Successful Blog

Don't Make Your Clients the Market You Serve

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Agency and Client Work Is A Cultural Communication Art

My first jobs after teaching were agency roles. I worked my way from presentations to conceptualizing whole programs, campaigns, and products. As project lead, I lived to serve clients — huge brands that made products for consumers, schools, teachers, kids, and parents. I translated the client’s needs, goals, and wishes into the final deliverables. I lived for success of our projects together.

Then, in the middle of my career, I was hired to take on the client role. I started hiring agencies, consultants, and developers to work on my own projects. That’s when I learned what many client facing business do wrong.

They made me their market. That left me to care about my customers on my own.

Keep Your Eye on Your Client’s Customers and Their Cares

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Once I was a client myself, I came to realize that the partners who were most valuable to me were those who cared as much about what my customers thought as I did. The folks who understood that became partner-thinkers. They made my job easier by improving process, product, and approach.

Being a partner-thinker is valuable to a client in so many ways.

  • We learn the client’s rules and process and the way it works when it works well, so that we can gently point out when it’s off track.
  • Seeing the client’s customer means we listen more critically to what our clients say. We share the burden of taking care of the client’s concerns and values rather than leaving it to our client.
  • Moving from the role of builder to thinker-partner allows us to offer ideas that contribute added value. The client gets engagement as well as execution.
  • As a partner-thinker, we involve ourselves in getting to know the customers, not just the client, in intimate ways that stretch our imagination to serve customers more fully.
  • The beauty of being “outside the client’s working system” means that we can see what people inside the system cannot.

When we look past our client to advocate for their customers, we can think with them. More thinkers ask more questions, test more possibilities, go beyond client information to meet their customers. The best agencies, developers, and consultants look to their clients’ customers and want to know them as intimately as the clients do. Then they can serve the client and the customer as a thinker and a builder both. more ideas, and seek more answers. Better products, campaigns, and communities are the result.

Who wouldn’t want the best thinking when the success of a project, profitability, and my team’s jobs are on the line?

How do you show your value as a thinker-partner?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

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How to Deliver Yourself to Your Dream Everyday … in Small Amounts

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What Are You Doing

When I was young my dad used to say, “If you’re going to be a teacher, own the school.”

I’d explain that’s not how schools work — that schools provide a place to do what I want. I’d tell him about what I’d teach and how what kids would learn would change the world.

He said I had my dreams in the clouds.

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My dad proposed.

  • In our own ways we can make any place our own by filling them with ideas that turn into action.
  • It’s the action not the ideas that make the difference, the difference that wouldn’t happen without us alone.
  • People who do things build their future by delivering value that would be missed if they weren’t there..

Whether we work in the most obscure company, or work for ourselves at contract jobs. People notice value added contributions. People look for folks who offer them unique value.

Value added is an irresistible contribution and it brings surprising opportunities as a reward.

Don’t wait for your dream to deliver … deliver yourself to your dream everyday … in small amounts.
It’s easy to get where you’re dreaming by always showing up with your dream work. Every little value will bring you closer to that dream you’re after.

How do you add a little of yourself to what you deliver today?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

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What Will You Do Today to Double Productivity?

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How Can You Get Someone Else Working Too?

Invigoration happens when we accomplish something.
Invirgoration is even bigger when we accomplish something that’s been nagging us because it needs to go somewhere.

Take a look on your desk, on your to-do list … Is there something that if you just do it someone else can be taking it to the next step?

One best way to be productive is to find the thing we can accomplish and pass on for the next person to work on. Then while we’re working on our second task, that person can be working on what we just passed on. I call that double productivity.

What will you do today to double your productivity … even for just a few minutes?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your productivity!!

Delegation Happens: Working with Friends Can Be Dangerous

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Ever End Up Doing Someone Else’s Work?

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Susannah was an editor who worked me years go. She had a project that needed help and knew just the person she wanted to call … her friend Christie. Christie was an experienced editor on maternity leave.

A meeting was set. Christie came in to get the work. Susannah explained exactly what was entailed and when it was due.

When the due date arrived, the work never came. When the work came, it was less than what Susannah had described. Susannah ended up doing the work and paid her friend anyway.

Ever been there?

Some things to remember when you’re about to delegate work to a friend.

  • Prepare for a friend as you would for someone you’ve never met. One clear signal to your friend and yourself of the business nature of what you’re doing is to treat the conversation as a strictly “work” conversation.
  • Define the relationship as you would with a new client or a new employee. When we’re delegating to a friend, communication can complicate itself. Friendship filters can recast everything that’s said. State your expectations. Write out guidelines and share them.
  • Leave room for the possibility that you’ve misjudged your friend’s skill set. As you describe the task ask whether this sounds like something he or she wants to do and has the time to do well.
  • Explain everything as clearly and in detail. We tend to endow our friends with information they don’t have. Understanding is often assumed — we assume they know things because they’re our friends.
  • Take time to say what the work means to you and your situation. Let the friend know that you are depending on him or her for your success. State clearly why you’re delegating the work and what depends on part of the project that you’re handing over.
  • Talk about who will make corrections or revisions to things that get missed if the work is incomplete or incorrectly executed. If at all possible, have time in the schedule for sending it back to your friend for such revisions.
  • If your ability to communicate during this conversation seems difficult, call off the delegation. It’s better to find someone else than to move forward with what doesn’t seem to be a good communication already.

