Passion, People and Principles
An administrative note: For those who pay attention to such things, this blog has had available, up till now, four different RSS sub-feeds (Strategy, Managing, Client Relations and Careers) , as well the aggregated “global” feed containing blog posts in all four categories.
I’m changing that, so that from now on there will be only one global feed available. Since the vast majority of people signed up for that, the sub-feeds didn’t seem to serve much purpose.
You don’t have to do anything. It’s just that if you only subscribed before to one of my sub-category feeds, you are going to start receiving posts on the other subjects, too. Sorry!
Since I work around the world, I am frequently asked if the business issues I discover tend to differ from country to country or region to region.
The answer is that while the business issues tend to be very similar, the style with which you respond to them must chnage a great deal.
It is always true that to have a successful company, you must energize, excite and enthuse your people. However, it turns out that the way that you excite a Brit is not the same way you enthuse an American. (They even show their enthusiasm in different ways.) In fact, it can vary regionally: the best way to get through to a New Yorker doesn’t always work best in the rest of the US.
The same lesson applies in client relations. When I sent my article Marketing is a Conversation to a prominent UK lawyer, she observed that aggressive attempts to get to know the clients (at least in the fashion I described) would be considered very counter-cultural in the UK and Europe. The intentions and the motivations might be the same, but you would need to have a very sensitive ear to pick up what was being received well.
None of this says one cannot work well in foreign countries. It does say that a key to success is the need to pick up social clues quickly and integrate them into your style (a form of emotional intelligence). But then, that’s true domestically anyway!
One of the most common and confusing terms in business today is “client centricity” or “client focus.” Many businesses claim to have it. Few are clear about what they mean by the term.
Charles Green, my coauthor on Trusted Advisor has a wonderful analogy. He points out that many companies have the client focus of a vulture – they pay close attention to what the clients are up to, but only in order to figure out the right time to pounce and tear at their flesh!
This is a very apt description of many company’s “client relationship plans” or client relationship management (CRM) systems. They are not really plans to build a relationship at all – they are just a list of activities trying to tell the clients about the wonderful things we can do for them. A sales plan is not a relationship-building plan.
But what could client centricity really mean if we were to take the term seriously?
I suspect that there are levels of client-centricity or client focus.
What follows is my attempt to describe increasing levels of client focus (and possibly of marketplace effectiveness.)
Level 1: We do a better job than our competitors at listening to customers and work hard at finding out what they like and don’t like about dealing with us.
Level 2: We have a better understanding (than competitors) of what the experience is like of being a client
Level 3: In designing our operations and activities, we focus on what the client wants to buy, rather than what we want to sell
Level 4: We have ongoing tracking methods (quantitative and judgmental) to assess the quality of the clients’ experience, as judged by the client.
Level 5: We treat those client satisfaction / quality metrics as equally important (if not more so) than financial scorecards in evaluating groups and people.
Level 6: We have provided experiential training to everyone who deals with clients on how to be a better counselor, helping them develop their interpersonal, psychological, social and emotional skills and ability to interact with others.
Level 7: We continually use our better understanding of the experience of being a client in order to enhance the quality of the experience for the client in dealing with us.
Level 8: We are able (and do) treat customers as unique, adapting and responding to each with a customized approach, rather than adopt standard methods of dealing with all clients.
Level 9: We have thoughtful, well-executed plans to invest (without fee) our own time and money in growing the relationship with key clients, earning and deserving their trust and future business
Level 10: We place a greater emphasis in our measure and reward systems on growing existing client relationships rather than pursuing new accounts. Relationships are more important then volume around here.
Level 11: Clients believe that if it is ever a trade-off, we will put the clients’ interests ahead of our own.
******
OK, reality time!
How well would you rate your company’s client focus on these criteria?
What have I left out or got in the wrong order?
post # 76 — May 14, 2006 — a Client Relations post
There is an absolutely marvelous blog and discussion about why advertising agencies don’t advertise here.
The argument (and the discussion) could be extended.
Why don’t the branding agencies have branding campaigns?
Which PR firm trying to break into the blogging / social media services marketplace got a lot of bad publicity because it didn’t have a blog of its own, yet held itself out as ready to advise others?
