How to Be a Trusted Advisor

On Episode 24 of The Wealth Cast, Charles Green, co-author of The Trusted Advisor, joins Chas to discuss how to build trust in your relationships. Charlie has consulted with countless firms to help them build and improve client relationships. His methods, which have at their core a Trust Quotient with several factors, are systematic in nature, and Chas has utilized them throughout his life and career to help foster his relationship building efforts.

Listen here:

Hello, and welcome to The Wealth Cast. I’m your host, Charles Boinske. On this podcast, we bring you the information that you need to know in order to be a good steward of your wealth, reach your goals, and improve society.

Today, I am joined by author and consultant Charles Green. Charlie has co-authored a series of books based on the original work he did in The Trusted Advisor. Charlie and his colleagues have spent their careers focusing on helping firms and individuals worldwide, improved client relationships, and organizational performance.

I first stumbled upon Charlie’s book The Trusted Advisor in 2002, I believe it was, and it really had a big impact on me personally. It not only reinforced the lessons I had learned so far to date in my career, but it also gave me a structure to think about—how to work with clients and colleagues, and even talk to family members and counsel them over the years. It’s been a really big impact on my life, and for that reason, I’m particularly happy to have Charlie on the show today. I hope you get a lot out of it. Thanks very much.

Charlie, welcome to The Wealth Cast. I’m absolutely thrilled that you’re here.

Oh, well, thank you so much! Pleasure to be here.

As we’ve discussed, in a previous conversation, you know how much your work has influenced and sort of reinforced the thinking that I’ve developed over my career. And it was, it was a little bit of a—it was a huge reassurance when I came across your original book in 2001, and I read it and I thought, “Holy smokes, this guy gets it. Maybe I’m not crazy.”

And maybe you’re not the only one.

Right! I’m not the only one. And so it really is meaningful to me to have you on this podcast, because you’ve, you’ve helped formulate and support and reinforce some of the ideas that we developed over the years. And first, I want to say thank you for that. And then also thank you for sharing some of these ideas with the podcast guests, because I think these are really important.

Well, as you can imagine, that’s very gratifying to hear—somebody writes a book, and then when people pop up and say, “Oh, my gosh, yes. Bingo,” that’s wonderful to hear. Thank you.

You’re welcome. So why don’t we sort of start at the I think, what is the structure of what you call the trust equation. How we develop trust, whether it’s in business or in volunteer work, or within families? What does that equation look like?

Well, let put some context on that first—first underscore what you just said. These kinds of trust dynamics are interpersonal relationships between one human to another. So it isn’t just wealth management, it isn’t just business, it’s, you know, the web of human relationships. So trust, the other dynamics are basically the same.

The trust equation talks about one half of the trust dynamic—the other half is the person doing the trusting. So in any trust interaction, you have a trustor and a trustee—the trustor is the one who takes the risk; the trustee is the one who proves themselves trustworthy or not. The trust equation refers to that second part—how do you be trustworthy. And it’s got four pieces. It’s a simple formula: (C+R+I) / S. C stands for Credibility. R stands for Reliability. I stands for Intimacy—meaning safety and security—and in the denominator, which goes the other way, S stands for Self-Orientation. Basically, who are you focused on, who are you paying attention to—yourself or others.

So you know, a maximum high score, if you will, is high credibility, high reliability, high intimacy and low self-orientation.

We got that notion of the trust equation from another firm who got it from another firm—I think as near as I can tell it, it traced to a firm called Synectics in Boston in the 70s. And we made a couple of, you know, significant revisions to it. Anyway, that’s the history, want to give credit where credit’s due.

Yeah, well, these ideas tend to build on each other, right. And so let’s, why don’t we talk about each one of those components quickly, so that so that people can really understand what each part means.