On the Internet, we meet and make friends easily, but sometimes we endow them with the “halo effect,” thinking their great personality is a sign of their great compentency.
Sometimes the only way to learn that we’ve gotten a wrong impression is by asking for help and finding out the person isn’t who we thought. Usually though, asking a few questions, and offering complete information can get us to a great working relationship.

We all have friends who are better than we are at so many things. Are you finding the right ones to help you when you need them?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!
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Delegation 2: I Can't Let Someone Else Do That!!

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No One Can Do This Like I Would

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Delegation is the art and a science of communication needs. For most of us, it’s a skill we acquire, not a talent that comes naturally. Delegation takes practice in order to fully share
enough information for another person to complete a task successfully. Have you ever left a meeting sure you knew what to do, only to realize later that you didn’t understand. Yeah, me too.

More than that, it takes the ability to communicate the importance of the task and to negotiate a work agreement that shifts the accountability for making sure that the task is on time, complete, and of high quality.

Before you delegate a job, have a plan to communicate to the person who’s joining your project. Great communication will help in making sure that you pass on accountability and a sense of mission with the work that you’re handing over.

  • Start with the big picture. Decide what every person on the project must know. Offering the big picture context helps a new player immediately frame decisions and judgment calls properly.
  • Show where this piece fits. By placing the delegated assignment into the context. We communicate its importance to us and to the success of the project.
  • Explain and show exactly what a good result would look like. Write guidelines or goals for the task. Have examples of a prototype or something similar that you and the delegatee can discuss. Take the time to say what you want and what you like.
  • Invest more time if the meeting can’t be face to face. When a conversation isn’t face-to-face, communication degrades significantly. Some figures say it goes as low as 35% comprehension without visual reinforcement. Send an agenda or samples before you meet.
  • Know your goals and how you’ll check whether you’ve communicated clearly. Include and early sample to check that messages you think you communicated are the same ones that were heard. A quick look at a first step can save a project gone way off kilter.

The minute we delegate, communication becomes key. Unfortunately in an effort to show respect for other professionals we often tell them less than they need to know and still think we’re telling them too much. In like manner rather than looking like they don’t know, the often ask less than they might.

What’s the single biggest error you find you make when you’re asking someone to do work for you?

Tomorrow … Delegation Happens: Working with Friends Can Be Dangerous

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!
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Delegation: How Do You Scale Up and Still Do Your Best Work?

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DELEGATION 1

No One Can Do This Like I Would

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The single social media questions I hear most is:

How do I find time do it all?

I usually answer, “You can’t and I don’t think you’d want to, even if you could.”

We all can only do what’s humanly possible.
We all get the same 24 hours in the same day.

So what’s the best way to get things done in the time that we have?

How Do You Scale Up and Still Do Your Best Work?

Communication might be easier, even quicker through technology, but more people further apart take longer to communicate with. Take, for example, a simple request for information. One message might get to 20 friends, but not all of them will get and respond to that message at the same time in the same way. Not all of them will respond completely. Some will not respond at all. Some will misread or not read the directions and send information that doesn’t help.

Time is an unrenewable resource. We can’t make more. So how do we make the best use of the time that we have?

  • Analyze the work you do to find your high impact value and core compentencies. Why do people hire you? What do you do that makes the most difference? Isolate those tasks and skills. No one is expert at every step of the process. Decide which steps are where you add the highest value. Is it planning, service, execution, design, management, writing, administration? Choose no more than two.
  • Identify the skills and tasks that you do least efficiently — those that you like least, those that you don’t do well, those that anyone can do.
  • Change the way you work to offer those tasks to someone who does them better than you do.

That’s right, the way to offer more of our best work is to delegate. It’s easy to think that no one would do it like we would. And it’s probably true.

But different isn’t the same as wrong and sometimes different is better.

The trick is knowing what to delegate and knowing that we don’t have to delegate the WHOLE task. We can delegate chunks.

Start with the obvious stuff. Let fresh eyes read your work for errors. Ask another person to key in the changes. Those are tasks that are easily isolated and executed by someone who’s probably more proficient at them than we are. We can check the final before it goes out.

When we pass on the tasks that we don’t like, don’t do well, and don’t need to do, we can put the best of our time where it makes the most difference — doing what only we can do.

How so you offer more of your best work when you’re scaling up?

Part 2 tomorrow … Delegation 2: I Can’t Let Someone Else Do That!!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!
Buy the Insider’s Guide. Learn how to write so that the Internet talks back!