by Pamela Meyer
Be Clear About Your Expectations. Explain in detail how you envision the role of a brain trust member, and what you hope to gain from the arrangement. You might even set up a schedule for how often you’d like to be able to speak, which could vary from “Once every quarter, I’d like to take you out to dinner and get your input on some of the decisions I’m going to be making over the next few years as I build my company” to “Can we set up a standing appointment, breakfast on the last Thursday of the month, my treat?”
Ask How You Can Reciprocate. Even if there is a large in equality in power between you, there is almost always some way in which you can be helpful to someone else.
Be Unflinching in Your Request for Honest Feedback. You want the members of your brain trust to be as forthright as possible, which isn’t always easy. Make it clear that if they can’t uphold that aspect of the relationship, it would be better that they decline your offer.
Start Right Away. One way to kick-start your relationship with brain trust members is to conduct a mini personal 360-degree review. A true 360 would demand feedback from almost everyone you work with.
You might ask:
What are my greatest strengths?
What are my greatest weaknesses?
When have I seemed most at the top of my game?
What are three things you can imagine me doing with my career?
What’s something you can’t really imagine me doing?
How do I get in my own way?8
Michael Melcher writes, “If you casually ask people in your circle for advice…they will probably give some helpful feedback. But if you use a questionnaire and go through items one by one, they will give answers that are more balanced and far more insightful. People give better answers when they are trying to be good interviewees than when they are trying to be good friends.”9
BRAIN TRUST MAINTENANCE
Provide a Year-End Report. Be prepared to demonstrate to your brain trust members that their time has been well spent and that you have been working hard to implement the ideas and strategies they’ve helped you develop. A great way to do this is with a year-end report, which you can send in writing, chat about informally over a drink, or present during an end-of-the-year meeting. Most people choose to do this quite informally. Give members a big-picture view of what you set out to do within the year, highlight your successes, and honestly describe where you fell short. Only if you allow people to see where you have faltered can they help you identify where you made mistakes, overreached, underprepared, or misinterpreted signals, and make sure it doesn’t happen again.
Try to Give Fair Warning. When you invite people onto your brain trust, you’ll explain that you intend to call on them for help when things get rocky. But if possible, do your best not to spring major emergencies or big ethical crises on them. If you see trouble brewing, you might want to provide a heads-up that you may need their input soon. Be careful not to jump on the phone every time it looks like things might start heading south. You should only call on your brain trust for help with the critical, demanding challenges that come your way.
Prove Yourself. Maintaining a strong, committed brain trust means being brain-trust-worthy yourself! As Jim Collins writes, “Paradoxically, remarkable people—those worthy of being personal board members—tend to be unusually generous with their time. They seem to live by an implicit life contract to give of themselves for the development of others, perhaps as others had once done for them.”10 Take these words to heart. Prove your trustworthiness in this very simple way, grounded in the Golden Rule: Live and work in a way that models the behavior you want from others.
Be on Time. Punctuality shows respect for others, and is not simply a cosmetic element of trust-building. Keep your commitments: If you promised a report, provide it. Go the extra mile even if there is nothing in it for you. As author Charles Green reminds us, “Trust is personal, not institutional; it’s emotional, not just rational…Your influence is greatest when you’re not trying to influence. Your profit is highest when your goal is not profitability.”11
In addition, make sure that you encourage trust throughout your day. Do you hold truly blame-free postmortem meetings? Do you blow up at others when they make mistakes? Do you maintain an open-door policy, where anyone can talk to you, or even brainstorm, if he is wrestling with a project or a client? Do you encourage people to tell you bad news, and do you stay calm when you hear it? Do you focus on problem solving or blame? Do you encourage debate and disagreement?
Some people make the mistake of confusing trustworthiness with emotional spillage. Sharing your intimate personal secrets or trading in industry gossip may make you an entertaining lunch companion, but it’s not going to increase someone’s trust in you. In fact, individuals who share too much too soon, or who try to prematurely tear down personal and professional boundaries, alienate others without knowing it. Such false displays of intimacy may actually serve to make you less trustworthy—after all, if you’re willing to divulge everything you know about employees at the last company you worked with, what would stop you from spreading information about your current colleagues or company? Building trust takes time, so take it. The day someone asks you to be a member of her brain trust (or her personal board of directors, or her mastermind group, or what ever she chooses to call it), you’ll know you’re doing something very, very right.
THE REWARD
Succeeding personally and professionally while still being yourself, warts and weaknesses included, is a plea sure too few leaders experience. Yet that is the greatest reward of liespotting—once you can purge your environment of deception, you can rest easy knowing you live and work in a community based on trust. So this is your challenge: to trust while staying alert for deception; to lead with a firm hand while remaining empathetic, generous, and a truly good colleague; to prove that you know that the people who work with you are not just means to an end; to succeed while sometimes deferring your own immediate needs—and ultimately, to create a culture of honesty. People with superior integrity and honor are drawn to others with superior integrity and honor. The brain trust you wind up with will not be the result of a smart advisory shopping expedition, but a reward for and a reflection of how you live your life.
