And then we wonder why our own work is a less-than-fantastic experience. It’s actually a vicious cycle. The customer demands their own personally perfect interaction which puts pressure on the company to respond. Then, those of us inside the company or non-profit have to work harder than ever to meet these ever-escalating customer expectations. All of this may indeed explain the long hours, intense competitive pressure, and lack of fulfillment that makes our work a joyless pursuit.

Want to change this dynamic? Good…it’s simple (I’ll leave whether it’s easy up to you).

First, stop being an overly demanding and unfair customer. Since when has the one strike you’re out rule applied in baseball or one foul you’re out in basketball? Never. So, if a company screws up don’t give up on them. Same thing applies to a restaurant, a shop, an online service. Talk to someone who can make things happen and let them know that you’ve been disappointed and then…

Second, start being a coaching customer. If that company screws up, let them know what they did and how they can make it better. If your restaurant server’s service isn’t up to your expectations, let them know…don’t just tell the manager after the meal is over.

Third, and finally, make each transaction about more than just money. Within that financial trade is the opportunity for greater value. Be the kind of customer you want to work with in your own work. Be respectful and reasonable and caring. Remember that you get what you give.

I know some companies aren’t going to get this. They may shrug off your attempts at being a good customer, but I’d argue that these companies are actually few in number. Trust me…within each company there is at least one person who gives a damn as to the organization succeeds or fails. Find them and help them. And in the process, you might just be coaching your next customer.

It’s the idea that employees want work that matters.

It’s the idea that employees want to matter.

We all want to feel that who we are and what we do is significant. In the crazy busy world of business, these feelings can get lost in the shuffle of meeting deadlines, making client calls, and other everyday activities. Yet, without being in touch with what matters, we tend to just go through the motions.

Leader managers have a unique role to fill by helping their folks connect with these deep and significant qualities. As a manager…if you don’t already know these things…take some time today to dialogue with your staff and find out what really matters to them.

And take some time to answer: What really matters to you? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

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.

A couple of days ago, Lisa Junker noted an interview with Howard Gardner in the March 2007 Harvard Business Review where he talks about the influence of an anti-mentor. Gardner describes anti-mentors as “potential role models who had been unkind to their employees or who had shown behavior that others would not want to emulate.”

Lisa writes:

This struck a chord with me, and as I consider the idea, I’m surprised to realize how much of my personal management style has been shaped not by the good examples but by the bad ones. Many things I strive to do as a manager—like moving heaven and earth to do a review on time, or providing constructive feedback immediately when needed (in a private setting) instead of letting issues fester, to give just two examples—came about because I’ve seen the atmosphere that can be created when these basic things don’t happen.

Which prompted Lisa to ask: “What lessons can you thank your anti-mentors for?”

There’s quite a lot to consider in her question. The first is that, as employees, we are capable of being grateful for the examples of lousy management. Within that, there’s a certain release that from being in a less-than-optimal professional relationship. And we also gain a greater sense of control when we can acknowledge our own learning in these situations. This doesn’t excuse shoddy management practices and certainly nothing that creates toxic work environments, but by taking time to consider how situations of anti-mentorship are contributing to our own growth, we can turn some of this pain and discomfort to our own advantage. If nothing else, it teaches us we need to get the hell out of that organization as fast as humanly possible.

I also realize that it’s not quite as easy to throw my former managers and colleagues into the two separate buckets of mentors and anti-mentors. Each of them have their strengths as well as their flaws – all of which have contributed to my own practice of being a manager and leader. In our not quite so black and white world, it seems more appropriate to consider our past managers as human beings who have a mixed bag of qualities.

And rather than thinking we have to have it all together before we can possibly mentor someone, John West encourages us to just do it and do it now.

In the course of a conversation with a volunteer whom I greatly respect, I took a pause, launched into the titular phrase here, and started to give my thinking on a current situation involving some delicate issues. I was surprised when he stopped me and asked me to think about what I just said. “Huh?,” was my reply. He responded, “Why did you feel the need to ask me if you could be honest? Honest as opposed to what? A lie? A half-truth?” He was being somewhat facetious, but he was clearly helping me better understand how the casual use of language can shape the larger conversation.

So, why would we begin a conversation or preface a statement with the question, “Can I be honest with you?” Maybe it’s to soften a verbal blow that’s coming. Or perhaps its an acknowledgement that it’s hard to offer frank thoughts to the other individual. We all bring different assumptions about how an opinion might land for the person at the other end. Get curious about those assumptions and whether they are truly helpful in building a more meaningful relationship.

Coaching comes in all shapes and from surprising directions. And the best coaching comes from well-founded relationships that don’t necessarily come from a manager or originate within the organization. Being authentic and vulnerable and asking for help from customers, members, and vendors opens up a whole new world of possible learning.

You’ll notice that the ImaginActive logo that used to hang out on the left hand side is no longer there. The practice website has been taken down and I’ve disconnected the business phone line. It all is simply too expensive to maintain right now.

Yet, I’m not sure if ImaginActive Coaching Resources is truly dead; perhaps this is the time to get it kickstarted again. As I was answering some of Lisa’s questions, I remembered why I started the practice in the first place. I love coaching because it is a powerful tool for learning. For me, the personal sense of fulfillment and honor in being a participant in another individual’s transformative growth is, in itself, a huge reward.