Sure. Well, I work mostly with professional services. So you know, the core of that is probably like Big Four accounting firms, consulting firms, etc, lawyers. Expanding out a bit you definitely get into wealth management advisory, financial advisory; you also get into B2B sales. Those people as a gross generalization, if you ask them to fill in the blank with what is trustworthiness, they’ll probably come up with credibility first, which basically means, you know, subject matter mastery, “Am I good at this stuff? Do I know my stuff? Am I certified,” and you know, credentials, all that kind of thing. Because the professions attract people who are mentally, you know, competent, smart, bright, high IQ, whatever you want to call it. So we all tend to say, “Well, that must be the most important because that’s what I’m good at.”

The second place one is probably reliability, which has more to do with actions, track record, do what you said you would do or not. By the way, the reliability is the only one of the four that actually takes time. There’s a lot of myths around trust—the biggest one is trust takes time. Well, that’s only true for reliability, which of course requires repeated experience, which requires the passage of time.

The third one in the numerator, intimacy: totally different and has to do with a sense of security. Like, “Can I share this information with you? Are you going to laugh or not? Are you going to share it with somebody else? And if so, how can I be sure that you’re going to treat it appropriately from my point of view, discretion,” all that kind of thing. The end of high intimacy, you say, “Yeah, I think I can have that conversation with you.”

So all three of those are positive virtues. If we score high on them, you know, trustworthiness is up. The denominator factor, self-orientation comes in two flavors: One is selfishness, and for the most part, that’s not really relevant. we can spot that a mile away. And yes, there’s a Bernie Madoff here and there, but we don’t run into that many of them and they’re not hard to spot.

The bigger one is not selfishness, but neurotic self-obsession: constantly worrying, “Am I going to get the sale? Does she like me? Are they paying attention? Why is everybody looking at me? Why is nobody looking at me?” All of which is completely about ourselves, and the effect of which is to shut it off from the person in front of us, the person we’re talking to.

So what you want is a low score on self orientation—that doesn’t mean, you know, low self worth or low ego or anything, it just means you’re capable of paying attention to other people, which we interpret as caring. You know, not without reason. So those are, you know, quick look at the four factors.

And in terms of the self-orientation, I was always intrigued by sort of the idea that, you know, when you’re having a conversation with someone who is depending on, or looking to you as an advisor, whether that’s in business or anywhere else, the important thing to do is to put the outcome aside, and focus on what they’re trying to achieve. And separating yourself from an outcome can be psychologically a little bit hard, right? That’s a difficult thing.

Absolutely. Yeah. And I mean, you put your finger right on a really fundamental point. And there’s a lot of sort of paradoxical qualities to trust. And that’s one of them. The ability to divorce yourself from the outcome, paradoxically, leads to better outcomes. Unless you start using it as a tactical tool to increase the outcomes, in which case you just ruin the formula. It doesn’t work that way.

Right, understood.

You actually have to care. It reminds me, the old George Burns joke, “The most important thing in life is sincerity. If you can fake that you’ve got it made.”

Right!

Same with caring here. So you’re absolutely right.

I noticed particularly in the field of sales, where the whole system is kind of set up to reinforce short-term, self-oriented goals. “How do I get the customer to buy? How do I handle objections? How do I close them to my benefit? How are we getting in my time frame?” And the key to putting trust into all that stuff, which is not there by all the usual signals, is as you said, detach from the outcome, and say, “Let me just help this customer, and you know, maybe they’ll buy something, and maybe they won’t.” But interestingly enough, if you approach it that way, they will be more likely to buy from you and if not now, then definitely in the future.

Well, and as importantly, you don’t compromise your role as an advisor when you do  that, right? When you detach yourself from the outcome, it’s not about detaching yourself from their outcome. It’s detaching yourself from the outcome as it relates to you. 

Correct. Exactly.

And that’s very hard to do. Many organizations have fostered the opposite.

Exactly.

Focusing on your outcome rather than their outcome. And I think in the long term, if you believe that, you pay it forward, and you do the right thing for people and eventually that benefits you in some form or fashion.