We have already discussed paradoxes like these on this blog under the title of The Shoemakers’ Children.
post # 75 — May 13, 2006 — a Careers, Strategy post
The concept of being mentored sounds like something that happens to you when you’re young and on the way up. The truth, however, is that, at any age or stage, we all need a loving critic, a friendly skeptic, a coach, a mentor to help us make sense of the world. Do you currently have someone who:
- Is reliably, dependably on your side but is not afraid to critique you?
- You can rely on to tell you the truth – gently, but nevertheless the truth?
- Helps you understand how you are perceived, inside your organization and in the marketplace?
- Helps you extract the right lessons from your disappointments and failures?
- Keep you from getting carried way with too much enthusiasm about your successes?
- Watches you and lets you know when you are failing to keep things in balance?
- Acts as your sounding board for your new ideas before you launch them, so that you can refine them (and sometimes abandon the crazier ones?)
- Suggests new things for you to consider?
- Helps you see things from fresh perspectives, and helps you think things through, without substituting their judgment for yours?
- Helps you understand the politics of the organization you are in or have to work with?
(Regular readers will notice the overlap between this list and material in my book Trusted Advisor.)
We all need to keep our eyes and ears open at all times for people who might serve one or more of these roles for us. It’s not true that we only need one mentor, or that one person can do everything on the list above.
If you don’t currently have people who play these roles for you, then you have work to do. Go make a mentor or two (or three or four.)
Some people look for a mentor who will be their champion, helping them get the best opportunities, supporting their cause and smoothing their way up the ladder. However, such relationships are rare. They are usually the eventual outcome of a long-term relationship, not its starting point.
The best way to think of a mentor is as someone who will be your confidante and guide. Someone you can go to in order to try out ideas, get feedback and advice. The mentor is thus your coach, not your champion. He or she doesn’t create your success for you, but helps you create your own success.
Finding, creating and sustaining a mentor is just like any other relationship: you get out of it what you put into it, and you cannot wait for the other person to seek you out. You have to work actively to develop and refresh your network of mentors.
Mentors do not have to be your superiors at work. In my case, former clients have been invaluable as people I can talk about my work with. Even though our time together began with me advising them, they are often delighted to “reverse” the relationship and help me. If you let your clients get to know you as a person, and the things you face in your career, many will respond with friendship.
Other sources of mentors can be colleagues with whom you have previously worked. (I owe a significant debt of gratitude to Charlie Green and Patrick McKenna, previous co-authors, who, to this day, still take the time to preview my writing and make suggestions. I try to do the same for them.)
As always, you build a relationship by earning it with small gestures of goodwill- finding ways to be helpful to the other person above and beyond the call of duty. Show an interest in them, without rushing to get what you want out of the relationship. Start small. Don’t expect a caring relationship to occur immediately upon your initial interaction with someone. Try to be useful to them even in a small way, whether it is helping on an internal project, providing work to a new client, or exploring a mutual interest.
Get to know your possible mentor, then begin slowly asking for their advice. Don’t expect them to spend an hour with you after a one-month project. However, they would probably gladly spend 15 minutes talking with you about their experience, or giving their advice on a career issue you are facing. The key is to make it easy for them to help you.
So, here’s your action list for today.
First, reflect on what aspects of being mentored (using the list above as a starting guide) you could usefully use more input and guidance.
Second, reflect on who you have met recently (or deal with regularly) who might be in a position to help you get better.
Third, start to build a relationship with those people (it’s almost certainly more than one person) earning their goodwill and trust by finding a way to be helpful to them.
(By the way – a message for top executives and corporate readers – all this applies to organizations, too. How well mentored do you think your firm is? What could you do about that?)
post # 74 — May 12, 2006 — a Careers, Managing post
The CEO of the consulting firm was giving a speech to his assembled troops, young and old, encouraging them to get involved in business development early, citing one of his own successes as a young consultant.
Noticing that he was being undercharged on his telphone bill, he speculated that the telephone company was undercharging many of their other customers. So, he wrote a letter to the telephone company’s CEO, identifying the opportunity for the telephone company to make money, and landed an initial assignment that grew into a significant consulting relationship.
