A matter of trust

 

Trust is a requirement in any successful relationship. Given the high stakes involved in creating successful pharma brands, building – or rebuilding – trusting client/agency relationships is worth a little extra effort.

Kathleen King, VP, Learning and Talent, Omnicom Health Group: I work on learning and development across the entire Omnicom Health Group, and so I’m always looking for needs that are not specific to any one group, that impact our company across teams and divisions and segments, and trust is absolutely one of those areas. So about a year ago, through our Omnicom Health Group University, we started doing Speed of Trust sessions, which is a product and book by FranklinCovey. We saw something magical start to happen when we brought teams in together, because the premise of Speed of Trust is that great work happens faster if there’s trust in the room. And as those teams learned to build trust with each other, they saw their communication improve and the speed and quality of their work grow.

Meaghan Onofrey, Managing Partner, TBWA\WorldHealth: Everyone’s propensity to trust is different. Sometimes people immediately have high trust in a relationship, and sometimes they do not, and we can not expect other people to have the same relationship with trust that we do, ourselves. It’s about understanding your own propensity to trust. And it’s additionally about finding those things that can quickly – perhaps without any prior touchpoints with another person – demonstrate that you are someone with high integrity, with true motives, with the capabilities to do what you say you can do, and that you are either beginning what will be a track record of results or even using the model to turn around if there has been a misstep in trust.

Kathleen: It’s easy to tell someone, “Hey, I’m not going to make this deadline,” but to say that and then still leave both parties feeling high trust in each other, that is truly a skill. What we found when Omnicom teams were going through this – I remember the first time – we heard from people, “We’re so stressed. We have no time at all. If you really wanted to do something for us, you should’ve just given us the day off,” that kind of thing. People were a little disgruntled about having to come in for this workshop on trust. But at the end of the day, what we heard from people was, “Wow, I’m so thankful that you’ve created the space for us to have these types of conversations because it’s an impossible topic to talk about without actually bringing up examples.” What are the ways in which we see high trust demonstrated? What are the ways that we think we have opportunities to build a stronger foundation? I think it takes some bravery and some vulnerability to take topics like that below the surface.

Meaghan: At the same time, while these internal trust workshops were going on, we were also working on and thinking through the process of maintaining healthy agency-client relationships. And in the course of doing that, it became very obvious to everyone that basic trust was at the heart of any strong agency-client relationship as well – and that a lack of trust was frequently the reason why those relationships break down.

Kathleen: So the natural next step, of course, was to expand the workshops to agency-client teams.

Meaghan: The first joint Speed of Trust workshop that we did with agency and client teams together, honestly, came out of a need. It was a partnership that at that moment in time was not healthy, and we did discover that there were some trust issues on both sides. My agency team hadn’t delivered in some places and that caused trust to break down. And the clients were not behaving, perhaps, in the most trusting ways, probably because they had business goals and challenges that were making it difficult for them to trust. But whatever the reason, trust had been broken, and we said, “Let’s press the reset button, and start over.” Trying the joint workshop, it really was a roll of the dice. Kathleen and I had no idea that it was actually going to work.

Jill Twohig, AVP, Head of Hematology Marketing, Takeda: We were not in a good place. There had been a lot of change on both sides. The team really wanted to switch agencies. That’s how bad it was.

Meaghan: We knew that this trust framework was something that had worked really well within Omnicom to build trust within teams. We knew that there were other clients that had trained their staff using the Speed of Trust model, but we’d never brought the two together and said, “Let’s do a workshop with both the clients and the agency on this framework.”

Jill Twohig: We were talking about what we needed to do to repair the relationship, and the trust workshop was Meaghan’s suggestion. It made sense to me, because through our discussions about what was working and what wasn’t, what became clear was that there was a lack of trust between the teams. And Meaghan said, “Can we dedicate some time to that aspect specifically?” I felt it couldn’t hurt. In any relationship, what you give is what you get. So if we could invest the time, it could only make things better, so why not?

Meaghan: To be perfectly honest with you, I don’t know that I said to the client, “We’ve never done this before.” What I think I said is, “We have a framework. We use it in this manner.” And they were willing to give it a try. So it was born, and the results were really incredible.

Kathleen: The workshop was about learning about yourself, in terms of what’s my relationship with trust, and then learning to communicate effectively with people about those things that have broken trust, or that have the potential to break trust. We give a list of scenarios, and we know at least one of them will ring true for the group, and we have them pick one and say, “This is real for us at this moment in time,” and then we have an open conversation. And the foundation underneath all of it is communication. I think one of the beautiful things about when we bring the agencies and the clients together is it’s just a forum for really great communication. It’s not about discussing the work that people need to do – we remove that stressor for three or four hours and just say, “This is for you.” This is about the people doing the work, not the work that people need to do. You have the opportunity to create something great when you free up that space for people, and it’s common that teams have never had the opportunity to have these types of conversations before.

Jill Twohig: Meaghan had just the right sort of personality to help bring everyone together, and it was a chance to get everyone’s agreement that we were trying to work through this. It started with a decision to try and make it work. The session provided people a chance to air concerns on both sides, which I think helped create a greater understanding with everyone in the same room. Normally in these relationships the senior people do most of the talking, but with everybody in the room together, there was a chance for discussion and a deepening understanding of how to work more effectively together with everyone there, top to bottom.

Meaghan: Out of it came, I think, a handful of commitments that we all made as a team, agency and client. Again, not the agency making commitments, not the client making commitments, but shared commitments that were then published afterwards, which was pretty incredible. Even that action reinforces the trust, that the commitments were published when we said they were going to be published, and that people continued to refer back to those.

