Archive | June, 2007

In Service To Our Clients

by on June 12, 2007 in Work

I experienced a moment of lucid learning today that’s well worth sharing. Hopefully, this will resonate with you, particularly if you work directly with customers and clients in a relationship-building capacity.

I have a client who is delightful in most ways, but is rarely specific in their requests. They sort of know what they want to achieve, but have a hard time communicating this with me. In the current case, they know they want a new website design for one of their events but that’s the extent of it. They know the design should be similar to the rest of their site but also different. This could mean nearly anything which is frustrating when trying to scope a project and understand their needs. What adds to the frustration is this lack of clarity (or at least lack of clarity in communication) is typical to how this client approaches our work together. It’s increasingly obvious that the client needs help in getting more detailed about what they want…which is leading up to the equally obvious trap of me knowing exactly what this client needs and how they need to do it.

In our project planning call today, I decided to take a stern approach with them. The overall tone of my voice was “look, it’s time for you to get your act together if you want this work done.” I didn’t say it exactly like that, but that was the vibe that I communicated. With some clients, I can take this approach and be okay, but for them it clearly wasn’t what they needed at the time. I later found out through my partner that I seemed ‘angry’ and ‘more hostile than usual.’ Yeah…big red flags.

Through this encounter, I recalled an important concept from my coaching training: each action should always be in service to the client. If you think about it, that’s actually a liberating idea. It opens up the opportunities for how we interact with our clients. If he or she needs to be encouraged and have their confidence fostered, then a coach can approach from this angle. And if he or she needs a loving kick in the rear, then that approach is also viable and honored as long as it is in service to the client and their ultimate needs. The danger is approaching as I did, which clearly did them no service. My actions actually diverted them from their overall objective.

So, what’s the learning?

1. Know the client and where they want to go.
Building the proper relationship with our clients is vital to a healthy, long-term partnership. There are no short cuts on this one. In order to help a client define and create their future, it means understanding what makes them unique, what fuels their purpose, what they most desire from your product or service.

For those who practice good client communication, that’s usually as far as they’ll go. Here’s the challenge: take it deeper. Actually make it a goal to know your client as an individual. Why do they work for themselves or their organization? What is it that personally drives them? What defines success for them? Knowing the answers to these questions is what separates the true partners from the service providers.

2. Match tone and approach to their purpose not our own.
This means putting our own personal preferences aside. If we’re getting ready to deliver a good stern lecture to a client who is waffling in their decision-making, we’d better be prepared to honestly ask if this is our preference or whether it’s truly in service to the client’s needs.

It also means setting our own emotional attachments aside. If a client’s indecision is driving us nuts, getting pissed off at them is not going to help them get where they need to go. That doesn’t mean their indecisiveness gets ignored…it’s still important to be open about it’s impact on their business objectives. We’re still trying to practice a caring partnership and that means sometimes addressing tough subjects. The key is to do it in a way that moves them toward their goals rather than farther away.

From Joining To Belonging In Organizations

by on June 3, 2007 in Work

A fine bottle of wine single-malt scotch needs to make it’s way to Jamie Notter for keeping me informed about all the juicy items in the Harvard Business Review. Once upon a time, I had a subscription and it was one of the best professional development investments I made. Which begs a question of…why don’t I subscribe now?

Anyway, back to Jamie and a recent article he brings to light, which focuses on the power of conversation in our working life. Poet David Whyte notes that most executives are hungry for a “larger language” that cuts through all the typical corporate bs that passes for communication. If you regularly play buzzword bingo during company meetings and win several times over, you understand what this type of shallow language is.

Jamie highlights a paragraph from the article that bears highlighting again, if for no other reason than to focus on one particular word: belong.

At the executive and managerial levels, work is almost always conversation in one form or another, and yet we spend almost no time apprenticing ourselves to the disciplines necessary for holding real exchanges. That’s partly because they involve a great deal of self-knowledge and a willingness to study how human beings try to belong—skills we hope our strategic abilities will help us get by without.

What is so compelling about the notion of belonging? And how can our daily language foster a greater sense of belonging – not only for ourselves but others around us?

When I worked in the non-profit association world, I witnessed the potential of belonging in a professional setting. When an actual spirit of belonging is present, it’s a dynamic and inspiring thing to behold. It not only energizes the individual, it invigorates the group. Yet, all too often, we get the agreement to join and stop there. Joining is the easy part. Cultivating a spirit of belonging takes work, preparation, and, as David Whyte notes, a willingness to curiously study what it means to belong to your group, your set of shared values, and your organization.

If you’re a manager or a team lead, what can you do to foster a sense of belonging in members of your group? Consider that each person has their own need for belonging and it’s your responsibility to figure out what this is. It goes beyond the question of why they’re working in your organization. It gets more to the relationship connecting the employee and their work. We don’t want to belong to something we don’t believe in; rather, we want to belong to something that truly matters to us.

Ask yourself…why would someone want to belong to your workgroup? Your department? Your organization? Taking the job and joining a company is the easy part. Helping someone truly belong to their work is where the power is.

What are you doing today to cultivate a sense of belonging?