In 2006 I approached my wife with a proposition that went something like this. “I want to quit my well paying job.” When that met with silence I bravely continued. “I would like to start a company”. Still silence. “And I would like you and the kids to give me four years to screw-up.” While I wasn't entirely sure of what her reaction would be I was pretty confident that  a high level of trust existed in our relationship. But it wasn't as if we had ever sat down and measured it. So for those interested in taking a short self-assessment to find out exactly how trustworthy you are then visit Charles Green's Trust Quotient (Charles co-authored The Trusted Advisor with David Maister and Robert Galford). For those interested in what my wife said, read on...

While her almost immediate response was “ok” <…long pause…>, her only real question was, “Why four years?” to which all I could respond was, “Well it takes time to screw things up properly.” Realistically though, my point was that if I was going to leave a good job with a company I really enjoyed working for (Forrester) then I wanted to be sure I had given it my best shot and to do that I wanted to practice some of the management mantras that I had either picked up along the way or that were preached by the industry gurus. Based on what I could garner, the two most important ingredients for success are time and focus. 

As our business has continued to prosper in the two years since that conversation, a few acutely important things have been reinforced in my mind.  Those things are that success takes time, innovation takes time, commitment to strategy takes time and discipline, and long-tail deals take time. But all of it is based on building trusting relationships.

It has also been reinforced that it is unfortunate that most of those things run counter-intuitive to the ability of local leaders to execute the development strategies of multi-nationals in Australia. It would be a rare occasion in deed to be able to ask of corporate chiefs the same request I originally asked of Kris. In companies all over the world The Sword of Damocles swings swiftly for underperformance.

About the only organisation that seems immune to a shareholder backlash at the moment is the Reserve Bank of Australia. At a recent luncheon, when one of their spokespeople were asked about the current economic indicators for Australia he simply stated, “they look about right for the moment”. And really, there was little that anyone could do about the interest rate increase that happened the following day. Yet if our little experiment is anything to go by, how that underperformance is measured is the antithesis of strategic success.

I was living in Dubai when I first got the call from Forrester asking me if I was interested in the Australia New Zealand Country Manager role. I subsequently flew to Singapore for a 7-hour interview. While we talked strategy for most of the interview (tactics really), at no point did I feel it appropriate to say to the regional president, “I would like you to give me four years to screw-up”. In the absence of any real personal trust I was clearly being approached for my contacts. While the job had a nice title, strategy and autonomy were not in the position description. So my life became a sales pitch again for a few years.

The mantra of most organisations is that for sales people you are only as good as your last deal. For consultants it is considered the same for projects. Short-term results receive a laser focus. Shareholders demand it. And that is still reinforced to me everyday in my meetings with state and national managers for very large international organisations. I’m not sure many of them believe it’s the best approach either but bending time in order to force a sales result still remains the single biggest impediment to building trusting relationships with customers.

When you boil it all down, success comes from trust in personal relationships and any strategy that doesn’t allow time to develop that trust is no strategy at all. It’s why so many vendors pursue a channel strategy and why Gartner and META and some of Forrester’s strongest performing regions were or are now franchise owned. The owner is invested in both the success of their customers and the company and empowered to act on it. Both personal trust and a culture of trust can in fact pay the bills. For us that means that trust will one day pay the bills for our corporate leases in Sydney, Melbourne, Singapore and beyond.