Bonus Add-on to EP477: How to Earn Trust, With Charles Green

In this bonus add-on to episode 477 of Relentless Health Value, host Stacey Richter revisits a decade-old conversation with trust expert Charles Green, founder of Trusted Advisor Associates. Green discusses the intricacies of building and maintaining trust in healthcare, emphasizing four key trust principles: client focus, collaboration, long-term relationships, and transparency.

The discussion highlights the challenges within the healthcare industry, compounded by conflicts of interest and transactional dynamics. Green underscores the importance of individual actions and leadership in fostering trust, advocating for empathetic listening and genuine curiosity about others as foundational behaviors.

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01:45 Four trust principles that can help you earn your clients trust and come off as more trustworthy from first impressions onward.

04:31 Charles’s words of wisdom for rebuilding lost trust.

05:46 Where does trusted leadership start?

06:38 Why trust in leadership is about embodying trust in actions, not words.

07:26 Why does personality have an outsized impact in leadership and trust?

08:21 “If we want to improve our trust, we just simply need to work on ourselves.”

08:56 Why listening with a sense of curiosity and respect drives reciprocal behavior and improves trust.

09:14 What is the best technique to immediately improve your trust relationship?

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
"Bonus Add-on To Episode 477,How To Earn Trust." 10 years
ago I spoke with Charles Green.
American Healthcare Entrepreneurs andExecutives You Want To Know, Talking.

(00:24):
Relentlessly Seeking Value.
Welcome to this bonus add-on.
I'm not gonna give much ofan intro here, except to say,
we've come a long way, baby.
And also this short clip from the originalshow about trust is really a masterclass
on what trust means and how to earn it.
My guest in the show is Charlie Greenfrom Trusted Advisor Associates.

(00:44):
10 years ago when this episode originallyaired, he'd been doing his, as he calls
it, trust thing for about 15 years.
This means being focused on speaking.
He's written a lot about trust consulting,doing workshops and training for corporate
accounts on the subject of trust andtrusted relationships in business.
He has also written three bookson trust, the best known one
called "The Trusted Advisor".

(01:05):
Here is my conversationwith Charlie Green.
My name is Stacey Richter.
This podcast is sponsoredby Aventria Health Group.
Welcome to RelentlessHealth Value Charlie.
Thank you.
Pleasure to be here.
If I'm a provider and I know I need to nowcollaborate with peers or if I'm a payer
and I really need to work with providersor get my providers to work with me and

(01:26):
actually trust that my motives are pure.
Or the same thing with thepharmaceutical industry.
How do we even start thinking about this?
It is a tough one.
There are some industries where it'sa lot easier than in healthcare.
I think for example, the accountingindustry, which is basically if you
fix individuals trustworthiness,you've got 80% of the battle done.
But in healthcare, in the healthcareliterature and the medical magazines,

(01:49):
you, you know better than I do there areconsistent cross currents of potential
conflict of interest and so forth.
It's not easy.
But within that context, there arecertain organizational trust components,
and I'll list four trust principlesthat if you can think about them and
apply them in your interactions withother organizations, they will help.
And very simply, they're systematically,make sure you're focused on

(02:10):
the other person, not yourself.
That's number one.
Call it client focus.
Number two is collaboration,meaning cultivating a mindset that
you're really on the same team.
You've really got thesame objectives here.
You're not competing with each other.
Number three, don't focus on transactions.
Do focus on relationships.
Never think that you'reinvolved in a one-off situation.
Always think, what if thishappened 10 times in a row?

