Becoming Preferred and Earning Trust Are Two Sides of the Same Professional Coin
Updated: Aug 11
Clients pick the person they want to think out loud with. Long before the proposal, they have already decided who listens, who gets the problem, and who makes it clearer instead of louder. Michael Vickers calls that person the preferred provider. The emotional favorite. I call that person the trusted ally.
We spent 45 minutes discovering we were describing the same person.
Michael hosts Becoming Preferred, a podcast about earning that position in the markets you serve. He invited me to open Season 7 and talk about my book, From Asshole to Ally: Why Ambitious Professionals Lose Trust and How to Get It Back. He asked better questions about it than I ask myself. Here is what I took from the conversation.
Preference is the decision. Trust is how you earn it.
Michael's whole body of work starts from a simple observation: clients rarely choose on specs. They choose the provider they prefer, and preference is emotional. My work starts one layer down: what creates that feeling?
The answer I gave on the show is the one I teach. Trust comes from your credibility, your reliability, and how well you know your client, divided by your self-orientation. Everything you bring to the conversation gets divided by how much the conversation is about you. Smart professionals lose trust by trying to look smart. Their credentials are real. Their answers are good. And the client can still feel that the meeting is a performance.
Two frameworks, one conclusion. Preferred and trusted are the same decision, made in the same moment, by the same person.
A great interviewer is a live demo of the skills
I teach four skills: Ask, Don't Answer. Listen to Learn. Trust Framing. Moments of Trust. Michael ran all four on me for 45 minutes.
He asked short questions and let them sit. He listened long enough to catch things I did not know I had said. When he played an idea back to me, he reframed it in his own language and checked whether he had it right. That last move is Trust Framing, and it is the least familiar skill for most professionals. If you want to hear it done well, listen to any good podcast host interview someone about their life's work. The guest leaves feeling understood. That feeling is the product.
The irony was thick. I came on to talk about asking instead of answering, and the host out-asked me.
The confession does not get easier out loud
Early in my career, my president at Y&R Chicago called me into her office and told me, calmly, that I was acting like an asshole and that nobody wanted to help me anymore. I have written that story. I have told it in workshops. Telling it on someone else's show, to an audience I could not see, still made my ears go hot.
That sting is the point. The book is built on the idea that the professional most likely to lose trust is the ambitious one with the most to prove, because ambition makes it about you. I was that professional. Any credibility I have on this subject comes from having been the cautionary tale first.
The fastest way to look smart is to stop trying to.
Listen to the episode
You can also listen on the Becoming Preferred website, or find the show on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
My thanks to Michael for the conversation, the generous questions, and the invitation to come back when the book launches this fall. I will take him up on it.
Winning the question means getting the problem right, together, before anyone reaches for an answer. If you lead a team of ambitious professionals, the question worth sitting with is this: when your clients want to think out loud, who do they call?
From Asshole to Ally arrives this fall from Trustcraft Press. You can learn more at winthequestion.com/book.
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