Yeah, I forget which one it was, but a managing director at Goldman Sachs 34 years ago had this great phrase, he said, “We are long-term selfish,” meaning “Yeah, I’m in it for the money, but I know that the best way to get there is focusing on the long term, not the short term, and if that means we lose the sale here and there, so be it—it actually works out better in the long run.” So I thought that was a neat way of kind of, you know, squaring the circle, how do you balance these things.

Well, That’s right. I mean, at some point, economics has to play a part, right?

Yeah.

It has to. But there are different ways to get there, and the way that that I sort of learned to be most comfortable with was the way that you’ve recommended in your book—which is to set that outcome aside from your perspective, figure out what it is that the client, or the prospective client, needs, help them if you can. If you can’t, find someone that can help them right, and move on to the next person that needs help.

Yeah, exactly. And, you know, I find, especially maybe in the accounting world more than anywhere, there is this antipathy towards sales. It’s not so bad in wealth management, or investment banking or something, but hardly any person who joined a Big Four firm joined because they wanted to be a salesperson.

Right.

And they intuitively hate it, right? They do not like to think of themselves that way. “Sell” is a four letter word. And the beautiful thing about what you and I are talking about is, you don’t have to deal with that contradiction, because your overarching goal is exactly the same as it is when you’re delivering—when they’ve already bought from you. You do the right thing, you bring up problems, you could close relationships. Well, guess what, that’s the best way to sell also.

So it gets rid of that psychological, semi-conscious, negative instinct. That’s true of some financial advisors, too, although, as I said, I don’t think it’s as endemic as it is in, say, accounting.

I think it is a symptom in our industry as well. But to broaden it beyond wealth management, I think everybody’s in sales at some point, right? If you’re selling ideas, you may not be selling a product, but you’re trying to convince your spouse to do something, or you’re trying to convince a child or a colleague or a client. And so you’re promoting an idea or a concept.

Yep.

And how you do that is really important. And the trust equation applies in every one of those instances, as far as I can tell.

Yeah, I agree with you. We can run down the list again, and part of when we redid the 20th anniversary edition of The Trusted Advisor, part of what we did was expand the audience. Because like I said, we started off with consultants and accountants and lawyers and so forth, but we realized over the course of 20 years, a lot of other people were using it. In particular technology, wealth management and B2B sales people. Because it makes sense: It’s all trust, it’s all relationships. And you know, you’re not just even selling an idea. In these cases, you’re kind of selling yourself. People buy your ideas if they trust you. So we don’t like to think of it that way, like because it’s, you know, “What if they don’t buy from me, they rejected me.” Well, it’s sort of true.

Right. 

So it gets complicated, but it’s all very personal, like you said.

Absolutely. So that’s helpful for sort of some background. How about if we talk about the Trust Quotient. Can you define that for us and put that into context as well?

Yeah. What happened was the trust equation was part of the original Trusted Advisor, which came out in 2000. And then about—I forget—2008, 2009, I was in the supermarket one day walking through the checkout aisle with the magazine rack there. And I forget what magazine it was—People, Us, Redbook, something like that. There was a banner headline: “20 Questions”—“Rate your sex life,” or “Am I an alcoholic?”—I forget what it was exactly.

Right, something like that.

Right. And I thought, “20 questions—am I a trusted advisor? That could be fun.” So I went home, you know, pulled out the book, pulled out five questions for each of the four variables—somehow 20 felt like a good number, threw it up on the web and waiting for the crowds to flood in. 

Well, they didn’t flood in, but they trickled in and it’s been, you know, over 10 years since then. Over 200,000 people have taken it, and when we hit 70,000, we did an analysis of it, and, you know, several interesting findings that I can now say, are in the database.