TEN
PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER
To Mitchell Gordon, president of a boutique investment-banking firm in Manhattan, the biggest sign that doing a deal with Liam might be a bad idea was the fist-shaped hole in the wall of his potential partner’s office.
At the time, Gordon was CFO of a New York Stock Exchange–listed company. He had entered into a joint venture negotiation with a company he had never done business with before. The negotiations with the CEO, Liam, lasted months, and in that time Gordon started to wonder if something was awry. There were a few times when he suspected that Liam, though not overtly lying, wasn’t being straight with him. He was late providing numbers to Gordon’s office. He missed deadlines. Gordon had been trained on Wall Street, where it’s not atypical to do background checks and very deep due diligence, so he called an investigative group he had frequently used in the past. Every time, the group had seemed comically disappointed to report to Gordon that they had not found anything untoward about the companies or individuals they were investigating. Gordon would be anything but disappointed. Relieved that nothing suspect was found, he would continue to close the deal at hand.
This time, as usual, Gordon telephoned the subject of the investigation, Liam, to inform him about the background check. As usual, Gordon said, “If there’s anything you want to tell us, now would be a really good time.” And as usual, the CEO answered, “No, no. There’s nothing wrong with me or my company.” What wasn’t usual was that a few weeks later, the investigative firm called Gordon to announce that they had some great news—great from an investigator’s standpoint, anyway.
It seemed Liam was difficult to do business with. His company had formed five joint ventures in the past, and had been sued by all five joi
nt venture partners. And then there was the detail about Liam’s driving habits: he had been arrested for road rage. Three times.
That was more than enough for Gordon. He asked his general counsel to sit in his office as a witness, and he called Liam on the phone to tell him that the investigation results had turned up some information that made it impossible for them to feel comfortable doing business with him.
Liam sounded hurt. “I never sued anybody,” he pointed out. When Gordon went on to mention the three arrests, Liam chuckled. “Yeah, the state road rage laws were a result of me!” he said proudly.
As Gordon tells it, “It was a very stressful conversation. There were tens of millions of dollars at stake. To break the tension, I said offhandedly, ‘Well, at least you didn’t kill anybody.’”
Absolute silence on the other end.
More silence.
“I didn’t say a word. My general counsel didn’t say a word. The time just ticked away. Twenty seconds. Thirty seconds.”
More silence.
And then Liam asked, “How the fuck did you find that out? I thought it was expunged from my record.”
In a pleasant, neutral voice, Gordon said, “Tell me about it.”
The story was almost straightforward. “I was young…I was at a bar…I got into a fight…Some guy came at me with a bottle…The bottle broke…He fell on the bottle….
“I have no official record,” Liam finished. His brother, an FBI agent, had stepped in to clear his record.
Gordon turned to stare at his general counsel, who had turned to stare at him. “I was stunned. We had checked out everything. Where he’d lived. His college degree. The companies he’d done business with.” They sensed that Liam was dangerous, but they hadn’t expected to uncover a murder! Gordon walked into his CEO’s office and announced, “That was the best eight thousand dollars we’ve ever spent.”
The following year, in a very strong market, Liam’s company filed for bankruptcy.
We have inherited a culture whose default position is mistrust. Mitchell Gordon’s story is just one illustration of why there is often ample justification for our suspicions.
For the past few years, the international public relations firm Edelman has conducted an annual survey called the Trust Barometer. The most recent study revealed that trust in U.S. business has fallen to 38 percent—the biggest drop Edelman has ever seen. Sixty percent of respondents stated that they only begin to believe something after they have heard it three to five times, and fewer than 20 percent trust information coming from CEOs. Similar figures were found in the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. How could it be otherwise, in an era still reeling from $5 trillion in paper losses from the dot-com boom, from the Madoff scandal—the biggest business fraud ever perpetrated—and from trillions in global losses due to the banking and mortgage crises?
Public figures lie openly, and their lies spread so rapidly that they come to take on a truth of their own. Witness Sarah Palin’s “death panel” Facebook page on health care, in which Palin suggested that President Barack Obama’s health plan would involve prematurely ending the lives of senior citizens and the disabled. Although there were no facts to support this suggestion, the phrase “death panel” instantly became a rallying cry for opponents of nationalized health care.
Ferreting out liars is a growth industry in both the public and private sectors. The U.S. Department of Defense is researching thermal scanners to determine whether changes in the human eye can be tracked accurately enough to reveal a subject’s deceit. Other DOD deception-detection devices include a “sniffer test,” which measures the level of stress hormones on the breath; an eye tracker, which follows a subject’s gaze to analyze whether he’s seeing a familiar sight or one he doesn’t recognize; a light beam that measures blood flow to the cortex; and a pupilometer, which tracks pupil dilation. Some of these devices can be operated remotely. Should they prove effective, the day may come when a suspect’s deceit can be detected without his ever realizing that he’s under investigation.