Quite a creative, impressive piece of initiative for a young person! The only problem was that, while the majority of the audience was incredibly (and appropriately) impressed by the CEO’s piece of autobiography, only a minority thought they would have had either the ability or the courage to do something like that.
The behavior seemed very forceful and aggressive to many of them – they questioned whether they would ever have the courage (or the wisdom) to do something like that. It seemed “foreign.”
There was a similar reaction to another point the CEO made. He was pointing out the benefits of staying in touch with everyone you went to school with, since your classmates may turn out to be people who, in future years, can hire you.
The CEO’s intentions were pure – he pointed out that the key to business generation was having a sincere interest in people and a sincere desire to help them. He cited the example of one of the firm’s great business-getters of all time, for whom there was almost no difference between his social circle of best friends and his customer base.
Again, while the impact of the speech should have been motivating, it was not so to all of the younger people present. Isn’t there something false, many of them worried, in staying in touch with people for such mercenary reasons? Do I really want there to be such an overlap between my work community and my personal community? Yes, it worked for the superstars, but is it ME?
The CEO was sincerely trying to use his experience to help his junior people succeed, and was giving them wonderful advice. But it was the advice of a “natural.” He wasn’t getting through to his novices and apprentices.
They were not thinking “Oh, now I see how it’s done – that’s easy.” Their reaction, just when anyone skilled is trying to show you how to do something was “Wow, I’ll never be as good and as smooth at doing this as that person, why should I try?”
The truth is that if someone is going to help us learn something, we do not learn best from the “naturals.” We learn best from someone who credibly, visibly, “been there – done that!” Someone who started out struggling with these issues.
If I’m struggling with a drink problem, don’t offer me a teetotaler as my counselor – they just won’t understand my struggle, and they absolutely will not be able to help me. If I’m struggling with weight, don’t give me an instructor who never had an extra pound of fat on him or her.
I need to work with someone who knows how difficult it is to stick with the program, what it feels like to get the “midnight munchies” and someone who can give me tips derived from really personal experience about how a NON-natural, a NOVICE, begins to build the new behaviors into a lifestyle.
The best teachers and trainers prove to me that they understand my struggle, and give me tips, tactics and suggestions appropriate to my stage of development – not just the examples of what the superstars can do.
One of our biggest problems is that we love putting people in categories, so that we can use short-cuts in figuring out how to deal with them. We’re always looking for general rules.
I remember wasting a lot of my adolescence and my 20s trying to answer the question “What do women want?”
Eventually, I grew up and realized it was pretty silly trying to make a generalization about a half of the world’s population. What I needed was not a theory about what women (in general) wanted, but an ability to detect, as quickly as possible, what the human being I was with wanted.
The very act of generalizing was what was getting in the way of me paying attention, getting close, and forming a bond with the other person.
People (even women, it turns out) do not want to be treated as a member of a group, or class, or market segment, or subset. They want to be treated as individuals.
The same, of course, is true in all aspects of human life, business as well as personal.
Any sentence that begins “What clients want is…..” is bound to be wrong. The essential lesson is that there is no one thing that all clients want.
The business challenge is this: how quickly can you or your organization find out what the specific client wants and adapt to that clients’ individuality? How well do you truly listen, adapt and respond?
Really great client service doesn’t mean figuring out a bunch of neat things that most people like and then doing those things to everyone. Client focus means being good at figuring out, in real time, what each client would prefer, and adapting as much as you can to those preferences.
Notice that we do not, in personal life or business life, have to adapt completely. People understand that there are constraints and limitations (after all, I’m just a male and there are limits to how flexible I can be.)
However, people really respond well in business and personal life when they see we are TRYING to treat them as specific human beings, not just as a category member. It’s so rare that they repay us with their commitment and loyalty.
post # 72 — May 10, 2006 — a Careers, Managing post
Yesterday I had an interesting conversation with an old friend and client who works at an international accounting firm, and who has been charged with providing “Human Resource support” not to the employees, but to the top level of the organization – the partners or senior professionals.
This is a healthy initiative. As he points out, there may be a lot of talk about the need for good management of lower-level employees, but the life of senior professionals in most sectors has been revolutionized. The world’s gone crazy around them – increasing client demands, new technologies, the need for greater concern about how junior people inside the organization are managed. Some sectors like accounting also have a new regulatory environment to contend with.
