There is a lot of good information about trusted advisor relationships, including the excellent book, entitled Trusted Advisor by David Maister, Charlie Geen and Rob Galford.  Another good book, Clients for Life, by Jagdish Seth and Andrew Sobel, deals with the subject without using that term.  Blogs, such as www.trustedadvisor.com  and www.davidmaister.com/blog/ are devoted to the subject or deal with it frequently and other blogs and ezines mention it sporadically.  It’s a worthwhile subject.
 
All of these sources provide commentary and advice, most of which can be reduced to one sentence, If you want to be a trusted advisor, act in a trustworthy way and know your stuff.  Living our lives by this simple dictum isn’t easy.  It is no wonder that whole books can be written on the subject and should be.  I will call this the behavior model and I don’t reduce all this material to a mere sentence with any desire to disparage it.  Rather, I want to contrast it with another approach to becoming a trusted advisor which doesn’t fall within the broad cover of this sentence.

I am referring to the age model.  The one-sentence reduction of this approach is: If you know your stuff and stay in touch with clients who are clearly rising stars and who are five to ten years younger than you, you have a good chance to become their trusted advisor in five, ten or more years.  I don’t have proof to support this, but I do have lots of anecdotal evidence.  For the past few years I have asked the rainmakers I interviewed their ages and the ages of those who treat them as trusted advisors.  In the greater number of these relationships the advisor is older than the advisee.

There are a number of reasons for this to be the case. It is obvious if you ask a 65 year old rainmaker about the trusted advisor relationships he has today, he will cite more people younger than he is.  But, I don’t believe the bias toward older advisors is solely based on an age ceiling for advisees.

Several other beliefs I have support the age model.  For example, I believe that most people find it easier to accept advice from someone older than they are.  The five to ten year spread between advisor and advisee seems about right for the advisor to be able to understand the advisee’s world.

This is all supposition.  But there is also the nature of networks.  Most networks form a power curve.  To understand what that means, think of the distribution of income in any country.  A few people have wealth beyond imagination, a few more are very rich and a few more are just rich.  Then come the broad middle class and the poor.  The difference in income between the wealthy beyond imagination and the very rich is immense compared spread of income between the middle class and the poor.  A few get most the goodies in a power curve.

There a two ways to end up on have-it-all end of the curve.  The first is to be in the network longer than others.  Our old rainmakers meet that criterion.  The second is to be fitter at the job, meaning know your stuff.  The comfort of confiding in older mentors and other explanations are, then, just the behavior mechanism that creates the power curve.

None of this takes anything away from the behavior model and all the good work that Maister and Green and others have done.  It does provide another path for research that I hope someone follows.

For the professional seeking to develop more business it is an explanation of why rain making gets easier every year you do it.  Older rainmakers know this, but younger professionals either don’t know or don’t quite believe it.  I spend a lot of energy trying convince young professionals that it is true.  In any event, you can’t win if you don’t play.  So, get out there and learn your stuff and build your network, focusing a part of your attention on the up-and-comers in the client companies.

Oh, and one other thing . . . while you’re at it, grow old! 

Do you think you can handle this last part?   If you can, you may well end up a trusted advisor to some important clients.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 8th, 2007 at 8:39 pm and is filed under Networking, Rain making, Rainmaker, Trusted Advisor. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.