It’s unclear, though, whether these devices will prove effective. As the history of polygraph machines has shown, a technological breakthrough in one era can seem laughably in effective a generation later. And as the history of human beings has shown, the ability to lie appears to evolve at a rate that outstrips technology’s attempts to halt it. In fact, technology itself may have contributed to conditions that have encouraged massive lying over the past two de cades. So it’s unlikely that technology will bring back honesty. Only human beings can do that.
Mitchell Gordon’s story is a dramatic illustration of the way that straightforward, respectful behavior can open new channels of communication with even the most questionable associate. Was Gordon trying to trick Liam into revealing the astonishing gap on his transcript? No. He knew before picking up the phone that he was not going to complete his deal with Liam. But the fact that he kept the discussion civil, that he didn’t overreact, that he treated Liam’s blurted “How the fuck did you find that out?” with a polite “Tell me about it,” rather than acting shocked or horrified resulted in what may be one of the most surprising displays of candor in any business interview. Back an opponent into a corner, and he’ll almost always lie to you. Find a way to connect with him, and he’s far likelier to tell you the truth. Trust and truthfulness can’t be forced; they can only be fostered.
And though we know that trust is good business, that it reduces transaction costs—due diligence, legal and closing costs, planning and monitoring—we cannot insist on it; we can only do our part in building it relationship by relationship, incrementally over time. One of life’s greatest pleasures is to engage in relationships in which we are free to express ourselves to our fullest. We would go a long way, individually and as a culture, if we could apply that ideal to our professional relationships, and not reserve it for just our personal ones.
In the meantime, as we make slow progress toward promoting a healthier, more honest business culture, we can rely upon liespotting techniques to protect ourselves and encourage honesty within our lives. There are plenty of technological advances in the works that are going to be marketed to future leaders as panaceas for deceit: portable sociometers that measure the results of face-to-face interactions; PASION (Psychologically Augmented Social Interaction Over Networks) technology, which could feed you information about people’s body reactions—heart rates, skin changes, and emotional states—during phone calls, e-mails, and texting.
But machines and technology may have been the very forces that created an explosion of favorable conditions for deception in the first place. Liespotting requires that we push back. It demands that we step away from our machines, that we relearn how to communicate face-to-face, how to read people, empathize, connect, and listen—the human skills we honed over years of evolution before we forgot their importance.
APPENDIX I
PUTTING BASIC TO WORK
A Guide to Structuring Conversation to Get to the Truth
You’ve now learned the verbal and nonverbal characteristics of deceptive behavior, the motives behind lying, and a host of proven techniques for liespotting. As you encounter possible incidents of deception in your life and workplace, the BASIC method will give you the tools you need to elicit trust and cooperation and uncover the truth.
These next five pages provide a structure to guide and train you as you begin implementing the BASIC interview method. Breaking down each step individually, you’ll be equipped to make thorough baseline observations, set the stage for receiving unlimited information, synthesize clusters of clues, contrast your instincts side by side against your subject’s story, and gauge the consistency of truthful or guilty responses.
While many of the steps may overlap or be performed simultaneously, they each represent a separate milestone toward discovering the truth.
*
BASIC | Baseline Behavior
Goal: Obtain a reliable reference point to use for measuring changes
in behavior.
Interact under normal circumstances, but pay closer attention to what you see and hear.
*
*
BASIC | Ask Open-ended Questions
Goal: Obtain unlimited information through expanded verbal replies and facial and behavioral slips, avoiding simple “yes” or “no” questions.
ESTABLISH WHAT YOU KNOW AND WHAT YOU WANT TO KNOW
Determine the evidence you need.
Determine what you already know about the person.
Assume nothing; suspend any bias.
Prepare “Who, What, When, Where” questions and possible responses.
Instead of “Why…,” ask “What made you…” or “What prevented you…”
DEVELOP RAPPORT
Maintain eye contact.
Mirror the other person’s body language and pace of speech.
Laugh at his jokes.
Sit in a nonthreatening, open-armed position.
Don’t let the subject become too defensive.
Avoid arguments.
Listen actively and find common ground.
ELICIT AN OBSERVABLE RESPONSE
Be sure the setting is comfortable and free from distraction.
Note any behavior changes after you make it clear that the interview is over.
PROPOSE MULTIPLE STORIES
Profile the subject’s blame patterns and personal and professional needs.
Empathetically offer a series of possible reasons the subject may have acted deceptively.
Collaborate to figure out the motive.
*
*
BASIC | Study the Clusters
Goal: Determine the subject’s state of mind by synthesizing facial, behavioral, and verbal clues.
Watch for clusters of these potential signs of deceptive behavior:
NONVERBAL CLUES
Grooming gestures