Number one, the strongest correlation actually was with age: we get more trustworthy with age, or to be precise about it, scores go up as ages go up—which I think makes perfect sense. You know, we certainly get more data and experience as we get older. Hopefully, there’s a correlation with wisdom there a little bit. You know, you get older, the hormones by down you get in less fights than you used to. And you know, every culture has some level of respect for their elders, at least until we turn senile. So I think it makes some good common sense.

The other big finding was the most powerful factor among the four turned out to be intimacy. We hadn’t thought of the trust equation as being you know, a statistical piece of research, it was just a conceptual model. But once you do throw that on there—if you equally weight all four factors, as opposed to giving self orientation triple the weight implicitly in the original formula—if you weight them all equally, it turns out intimacy has a slight edge over self orientation as the most powerful factor. That’s by doing a regression analysis.

And I don’t know about you, Charles, but I don’t trust—if somebody says here we have a regression analysis, and that proves the point, I want to say, “No, give me some ‘doesn’t make sense.’” And it does make sense. For example, Gallup does surveys every year of most and least trusted professions. Everybody guesses this right. Who’s at the bottom of the list? Lawyers, politicians and car salesmen. Who’s at the top of the list is less obvious. But it’s nursing, 19 years out of the last 20, the only exception was 2002, when it was firemen. That was the year after 9/11. And by 2003, it was back to nurses, and it’s been nurses ever since.

Women tend to score more highly on the TQ than men do, and men are not surprised by that. It sort of intuitively makes sense, and nursing happens to be an 89% female profession. But whether it’s male nurses or female nurses, doesn’t matter. If you think about which of those four factors in the equation are most job critical for nursing, most people would say, “Hmm, probably intimacy.”

I mean, you look at the year we’ve been through with these horrible images of people dying alone in a hospital bed, connected with their loved ones only through Zoom held in the hands of… a nurse. You know, right there at the heart of the most intimate kind of personal relationship you can imagine. So again, I think that makes sense that intimacy is the most powerful. Let me let me stop there. There’s some of the findings of the TQ,

That’s really interesting. And the development of intimacy with a colleague or a client, etc, requires some vulnerability—it requires taking some sort of risk, right?

That’s at the heart of it. And that actually—thank you for pointing that out. That’s where the trustworthiness crosses over the line to the trusting. In both being trusting and in developing intimacy, you have to take a risk. If nobody takes a risk, there is no trust. You remember that in the Reagan era, the old Russian proverb that Ronald Reagan loved—”Trust, but verify?” Well, if you have to verify, it’s not trust. There has to be risk, and if we’re not willing to take risks, at some point in the conversation, eventually our clients will say, “Hey, I appreciate that you’re honest and credible and reliable. But I notice I’m always the one taking the risk. So the heck with you. I don’t trust you, after all.” So you’re right. The vulnerability is absolutely key there.

Well, going back to what we talked about initially, in terms of the trust equation—setting aside the outcome is a big risk, right? Because you may be doing work that doesn’t result in any benefit to you, it just benefits that person. Am I looking at that correctly?

Well, yes and no. It feels like a big risk and all the incentives and all the organizations that we know, make it feel like a big risk of, you know, “I’m deferring gratification.” How do I have any assurance that’s going to work out? Well, all you have to do—just do a thought exercise and think, “Who would I like to buy from? I would like to buy from somebody who seems to be transparent, open, honest principles-based, works in the long term, my interest, pays attention to me, not in a hurry to close the deal, not you know, conflicted by perverse short term monetary incentives, that’s who I’d rather buy from.”

Sure.

Well, if that’s it, we’d rather buy from, isn’t that the best way to sell? So the truth is, the best way to short-term results is actually long-term behavior. But it’s hard for any of us to think past that when you’re, you know, your boss is saying, “Hey, we got a monthly contest,” or “Here’s the quota,” or “Look at the marketing again on this product.” There’s a lot of distractions. So in that way, it feels like a dilemma. It takes really clear thinking to get outside of that dilemma and recognize it’s actually a win-win proposition.