Kathleen: When I’m hearing internally that the relationship is tough – it’s like being a marriage counselor. If you hear that there’s frustration on both sides, but you also hear that both sides really want to make this work, there’s a desire to make it work, the people are all good people at their core, but the relationship just doesn’t always reflect that. The impetus for it was the idea that we are a great agency, but we’re not showing up as a great agency, and these were smart, incredibly articulate, great clients, but in this particular situation, the mix was not right. That was a trigger, because I do believe TBWA is a great agency, and the clients are great, and each side needs to own that 50 percent, but when both parties aren’t showing up in the right way, something like this is the right thing to do.

Jill Twohig: You could start to see as the session went on that the mood was lighter, there was more of a feeling of, “Yeah, that’s it exactly,” people feeling understood. So by the end, there’s still work to be done, but it did feel like we got people to a place where we were on firm ground with the relationship, about what we’re going to be doing on both sides to be able to move forward in a way that was positive, and it has absolutely helped. The relationship really has improved overall.

Meaghan: So after the success of the first joint workshop, the evolution of this has been that we’ve actually suggested doing it with more clients, even clients with whom our relationships are solid. The best of clients will ask, from the very beginning, “How can I be a great client?”, or, “How can we get this off the ground the most efficiently?”, or, “What’s the onboarding process look like?” We’ve started to build these workshops into the onboarding process. We’ve got a ways to go in terms of really pushing that agenda more, but I would argue that starting off any relationship with a Speed of Trust exercise is a good idea. There doesn’t have to be a problem for this to be a great solution.

Jill Elliott, VP, Global Commercial Lead, bluebird bio: When Meaghan introduced the idea of the Speed of Trust workshop, we thought it sounded like a great idea, a great way to continue to move us to a stronger place from a relationship standpoint. I thought we could only benefit from it, because trust is really half the battle, right? You have to have trust and be honest with each other to move things forward. Often in agency-client relationships, these open conversations don’t occur, and instead things are kept inside and can kind of go sideways, and before you know it, you’re in a fractured situation with your agency.

Meaghan: People would talk about something that had happened and their perspective on it, and then you could really see how the agency would have a different perspective on it. Within that context, people could see where the trust had broken down, but also have an appreciation for both sides of things because all of us, agency or client, can only know what we know. So, for example, when clients ask an agency team to do something quickly, if there’s low trust, what an agency might think is, “They’ve been hoarding this a long time. They don’t respect our time. They’re always asking us to turn things around quickly.”

Kathleen: Let’s say you’re the client and you ask the agency to turn something around quickly, it could be because your boss sat on it and just gave it to you. If you’re not vulnerable enough to say to the agency, “Guys, I’m really sorry. I know I’m asking for a quick turnaround here. Let me give you the context,” and not that you’re going to say anything about your supervisor, but you might say, “This just landed on my desk. It’s a sudden thing. There was a market event, and I know that it’s not always easy for you guys to do this quickly, but this is a special circumstance.” Then, of course, the agency is going to respond, “Of course. You’re a client. We want to do great work for you. We’re going to turn this around quickly even if that means working the weekend because we know that we’re helping you, and that there’s a reason for it, not just because.”

Jill Elliott: No other agency had ever come to us with anything like this before. It was a completely new and unique experience.

Kathleen: What we don’t do is get people in a room and say, “What are you not happy about? What’s not going well?”, because that’s not actually productive. It puts people in a threat state versus a reward state, and the reward is this great team that we all get to be a part of, and we’re going to create the path to do that together. You come up with things people are inspired by because they want their reward at the end.

Jill Elliott: The session started with a key question: “Are you the kind of person who enters a relationship with a high level of trust? Or are you the kind of person who thinks, I don’t know you, prove it to me.” So we talked about how people enter relationships from different baselines, and how valuable it could be for everyone to know those baselines. Then we discussed the tenets of trust, and each person selected which tenets of trust were most important to them. It was a great exchange of points of view, like, “If you deliver things on time, I trust you. If not, I don’t.” And that really started some great conversations about how different people pick up different signals, and maybe you are inadvertently breaking someone’s trust because your perspective on trust is a little different.

Kathleen: Everyone wants to be a part of the best team ever. We’re wired to be social, to work in teams. We want to be a part of a team, and how do we help this team do a great job? We build a space where it’s open-ended creation of what this great future state would look like for us. Then, we talk about, “Okay, well, how do we get there? What would it look like to be there? What do we need to turn up? What do we need to turn down?”

Jill Elliott: At the time, my team was working on the company’s first campaign, first drug, first approval. Being first comes with challenges. You really want to deliver for the patients and gain the company’s confidence in the strategy and launch plan. That put extra pressure on us, so our threshold to forgive errors or overlook delays was very low because of the high expectations. And two previous agencies had not worked out for us. We all wanted this to be a successful partnership – we wanted TBWA to be our forever agency. And all of that context came out at the trust workshop. It was cathartic for us, and it sensitized the agency team to something that they had maybe not entirely understood before.

Meaghan: Honestly, for me, I would love for other agencies and other clients to see what we’re doing and say, “Let’s shamelessly copy it,” because I think it would create much more trust in the industry and break the cycle of, “Not happy with the agency, do a pitch, switch agencies, massive transition, rinse and repeat.” Because the talent and the will is out there, on both sides. We just have to learn to communicate with and trust each other.