This reminds me of a speech I gave a while ago, where I was asked to talk about improving the morale of junior people in order to prevent increasingly high levels of staff turnover amid the war for talent. Early in my presentation, a partner in the audience raised his hand and said “Forget about discussing THEIR morale as employees – what about discussing OUR morale as partners?”
He had an excellent point. The traditional model of the professional business was to say to the juniors “Work hard and, one day, you too can have the life of the partners.” Needless to say, if the juniors look at the partners’ lives and don’t like what they see, this is less than fully motivating, and they are not going to hang around for very long!
The efforts that my friend’s firm are making to help their senior professionals succeed and manage the new stressful world can be divided into two groups.
First, there are what I call “off-line” support ideas. These include sabbaticals, leadership development processes and an interesting and innovative “comprehensive medical and lifestyle evaluation” service to help senior professionals find and deal with health issues before they are serious or even symptomatic. Apparently, they find solvable undiagnosed issues in 20% of the evaluations.
The second set of ideas for reducing partner stress is to go back to basics and start managing senior professionals differently through different approaches for normal “on-line” regular, managing. (In other words, start managing them instead of just administering a profit-and-loss scorecard)
This involves getting practice leaders, department heads, and office heads to engage more in one-or-one coaching, helping senior people to find out what activities turn them on, then helping them get rid of activities that do not and get more of the activities that do. Companies and firms have to start HELPING people succeed, not just demanding that they do.
It also means re-examining the way the firm uses metrics so they don’t (as is traditional in firms like these) keep holding all senior people accountable for being good at everything, but are able to create super-successful teams by allowing individuals to pursue their interests and make a contribution in a specialized role that, through team management, is integrated into the overall needs of the organization through effective team leadership.
Needless to say, firms find it a lot easier to throw money and time at the “off-line” support initiatives than they do at holding accountable those with managerial responsibility to start being effective at managing. But the effectiveness would come with precisely the reverse priority.
If the CEO or Managing Partner started asking the office heads regularly “What’s Jimmy doing to develop his career? What are his challenges and problems? What have you done as office head to help him?” then the office heads would start getting the message that a new regime really existed, and that they probably would have to start changing THEIR behavior if they wanted to keep their role as practice managers and leaders.
Done this way, things would change fast. However, without this change in managerial behavior (not just speeches) from the top, I have deep a skepticism that change can be brought about through off-line support initiatives.
If management wants other people to change, then management needs to figure out how they personally need to change in order to elicit the new desired behaviors from others. Change only happens if the people at the top change. We keep asking too much of those in support roles – they cannot patch over bad practices by line management.
Andrew Lumsden communicated with me quoting from a piece written by Guy Rundle at www.crikey.com.au
It was 1977 and my friend Todd had saved for six months until he finally had what every 11-year-old wanted – a CB radio! For a year after he got it, we would tune in and roam the frequencies only to find…airy nothingness.
I was reminded of this recently while trawling the blogosphere which is increasingly taken up with blogs that appear to be dead, dying from neglect or stillborn, with one or two initial entries, now years old.
As with CBs, what thrilled people with blogs was “the ecstasy of communication”, the pure fact of being out there in the wide cyberworld – in other words, the form rather than the content.
What most realise is that blogging is the illusion of connection, publishing into a void and thus doubly isolating. Those blogs that survive will and are evolv(ing) into multi-person sites, some with collective and decentred ways of uploading, others with hierarchies essentially identical to paper editing.
This repeats the birth of newspapers out of the “pamphlet wars” of the 17th century – the latter a product of the creation of a cheap, single operator platen press. This may be the necessary stage of development required to create a media sphere which genuinely overturns the mass media model – one in which a range of well-edited moderate circulation outlets can charge and get subscriptions. Whether they could turn into full newsgathering organisations remains to be seen.
Andrew then asks: Is blogging already dead?
Andrew, I don’t think blogging is dead. What’s rapidly disappearing is the illusion that being successful with blogging is quick, cheap and easy. That all you have to do is “build it and they will come.” That’s never been true with any other business issue, and it’s not true here.
