingly unsurprising: professional relationships are human relationships. There is no way around it. Like all lasting human relationships, professional ones also move from the superficial to the deep, as those involved open up to fearlessly expose their humanity with all the good and the bad that comes with it. It is this fearlessness that is the basis for the insight of this great little book.
Lencioni brings home this need for fearlessness that turns into trust and loyalty on both sides by exploring the three specific fears that prevent consultants from becoming trusted partners of their clients.
- Fear of losing the business
Like in dating, if you’re afraid of losing your partner, you will behave in a way that actually gets you there. Your relationship will stay superficial because you will avoid the “difficult” conversations that make a relationship more intimate. In regards to consulting relationships, Lencioni puts it brilliantly: “ironically, though, this fear of losing the business actually hurts our ability to keep and increase the business, because it causes us to avoid dealing with the difficult things that engender greater loyalty and trust with the people we’re trying to serve.” This happens, he explains, because clients can “smell” that fear of losing their business makes us put our interest in keeping it before their interest in being helped.
- Fear of being embarrassed
This year marks the 50th anniversary of one of the most acclaimed movies of all time: 2001: A Space Odyssey. In it, pride causes HAL, an AI-enabled computer, to assume it is infallible, pushing it to eliminate all but one of the crew members, derailing the mission it was trying to maintain intact. It is pride, Lencioni writes, that keeps consultants from asking questions that may make them look ignorant or stupid. This leads to the second fatal fear in his book: the fear of being embarrassed. Nobody can look smart 24/7 in a deep relationship, vulnerability, which builds empathy, needs to go through the trial and error of making mistakes, sharing stupid ideas, and facing errors. In my experience, it is how one reacts to errors that shows a client what one is made of. A client will fire a consultant who tries to save face before firing one who owns their mistakes and problem-solves to correct them. As in personal relationships, wanting to be seen as smart is a turnoff. Smart people don’t yearn to be seen as so.
- Fear of feeling inferior
This final fear that prevents consulting relationships from taking their journey to loyalty and trust is also based on pride, but on a different kind. Lencioni writes that the “fear of feeling inferior is not about our intellectual pride, but rather about preserving our sense of importance and social standing relative to a client.” Interestingly, he reminds us that the word “service” comes from the same root as “servant,” and outstanding consultants who build loyal relationships overcome their need to feel important by serving, or in the author’s words, doing “whatever a client needs them to do to help them improve, even if that calls for the service provider to be overlooked or temporary looked down on.”
At the end of his insightful book about loyal relationships, Lencioni provides a practical list of actions that outstanding consultants can take to overcome the three fears and build a deeper relationship that grows roots. These practical actions are the following:
To fight your Fear of Losing the Business:
- Always consult instead of sell
- Give away the business
- Tell the kind truth
- Enter the danger
To fight your Fear of Being Embarrassed:
- Ask dumb questions
- Make dumb suggestions
- Celebrate your mistakes
To fight your Fear of Feeling Inferior
- Take a bullet for the client
- Make everything about the client
- Honor the client’s work
- Do the dirty work
At the end of the day, Lencioni reminds us “we all have weaknesses, and if we try to cover them up, we’ll probably put ourselves in a situation of having to do more and more of what we aren’t good at.” Nurturing trust and loyalty in a consulting relationship requires us to put down our egos so that we become vulnerable by showing – not hiding – our weaknesses, by showing our humanity to ultimately generate the empathy we need for our relationship to go deep.
Become fearlessly human in your professional life! Realize that you can’t conveniently put your humanity in a drawer in the name of a “professional” relationship, because at the end of the day, all relationships are human.