Maybe there is a place for ImaginActive in my life right now. In addition to the internal workplace coaching I do in my current organization, I’m also thinking about how I can apply coaching principles in helping companies build better customer experiences. If you’re thinking that sounds like I’m working on another consulting angle, you could be right. Seems that once you get bit by the entrepreneurial bug, it kind of sticks with you.

I’ll just test the waters…if you are interested in:
1. coaching on livelihood integration (fully bringing together work, life, and all the other stuff).
2. building more dynamic customer experiences
send me an email or skype me. No obligations at this point, we can just see if there are potential relationships we can develop.

Getting to work means a fairly lengthy commute (pretty common for us DC Metro residents) and I tend to take public transportation so I have a chance to read. If I’m not reading one of the books you see in the left column, I’ll pull out a magazine. Right now, its the March 2005 issue of Fast Company. I know its a good issue by how many pages I have dog-eared and this one’s been well marked up.

Here’s the March issue link: http://www.fastcompany.com/subscr/92/index.html
It’s too soon for this issue to be free and open to the public, but log-in if you’re a subscriber.

Here’s one of the highlights for me:
Marshall Goldsmith’s article called Do You Love What You Do? Besides the fact that the article talks about loving your work (not much of a surprise that I’d be interested in something like that), I was drawn to something else. He begins the article with a story about Warren Bennis when he was President at the University of Cincinnati. Goldsmith writes that Bennis was addressing a university audience when a friend asked him, in front of everyone, "Do you love what you do?" After a long, uncomfortable pause Bennis answered that he didn’t know.

What Bennis’s friend did was ask him a disruptive question because it prodded Bennis to deeply question his assumed career path. Goldsmith writes:

That revelation plunged Bennis into deep reflection. It dramatically altered his path through life. He had always thought that he wanted to be the president of a university. It had not dawned on him that after he got there he might not actually enjoy the life of a university president.

This is one of the most effective tools in the coach’s toolbox. As a career coach, my goal is to ask one disruptive question each session. Sometimes I’m successful and sometimes I’m not. I’m also  conscious of the inherent risk when asking clients a disruptive question because it’s ALWAYS uncomfortable to have assumptions challenged. But, that’s the type of question that a client ultimately comes to coaching to be asked. It’s highly difficult to ask yourself a good disruptive question; it lingers in your blind spot – close by, but outside of your immediate awareness.

So, if your career is not what you want it to be and deep down there’s something gnawing at you, it’s time to find someone who can ask you some disruptive questions. Whether that coach is me or someone else, you owe it to yourself to love what you do.

It takes patience to develop solid networking business relationships. It takes patience to allow folks to find their way to your blog and website. It takes patience to gather enough people to create a tele-class. It takes patience to build a strong foundation. All of this goes against an assumption I held when I first started my practice – the work you put into business development will be met with some kind of correlating result in the near future. Kind of like: if you do this, you’ll get that. Yes, it was kind of naive, but I came from a non-profit world where I could measure project results in real-time and make conclusions as to whether the project was successful or not.

Now, I realize that developing my practice involves a kind of patience that emphasizes faithfulness. The actions that I am taking now to attract clients may only begin to yield results further in the future. It’s not the easiest lesson for me to learn, but it is proving to be one of the most valuable.

So, as you build your professional network, develop your own influence and reputation, or find your true career purpose, remember it all takes time. Regardless of how hard it is, letting go of the NOW mentality can make a huge difference in how you approach your career development. It can keep you from giving up or giving in to the notion that your work doesn’t have to be something you love.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

If you tell yourself that you’ll start doing something when it slows down, when its a little less crazy…guess what? It will probably never slow down and be less crazy that it is now. As a matter of fact, there’s a good probability that it will be even more hectic in the future. Yet, instead of this being an absolute truth, consider this to be just one story or perspective that keeps you from stepping up to bigger and better things. What other perspectives can you generate that might help you start something that’s really important?

Along with considering other perspectives, take some time to make sure that everything that you’re doing right now is in line with your core values. Are you doing anything that is unimportant (or less important than the other activities), but seems to take up your time anyway? Consider making some intentional decisions about what fits into your life right now.

To borrow liberally from Billy Crystal, “When you finally realize what you want to do with the rest of your life, you want the rest of your life to begin as soon as possible.” What do you want to do today?

By the way, visit http://www.utne.com/pub/2003_117/promo/10492-1.html for the interview with Henry.

The answers have provided a foundation not only for my personal life, but my professional life. I remember the first week of knowing that I was going to be a dad; I was terrified by all the changes that were going to need to take place…getting a solid job with health insurance (I was in graduate school at the time), finding a good place to live, etc. Then, this experience was further deepened when I started to consider all the changes that I would need to make as a person. At one point, the anxiety of it all was just too much and I started to run (physically) as hard as I could. I ran out of my basement apartment and kept running along street after street, through park after park, until I couldn’t go any farther and fell into the grass. From this exhausted state, I asked myself what kind of father do I want to be and then the answers started to appear.

I wanted my child to know love, to know integrity, to know playfulness, to know commitment, to know that this world is a good place filled with good people, to know that we can love our work. And the way for her to know these things are to see them modeled.

The process of asking myself this question did not end prior to her birth, but continues to guide me today. As my children grow, so do I as a father. Being a dad has provided another powerful layer of purpose to my life. To wrap up, I believe that my children are an incredible influence on me as a man and as a coach.