(02:31):
And finally, practice transparencyas a default instead of obfuscation
and accept where it's illegal,which it is sometimes, or where it's
hurtful, which it also is sometimes.
So client focus, collaboration,long-term, and transparency.
If you look at all your interactionswith other organizations from
those perspectives and do thebest you can to push on each of

(02:52):
them, that will begin to help.
That just brings into starkfocus how difficult this is
gonna be for the health industry.
Because if I tick down this list,hopping over client focus for a
sec. But if we get to collaboration,I mean, that's always been sort of
That's tough.
Well, it's always been an issue becauseexactly as you state, oftentimes

(03:13):
there's conflicts of interest.
And oftentimes there's this very muchzero sum game, either real or perceived.
Right.
So that's one thing.
Then the focus on the transaction, Imean, one of the things I know for a fact
that has happened over the years is thatit has become incredibly transactional.
It's all about kind of, you know,selling the pill and less about

(03:35):
how are we gonna work together.
And then lastly, with transparency, andeveryone's holding their cards to their
vest and nobody actually even understandswhat the others' true motivations are.
And yet, those are thethings that have to happen.
If you take collaboration, for example,you have got to step outside this and
say, look, we have been thinking foryears about zero sum interest here.

(03:56):
And it's obvious there are some ways inwhich we're gonna wrap it a zero sum game,
but both of us are stuck in that zero sumgame, and both of us are gonna get screwed
by it if we can't think our way out of it.
So let's collaboratively think aboutthis prison that we find ourselves in,
and how can we collaboratively beginto work on ways to get out of it.
I do think that also could revolve aroundbeing really creative and coming up

(04:19):
with creative solutions that work forboth parties, which might not be the
original goal that either party had.
I'm sure that's right.
But now okay, so we've lost our trust.
How do we get it back?
I think you can say one thing clearly.
It has to start at the personal,not the institutional level.

(04:40):
And I think you know what each of us cando individually is actually quite a bit.
If I had to give one really gross,simple piece of advice, it would
be go out and do the best thatyou can to listen to other people.
Be curious about them.
Listen to them not to learn thingsfrom them or to do a brain suck
of whatever you can find out, butlisten to them as a form of respect.

(05:00):
As a form of paying attention, as aform of homage to another human being,
and you'd be amazed at the responsethat you get when you behave that way.
Even in matters of a you know, fiveor 10 seconds within a conversation.
If you truly listen to other peoplein a sense of kind of valuing them,
their natural reciprocal response isto pay attention to you in return.

(05:20):
It's just, it is how people work.
It's how we do things.
I reach my hand out to shakehands with you and smile at you.
Guess what you do?
You reach out and shake myhand and smile back at me.
And at that trivial level, you addit up, uh, and you end up being able
to have dialogues with other people.
Well, some of those people arefrom the other part or another
part of the healthcare system.
And if you can begin to have adialogue with each other, you

(05:41):
can begin to say, listen, we gotinstitutional problems here too.
How do we deal with this?
How can we set up morecollaborative systems?
But that's where I thinkit probably has to start.
It's not gonna start in Congress.
It's not gonna start in greatacademic studies about the
structure of the industry.
Those have to happen.
And those will happen.
But the leadership thing I thinkhas got to come from individuals.
A few people behaving in a determined kindof a way can have quite an outside impact.

(06:05):
You don't have to waitfor the CEO to do it.
You don't have to wait for the incentivesystem to make it worth your while.
You can be behaving in these waysand watch the ripple effects.
They're quite, quite extraordinary.
When you were talking, it really occurredto me that leadership of organizations
could be really important here.
How many times have you, you know,gone into a business and seen
some kind of credo on the wallthat nobody pays any attention to?

(06:27):
Right, right.
Or it's one thing for a leaderto say, we want relationships.
You know, we're concerned aboutthe long term here, and then
hammer to deliver the numbers.
Yeah, exactly.
I know that it all starts fromthe individual and we talked about
this earlier, but can leadership bekind of a force multiplier in this?
You know, if leadership really embodiesthat trust equation and really makes

(06:51):
their organizations understand the valueof this trust, how much does that matter?
Yeah, we often hear how leadership, youknow, makes a big difference and you
can't do it if it doesn't lead with theCEO's office and all that sort of thing.
What's unique about trust, I think,is that there's an outsized impact on
the behavior of the CEO or the leader.