Yeah, that makes total sense to me.

What do you think—you touched on, you know, setting aside the self and being patient and going through a process that’s in the best interest of the person, whoever you’re advising, whether, you know, in whatever form or fashion that might be. And it seems like the biggest barrier to trust, then, is probably jumping right to the solution.

I think so. 

Right out of the gate.

Yeah, that’s—in my talks, I do highlight that as the number one barrier to trust and it comes… you have to think kind of deep psychologically. Most of us in professional, intangible services kinds of business, you know, we’ve all been brought up since second grade to think that the “job” is to get the right answer first. You know, “Me me me, teacher, I got the answer, call on me.” Teacher called on you, “Good for you, Johnny. You got the right answer for it, you get the gold star, you get the Blue Ribbon, etc.”

Well, that works in second grade. But in the more complicated world of adults with real money and real issues at heart—yeah, people would seek you out because you have expertise, but they don’t take your advice until they feel that you have understood them uniquely. And then we become quite willing to say, “Well, thank god you know what you’re talking about. If you say I’m like 99% of other people, I buy that.” But not until you pass that sniff test.

I ask people to imagine, you know, my daughter had her first child a couple of years ago, well just put yourself in any new parent, new mother’s, new parents’ position. Let’s say the kid is three weeks old, and suddenly they’re crying all night and red faced and colicky. And you know, and you frantically call up the pediatrician. And then you bring the baby in. And let’s say the pediatrician looks at you for 20 seconds, is totally calm, and says, “Here’s what to do: Take this, call me back in a couple of days.” No way that new mother is going to be satisfied. She’s going to want to say, “Wait a minute, what about restless baby leg syndrome? And look at this thing I saw on the internet. And how do you know, da da da da da da.”

So fortunately, most good pediatricians know you talk to the parents and say, “What does he do like this? Does this happen? What happens if you do that?” so that the patient in this case, you know, feels heard understood, and then you know, it’s naturally human—if we feel understood, we become much more open and willing to accept the advice.

So in that scenario, which I think is common sensically true, credentials are the gating mechanism. They get you on the shortlist, they’ll get you in the door, but they will not get you the sale, they will not get your advice taken. That requires this soft, squishy interaction of human beings and vulnerability and intimacy and all that good stuff.

I wonder what your opinion is on, you know, when you talked about the list of the trusted people a moment ago, where we’re talking about the Trust Quotient, you talked about car salesmen not, you know, on the bottom of the list. And nothing against car salesmen, but they’re operating in a world where they have a limited number of choices to offer their clients, right?

Yeah.

They’re beholden to the car manufacturer in terms of their compensation. They’re being incented to sell a particular model versus another. They’ve only got yellow on the lot. You know, there’s all sorts of—as soon as you walk in there, you feel like you’re being channeled towards the outcome that meets the needs of the dealership and not your needs. Is that sort of at the core of it, do you think?

Yeah, I do. It’s a good example, actually. That’s one where the perverse incentives are just massive and totally obvious, in your face. Although ironically, now, I haven’t checked this for a couple of years—but it used to be true—that the top performing card salesmen did not behave that way. The ones that really make mega big bucks out of it, they are the ones who are all over their past clients and customers, phoning them up all the time, staying in touch, forging relationships, handwritten notes. And you might say, “Well, that’s funny. Anybody can handwrite a note.” Yeah, but who takes the time to do that? Who really does that? And guess what, these are the guys that are not making the most money. So even there. Even in the hardest, toughest case, I think that some of these trust principles can apply.

That seems to be the case where if even in the hardest environment to operate in, if you pay attention to this, you can be more successful. Pay attention to the trust equation and the Quotient, you can be more successful.

Well, this is really helpful, and I’m going to pose a question to you that may sort of punctuate the discussion, Charlie, and that is: What’s the single best thing that someone in an advisory position can do to help the relationship progress along that trust continuum?