The simple fact is that creating an interesting blog that entices people to want to come back and enter into conversations with you is a slow, time-intensive and hard process. It’s no less hard work than writing a book, a series of well thought out articles, or (to switch analogies) building a network of close friends who want to have a committed relationship with you.
If you are looking for instant gratification (and many, many people are) then the fad of blogging is going to fade quickly.
The same is true for those who wish to participate in blogging mostly by reading, rather than creating their own blog. As we have all discovered, it’s not that easy to find the “soul-mate” blogs that make you want to come back again and again and continue discussions.
There are two reasons for this. First, and foremost it has always been true that you have to go out on a lot of first dates to meet someone you really want to have a relationship with. It’s hard work, isn’t it, to search for sites that consistently contain interesting commentary and match your interests.
To continue Guy Rundle’s analogy of the CB Radio, it turns out not to be that helpful if you have to scan the frequency every time you want to find something interesting. You and I want shortcuts, and that’s why we lapsed back into listening to broadcast radios with stations at pre-set locations and frequencies. The time cost of searching gets too big for the low-probability of a beneficial payback.
The second, related reason is that the technological tools to help us with our search for “simpatico, interesting” people (such as blogrolls, trackbacks, del.icio.us, carnivals) are still undergoing evolution. They reduce the search time, but do not really make it manageable.
Blogrolls are filled with indiscriminatory “friend of a friend” listings that are no guarantee that you’ll find the new blog (or person) interesting, and because someone made one interesting comment doesn’t mean you want to listen to everything that person has to say.
The lessons? Well, just like your parents told you, it is worth making new friends, and it involves a lot of false starts – you have to go to a lot of boring parties, hang out in places you don’t really like on the chance that you will meet someone, talk to a lot of strangers. It’s a pain, but if you want a social life, you’ve got to do it.
Unless, as Guy Rundle suggests, someone comes up with a way for each of us to decide where to go that maximizes the chance that we find like-minded people. That may be a “new” approach, or it may be, as he argues, just a modern equivalent of a preset radio station or print media magazine that targets a market segment and serves both the readers and the advertisers by establishing a clear market position.
(By the way, everybody, I suffer from this problem as much as anyone else. Let me ask all of you out there a question: based on what you tell of my interests by reading my blog, what other blogs should I be reading regularly? It’s like those reviews in music magazines – if you like this CD then you’ll probably like that one. Help me out here, folks!)
Finally, for those interesting in writing blogs, more parental advice you probably received – find something you are passionately interested in, stay true to your vision and keep at it! If you want people to seek you out for ongoing conversations, then you can’t just occasionally say something inetresting or fun. You have to try your best to make it worth people’s time to come back to you again and again. Even here in the blogosphere, this is about relationships, people, not a frenzied search for quick hits!
Being good at relationships means more than knowing how to start them and maintain them. It also means knowing when and how to end them.
The time will come – you will find yourself in the wrong job (or working for the wrong client, or even employing the wrong person) and will need to break off the relationship. How you do it matters.
Maybe you are not the one who is initiating the separation, but you can see it coming. In such a case, remember the old slogan “If they are going to run you out of town, dash to the front and lead the parade.”
If you suspect the other person is wondering whether or not they want to stay in the relationship with you, you don’t want to be caught holding on desperately. Assuming you have made reasonable efforts to make the relationship work, you’ll have a lot more options (and make better decisions) if you take the initiative.
Take charge and get out as soon as possible. People will often be grateful if you save them the awkwardness of ending a bad relationship. It’s better to plan your exit when you are the one choosing the timing and the style of the separation.
It is often tempting, once you have decided to move on, to switch off or wind down – to give up working on your relationship with your employer, client or employee. Don’t. Do your best right to the end. Regardless of what happened before, or how long you were together, you will be remembered most for the way you leave a relationship.
If you have to divorce (a client or a spouse or even an employee), there’s no point sniping. Resist the temptation to tell people what you really think of them and why – even if you have lots of good arguments and just cause.
Remember that friends come and go, but enemies accumulate. Be kind, say thank you for the good parts and move on. Why make an awkward situation worse?
Avoid burning bridges. It’s more noble – and better for you – just to walk away, head held high, mouth shut. You’ll be glad you did it that way.
