Earlier today, I attended a webinar that was designed for lawyers. Although the webinar was designed for lawyers, the subject matter was certainly a topic that I feel is of the utmost importance for all professionals, no matter what area they work in. The topic was trust. As a professional, you can only be in business if your clients and potential clients trust you. If no one trusts you, you will quickly find yourself without any work.
Fortunately, there is no secret formula for building and maintaining trust. There are simple and universal things that people can do to inspire others to trust them. There are also things that people do both intentionally and unintentionally that can cause others to lose trust in them. If you remain aware of which actions fall into which group, you can see to it that more often than not your actions fall into the category of those things that build and maintain trust.
As I mentioned before, the things that inspire trust are not difficult to understand. They are things like returning phone calls and other communications promptly, listening to your client when he or she is speaking and communicating to him or her that you understand what he or she is trying to tell you, and generally taking care to ensure that they feel like they are being take care of. You are the professional. The client came to you because they needed your help, your advice, your expertise. They are looking for you to take care of them while you take care of something for them.
The things that cause people to lose trust in professionals are things that we may not even do consciously. Nonetheless, they are important because trust is difficult to rebuild once it has been eroded. Things like taking days to return calls or email (don’t they know you are busy) and addressing your clients in a manner that makes them feel like they are bothering you are just two examples. The biggest complaint that dissatisfied clients make about lawyers (and I am sure that this holds true in other professions too) is that their lawyer did not communicate with them regularly.
I found that the discussion of trust and the things that people do that influence whether they are trusted is something that can be of use to all professionals. Awareness of how you interact with not just your clients but your coworkers and other people can help you to choose patterns of behavior that gain people’s trust. It does no good to say that you are trustworthy if your actions scream the opposite message. Think back over the course of the past day. What did you do to inspire trust in you? Did you do anything that may cause others to view you as less than trustworthy? What can you do to make tomorrow different in this regard?