Yeah. It’s a great question, you know. Lots of possible answers, I think the single best thing we can do is to get really good at listening and listening of a particular type. You know, I’m hardly the only one to say that we should do more open-ended questions and pay attention, all that stuff.

But the dynamic behind it has to do with reciprocity. Robert Cialdini wrote very convincingly about this years ago: If somebody treats us badly, we’re inclined to treat them badly. If somebody treats us well, we’re inclined to treat them well. Somebody famous, I forget who, once said that the best way to make a man trustworthy is to trust him. And you know, that’s reciprocity again.

So listening, it turns out—if your objective in listening is simply to validate as a human being by focusing a very scarce resource, namely our attention—if we focus on someone with the intent of understanding who they are without judgment, but deeply understanding, that’s a profound interpersonal kind of relationship. Like wow, you know, we’ve all, every day we experience interacting with people who are not really listening, who don’t particularly give a damn, and we don’t necessarily want them to. I don’t need the gas station attendant teller, you know, to form a deep relationship with me. But when you’re dealing with like wealth management or legal advice, or you know, that sort of stuff, we do want people to pay attention to it.

So listening without attachment to outcome, without trying to advance a hypothesis, without trying to prove something, turns out to be powerful. I’m not a psychologist. I don’t have the right language to describe it. I just, you know, common sense. We love it when somebody actually pays attention to us. And what do we do when that happens? We’re grateful and we return the gesture by reciprocating and become willing to listen to them.

So whether you’re in sales, or whether you’re trying to get somebody to take a piece of advice, the single best trust-gaining way is make sure you leave enough time to listen to them, without trying to be clever, you know, without all that—as we said at the beginning—without attachment to an outcome; just to understand that person in that moment, and then step back and let them go where they want. And often enough, they’ll say, “Well, what do you think of that? And what do you have to say about that?” And that’s an invitation for you to tell them, you know, “What do you think is the right thing to do?” And they’ll do it.

That’s really interesting, because I think it as I listen to you, I think it may have two impacts. Not only does it enable you to develop the kind of trusted relationship with the individual that you’re talking to, but it also, by listening well, it also allows you to deliver the better solution. Because you hear nuance, and you hear things that you may not hear if you weren’t listening closely.

Yeah, that’s right.

And so it sort of wins in two directions.

Yeah, exactly. It advances the ball, which is really important. If you think about the evolution of a conversation, whether it’s in wealth management, or again, accounting, or a lawyer, client, whatever—we sort of start off in general terms. “Hi, how are you? How’s the weather?” You know. And then maybe you narrow into a little issue or something, and then you hopefully move into some kind of listening phase.

And one of the best outcomes of that is when the client says, “Yes, that thing that you said, right there, that’s the problem. That’s it, boom!” You know, we get that far, everything’s done. That’s the point at which you made the sale, if you’re in a sales process. That’s the point at which the client said “Yes, that’s the advice I want to take, because you have nailed in on the problem.” And if you do a good job—I’m just underscoring your point—a really good job of listening, the odds of you coming up with the correct problem statement, are much increased. And if you have agreement with your client, “This is the core problem,” then the odds of your solution being accepted are far higher.

I think, from my perspective, in my career, it’s been the development of the ability to have those kinds of conversations and listen, and really understand that individual, that gives you the power to bring the right solution to the table.

If you don’t really understand the person, how are you going to understand the nuance of their situation, etc, and deliver what is a complex solution in many cases, in our industry, and I’m sure in other industries as well? It just, I don’t see how you—it would be impossible for me to do my job unless I really understood what it is that that person is trying to achieve and have listened to them.

Now it’s interesting listening to you talk about that. When I work with accountants, I have an anchor client now in one of the Big Four. And one of the examples I use is, “Let’s imagine you have to select a financial planner, and you’ve narrowed it down to two. And the characteristics of that transaction are, they know more than you do, it’s important, and it’s expensive—and it’s intangible, too.” How do you choose?

