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The Power of Onlyness: Go from “You” to “Us” with Trust, with Nilofer Merchant, Marketing Expert and Author, “The Power of Onlyness”
Trust is so important to how we scale an idea. The thing is, we go from you to us, and we don’t understand how to do that coupling. It’s the way in which we decide, I can lean on you. I can share an early nascent idea, and you can help me make that idea better, because I’m willing to expose to you that I don’t know. And without that trust, we don’t take risks. Without that risk, we never build the next big thing. And so that becomes the key linchpin by which we actually go from to you to us, first person singular, first person plural. And that’s the piece that, actually, I think every team is really struggling with but doesn’t know that that’s what they’re struggling with.
Discovering Shared Connections
The first thing that helps build trust is just the sense that I actually know who you are and what your interests are. So there’s a lovely trust equation I shared in the book, and there were some elements of what we honestly look at with people, like can you do it? Will you do it? But it turns out the denominator is this very specific thing, which is, will you choose your interests over our interests?
And so if I don’t know your interests and where they converge with mine, I actually don’t know whether or not to trust you. And so one of things I think we need to learn very, very specifically is, how do we have our own user guide? This is what I’m interested in. Here’s the set of things I tend to pursue. And here’s, therefore, my UI, my plug-in points where you and I might intersect. So getting more intentional about being able to express that so other people who then go, OK, I’m on your team.
For any meeting I’m going to, I’m not only thinking about, what do I want to share, I’m thinking about what it is I want to ask. And I will generate 5, 10 questions– what do I want to learn that would let me know more about someone’s intent, interests, purpose? I was at a conference recently, and a colleague of mine– we were on a panel– and a colleague of mine noticed that I was still writing down things along this list of questions. And he said, what are you doing? And I said, I’m trying to train myself to listen for why they’re asking the question. Because if I can understand why they’re asking the question, I might answer it better. That lets me actually go, OK, well, what they care about is this, and therefore, do I care about the same thing? Do I care about something else? Is it close? Is it not close? Where is the overlap?
And all of a sudden, then, you can start to actually create that what I’ll call resonance of either we disagree– because it could be that, we’re so completely opposed– or we agree on something in principle but the specifics of which we may not agree with. So it lets you start to navigate the relationship and then form the trust, because you’ve listened enough to even understand, where could we be connected?
Presenting a Different Point of View
If I’m ever in a meeting and I’m asking– let’s say I have a point of view that seems like it’s going to be very different than the other point of view, instead of saying, I’m right, coming at it with that energy– because I actually don’t know. I don’t know where we are yet. I’ll say, could it be that we agree on this, or could it be we disagree on this? So I will basically pose it as a question so that I’m actually looking for, where are we? And “Could it be?” is a lovely way, because I’m not asking them to tell me if I’m right or wrong, and I’m asking them to, essentially, come into that exploratory space, that co-creative space, by asking a question that steps them outside of what do they already think, but could it be? And then trying to think about, what is the connection point?
I keep going back to this visual of my hands. But I think we really don’t understand this notion of coupling in our society. We celebrate individualism so much in business, as if somehow it’s about the isolated person. But the word “individual” itself is actually the smallest measure of the whole. And so what we need to understand is, OK, so if you care about these things, what is it that it fits into for the whole? So you’ve got be listening for where the seams are for you to be able to then figure out how to do that coupling.