Lie Better to Advisors

I really mean that, too. If you’re going to lie to your advisors, at least have the decency to get good at it so that we can’t see through it. And after we talk about that, we’ll talk about when your clients lie to you.

How it Unfolds

It often starts well, but then devolves into something quite a bit less ideal than it could be:

• You have a challenge.
• You’ve tried all the things you can think of to fix it, and it’s created some wasted time and money.
• You even talked to a neighbor, who in a stroke of great luck used to own a failing business, and he has some ideas for you. None of these work, which is kind of a surprise, because he was very confident in giving you the answers.
• You decide to reach out for help from an expert who’s seen most everything there is to see.
• She asks you lots of really good questions. Thought provoking ones, even, and this gets you to thinking.
• But you don’t want to look incompetent to this new advisor, and so you pick and choose what to share, paint over some of the deep frustrations you have, blame it on outside forces instead of your lack of clear decision making and disciplined execution.
• So she has only some of the story to work with, does her best, does a shit job of diagnosing what’s REALLY happening, and therefore suggests some less than ideal solutions.

That’s not how it’s supposed to work, right?

A Strong Foundation

Here’s a better way to address the challenges that you might be facing while running your entrepreneurial venture. I’m going to suggest a few foundational precursors, too. These are the things that should always be true because they’ll put you in a better position to address challenges:

• Be in charge of the right things so that you see the trends. These consist only of four things: watching financial performance, establishing your positioning (business strategy), ensuring that new business is humming, and managing your direct reports (five or six). If that doesn’t fill your plate entirely, the next place to focus is inventing the future with the right sort of service offering design.
• Be aware of your own immune system to good ideas. We (as in “I”) can stubbornly cling to certain frameworks and keep resisting other perspectives.
• Understand that your job is to make decisions, not to make correct decisions. When you work too hard to make sure they are correct, you wait too long, and then the decisions you make are harder to correct than a lot of smaller ones.

That’s the background to getting help and navigating challenges effectively.

A Better Way

What you are really aiming for is a better relationship with reality. When you see things going off the rails, quickly check the foundational things (see above), and then possibly engage with an expert who will ask better questions, not be afraid of political pushback internally, and understand how to communicate difficult concepts that you can accept.

When that happens, and when you’re being transparent with an advisor (or therapist), good things happen:

• You’ll learn things from the questions themselves.
• He will not leave things unexplored, but instead look at where you are overly confident, where you hesitate but try to hide it, etc.
• He’ll suggest the changes, first in a big picture that stays private, and then in a smaller, immediate picture that you’ll talk about with those in your business circle.
• You’ll fight some of the changes. The expert will listen and be open to the idea of being wrong. But at some point he’ll say, “well, I might be wrong, but we know that what you are doing isn’t working, so let’s find a better solution together.”
• You’ll bounce the recommendations off your team, and some will resist. This is natural and it’s a part of change management. Your job is to listen carefully because they need as much time to embrace the idea as you do, and they are also coming to it from a non-entrepreneurial perspective. Which you honor but then reject, almost always.

And once change is underway and you start breathing easier, you look back to see how this happened and what you can learn from it, you share your experience with a cohort, and the expert gets a referral. This is called an After Action Review.

If nothing else, don’t fool yourself. Pinky the Cat is not an adoption candidate, no matter what this guy says. And if you don’t think clients lie to their advisors, read this hilarious account from my favorite attorney, Yassine Meskhout.

Flipping this Around

Let’s talk a minute about how your clients lie to you, too. When they do that, what it really comes down to is what sort of advisor you want to be. As Morgan Housel puts it:

“Lie to people who want to be lied to, and you’ll get rich.”

“Tell the truth to those who want the truth, and you’ll make a living.”

“Tell the truth to those who want to be lied to, and you’ll go broke.”

That’s kind of sobering, but probably true. However, over time you can develop such a reputation in whatever community you serve, that eventually people will seek you out for the truth. They’ll love you when they first hire you because their hopes are high; they’ll hate you in the middle when you tell the truth; and then they’ll love you a long time later when they look back on it. This is what I call The Hate Sandwich.

Don’t lie to your advisors, and recognize it when clients are lying to you.