Well, let’s say they both have CFP, which is relevant, you know, important certification, certainly more so than some industries. I’d say they’re both good at complex financial modeling. They know what Monte Carlo simulation is.. Let’s say that they, you know, they’ve gotten good recommendations, a track record, they’re both the same on that.

But one of them asks you questions about what’s important to you in life, you know, “What does money mean to you? What are your aspirations? Where are you going with all this?” And I asked these accounts, these, you know, emotionally constipated people as to how much difference that one makes, and almost to a person, they say, “That’s a game changer, the person that you have that conversation with, that’s who you want to work with.”

Well, and that’s accountants, you know? Most of them don’t have any direct experience with wealth management or financial planning, but I think they’re dead right. It’s a good paradigm.

Well, that’s really helpful. Your perspective is, from my view, extremely valuable. You’ve got decades of working with these concepts, and you’ve formulated them into a series of books that have been really helpful to me. And I know to many of my colleagues and folks that I’ve recommended it to over the years—Charlie, I really can’t thank you enough for spending the time with us.

Oh, it’s a pleasure. I love talking about this stuff, Charles—and you clearly, you know, you get it. I have the same reaction you did—you get what I’m talking about, which is always nice to run across somebody who does, right?

Well, thank you. And I my hope is that this is the first and perhaps a series of conversations that we can have over time—

Wonderful!

—as you continue to publish, and we continue to work in an effort to make these ideas more broad. I think everybody benefits.

Yeah, you know, if I can make one last point, Charles. Go back to the Trust Equation for a second. The credibility and reliability, which are basically about content expertise. Both of those are very comfortable within the realm of modern management, which is largely built around behaviors and metrics. You can define behaviors to increase credibility, reliability—you can certainly come up with metrics.

However, when it comes to intimacy and low self-orientation, the much squishier end of things, those don’t work at all. You can’t define a single behavior that will fit every two human being combination, in situation. I mean, everybody’s an individual. So how are you going to measure? How are you going to define? If somebody says, “Wow,” you know, on the written page, you don’t know whether that means, “Woooowwww, that’s really something, or “Wow, so what did you do then?” It’s all in the wrist, if you will. And self-orientation is even more.

So you end up having to do things like stories, or role-playing, or analogies, or metaphors, in order to do this. So that’s a long, roundabout way of saying, the more we can talk about this kind of stuff, probably the better. And I’d be delighted to continue the conversation.

Well, thank you. And I will definitely take you up on that. So with many thanks, I really enjoyed it, Charlie, and I look forward to the next time.

Great. Thanks so much, Charles. Take care.

You’re welcome.

I hope you enjoyed the conversation that Charlie and I had as much as I did having it. His influence in the consulting world and the business of advisory relationships has been very significant over the years. If you would like to learn more about Charlie and his writings and his work, you can visit our page for the show notes, and you will have a link to his website and his books at Amazon, etc. I highly recommend them. As I said, I believe in the intro, these have been very, very influential on me and my colleagues over the years and I hope you have a chance to read them, as I think it’ll benefit you in your careers. Thanks very much.

Charles Green’s author page on Amazon

The Trusted Advisor: 20th Anniversary Edition

About Charlie

As founder of Trusted Advisor Associates, Charles Green is passionate about crafting insights and ideas in ways that are memorable, and that allow people to change.

Charlie got started as a consultant in 1976. He founded Trusted Advisor Associates in 1997. He has worked for about a hundred diverse clients throughout the course of his career.

Charlie specializes in commercial relationships where people in one organization get paid to persuade other people, within or outside their own organization. That includes sales, and it includes advice giving, both internal and external.

Charlie is co-author of The Trusted Advisor, and has written or contributed to several other books.

Charlie earned his MBA from Harvard University, and his bachelor’s degree in Philosophy from Columbia University. He drove a taxi in New York City part time while in college.