I had the good fortune this week to attend a leadership conference sponsored by the Virginia Association of REALTORs. I think VAR is a top notch organization and I'm proud to be a member. The conference itself contained some really excellent content.
I was especially pleased with the presentation by a college psychology professor from California. His field of expertise is influence, a field of study I didn't even realize had it's own experts! His presentation talked about how influence is an outgrowth of credibility. Credibility he defined as being expertise plus trustworthiness. Typically establishing credibility is a very lengthy process. But given the nature of what we do, it's not always possible to wait a few years while you establish credibility with a client. And, so we were treated to a presentation on how to speed up that process. His ideas were good and although the topic sounded like we could possibly talking about manipulation, the bottom line in everything was honesty and integrity. I liked that. Clearly no one ever established credibility by trying to short circuit those essential ingredients.
An important part of the process he discussed was being willing to share hard truths that are not necessarily in your self-interest. So, let's say I tell you, as a seller, that you shouldn't sell your house right now. Theoretically, that's going against my self-interest since I'm unlikely to make any money in the short term if you choose not to sell. But you are more likely to perceive me as credible when I do this because you know I've spoken against my self-interest in order to give you the truth.
This presentation was immediately followed by a public affairs spokesman from the National Association of REALTORs. I'd like to feel as good about NAR as I do VAR. Really I would! But they definitely make that difficult!
The gentleman from NAR gets up and starts the same old song and dance about how the media isn't fair and doesn't love us. He talked about how they only publish bad news. He used as an example the latest sales numbers that were released to the press in a nice package that even gave them the positive headlines they could use to lead the story.
Talk about no credibility! If journalists had used NAR's proposed headlines for the last two years they'd be out of a job by now! NAR has continued to tell everyone how we've hit the bottom every single quarter! Of course, they've been completely wrong, but it hasn't stopped them from continuing to lose credibility with the public, journalists and economists as they keep trumpeting their positive spin.
Tell the truth, the whole truth, the ugly truth, the painful truth. You can not spin your way into an up market! And, in fact, you hurt every real estate agent's credibility when we sit down in front of a seller and have to tell them how rough the market is after you've been telling them the reverse!
It was a very odd way to follow a piece on gaining credibility through truth telling! I don't know exactly who put the agenda together. And, they may not have known exactly what the full content was for either presentation. But it's surely an odd juxtaposition of messages!
Comments(0)