(07:12):
It's less about what they say,it's much more about what they do.
So you'll find, I don't know, any leaderor CEO that won't say, oh, we value
relationships and customers and so forth.
As you point out, you know,their next actions are often
very cynically at odds with that.
Leaders who embody very personallythe kinds of attributes that we've
talked about have a huge impact.

(07:32):
When people see a leader saying, you know,I don't know the answer to that, whoa.
And it's okay to say you don't know.
When people see a leader whoactually listens and pays
attention to a subordinate.
And displays characteristics ofempathy, it's just, it's remarkable.
You know, the older I get, the more Ilook at business and history and so forth,
and the more I become convinced of thepower of individual leaders, people, human

(07:56):
beings really have an outsized impact.
You know, you watch the series, theRoosevelts that was on this, these past
few weeks or something, and you realizewhat an outsized impact personalities
have in positions of leadership.
It's especially true with trust.
So walk the talk turns out to bemuch more powerful in trust than
almost anything else I can think of.
So basically your advice is thatregardless of who your CEO is, that.

(08:21):
if we want to improve our trust, wejust simply need to work on ourselves.
However, if we are a CEO, then weneed to really take a good, hard cold
look at, are we trustworthy ourselves?
Yep.
Because our influence will trickle down.
That's exactly right.
We watch people whom we admire andrespect are in positions of responsibility

(08:45):
and we emulate or, and we judge them.
What's the Gandhi phrase?
Be the change you want in the world.
It's a great model.
He is absolutely right in trust.
So we might have already covered this,Charlie, but if someone cleared their
calendar and they've got three hoursin this afternoon to do something
to improve their score in the trustequation, what would you suggest?
It's listening with a sense of curiosityand respect to affirm the other person.

(09:09):
I don't know what you call that.
Call it empathetic listening.
Call it affirmativelistening, but it's different.
I mean, if you go read the stuff that'sout there, there are millions of things
on listening and paying attention and bodymirroring and all that stuff, but most
of it's aimed at how do you get somethingfor you out of listening to them.
And what I'm talking about is, ishow do you simply give people a gift.
A very fine gift of your attention?

(09:31):
How do you pay attention?
The phrase is interesting.
How do we, it's something we pay.
What that drives is this reciprocalbehavior on the part of other people
that goes right to the foundationof not only social etiquette,
but business and relationships.
If you do X for me, I will do Y for you.
We've come to think of that equationas being somehow loaded with quid
pro quo and illegal and so forth.

(09:52):
But the, if you do X for me,I do Y for you formula is at
the heart of relationships.
We do things for other people, notso that they will do things for us.
But the fact is that in sodoing, they do do things for us.
So go out and practice listening as aform of paying attention, you know, and
then you gradually build up trying this,kind of listening on people in your life

(10:13):
whom, who have much more control over you.
Typically, the big three are, youknow, your boss, your customer,
and your and your spouse.
If you can listen to them in the kindsof ways that I just talked about,
showing respect, being curious, you'llbe astonished at the kind of powerful
impact that can come right back at you.
Well, that is something Iam going to work on today.

(10:34):
So Charlie, how can people reach you?
They can reach me at my website,"trustedadvisor.com", or if they
happen to have a pencil C Green,that's cgreen@ trustedadvisor.com.
Thank you so much forbeing on the show today.
It's been a pleasure too.
Thank you.
I'm Peter Hayes.
I'm the principal of HealthcareSolutions and have been involved

(10:58):
in healthcare for 30 plus years.
I will say one of the sources thatI go to and rely on all the time to
kind of stay up to date and reallyunderstand what's happening in healthcare
is to listen to Relentless Health.
I encourage everyone to sign up forthe Relentless Health Newsletter.
It's just a great source of what'shappening in healthcare today.
To me, it's the most trusted source thatI use to really try to stay current with

(11:22):
the complexities of the healthcare system.
So thank you everyone, and I hopeyou listen and start the good fight.
I try to make healthcare alittle bit better for all of us.
Thank you.