Defying Stagnation: A Simple Technique For Getting Better
Defying Stagnation: A Simple Technique For Getting Better
This simple practice for improving your consultancy abilities isn't a secret, but it's nto quite common knowledge either.
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Always Seek Feedback From Clients On Your Performance
At the end of a consultancy engagement, ask for feedback on your performance. Crucially, you want to know what you could have done better.
And whatever your client says, simply agree with them and thank them for their help!
This isn’t the time to get defensive or explain why your client is wrong. That is a sure-fire way to make sure you never work with the client again. The client’s experience is their experience after all. But it is a time to understand how the client experienced you and what they would improve about it.
It’s remarkable how few people seem to ask their clients for feedback on their performance. Perhaps it’s a fear of what the client might say (feedback is personal after all). But it’s this feedback which is critical to growth. You need honest feedback on what you can do better to highlight the areas which a) clients care about and b) you need to improve.
The harder the feedback is to hear, the more valuable it is.
If you go through this process well, you can even send updates to clients over time highlighting how their feedback has helped you improve. This makes them invested in your success and more likely to work with you again in the future.
Solicit Feedback In All Situations
This doesn’t just apply to clients, it can apply to a wide variety of working relationships.
When I worked with a video team to record new training courses recently, I asked for feedback on what I could do better to work with them. I ask my accountant for feedback on how to be a good client, I ask my employees for feedback, and, I often, ask event organisers for feedback.
I’m equally impressed by clients and others who ask for feedback from me on what they can do better.
If people say they liked my talk, I’m flattered, but I ask them which aspects of it resonated most with them.
You have almost unlimited opportunities to gather honest feedback on yourself. Don’t waste them.
Create New Rules To Resolve Past Mistakes
Your greatest period of growth comes when things don’t go well.
Success follows growth. Growth follows learning. Learning follows failures.
They say an expert is someone who has made every conceivable mistake in a narrow field. That’s only true if they learn from that mistake.
Real growth will only happen if you treat negative outcomes as a learning opportunity. If you hide from it or blame an external circumstance, you won’t grow.
Let me share a recent example.
A few months ago, I had a call with a prospective client which didn’t go as well as I wanted it to. It wasn’t a disaster, it just didn’t feel like we connected the way I wanted to. This was because the meeting suffered from a few key problems.
The meeting was only set for 30 minutes. I only had 30 minutes - less than usual - because it was incredibly hard for the key stakeholders to get their schedules lined up. There was very limited availability to squeeze me in.
The key decision-maker was running late. So I had to either run down our limited time waiting for him or proceed without him.
He later turned up towards the end of my presentation. This interrupted the flow of the talk and forced me to make a decision to either restart the talk or continue knowing he had missed the key details. He also asked questions on topics which had been covered already.
I fumbled a question. He asked a question which wasn’t relevant to the scope of the project. I didn’t have a strong answer (partly because this stage I had been knocked off balance and partly because we were running short on time).
It’s frustrating when these things happen, but it feels good if you use it as an opportunity to grow.
If you can critically reflect on what you could have done better, you can improve. I can critically self-reflect and figure out what I would do differently next time it happens (because these kinds of things will happen again!).
For example, I need to decide what I should do in the future if:
I’m only given 30 minutes when I need more time.
If the key stakeholder doesn’t show up - but the rest of his exec team is there.
If the key stakeholder turns up late.
If I’m surprised by questions which I don’t have a prepared answer.
All of these things have happened before and will happen again.
I need to create rules which are firm in principle, but also flexible in recognising each situation is unique. Going forward this might be:
To be clear 45 minutes is required. If the potential client can’t spare that much time for the project, they probably don’t prioritise the project as much as we do. This feasibly might cost us clients, but I suspect we wouldn’t convert clients who don’t prioritise the project.
To reschedule if the key stakeholder isn’t available. Yes, we could send the recording - but we know s/he won’t watch the recording. We could also summarise the notes. But the reason the stakeholder is on the call isn’t just to get the information, it’s to get to know us. We need to make that human connection with them. We need to make this principle clear before the meeting.
Develop a standard response for questions we’re not sure about. In future, I might just say something like ‘I love that question, it came up [previous occasion]. It’s only tangentially related to this project - so let me put together the resources on it after the call and make sure we can get through all the questions on this call’.
Developing Better Responses To Tricky Questions
One of my favourite examples happened a few years ago.
I was asked by a prospective client: ‘Why should we hire you to do our consulting when our platform vendor offers it for cheaper? Won’t they know their platform better?’
I fumbled the response talking about bias and skill in vague ways.
Immediately after the call, I spent around two hours coming up with potential responses. Then I tested them with acquaintances in my field to see which they felt was most effective.
In the end, the response which proved most effective was a variation of:
Hiring a vendor to do your consulting is like letting your bank be your financial advisor. The advice they give will always be aligned to their goals, not yours.
Most importantly, a vendor is designed to develop and sell a product. Consulting is not their priority. You don’t want junior staffers giving you consulting advice as part of a vendor ‘upsell’ or as a side gig. You want someone who has been through this many times doing this as their only gig.
You want a consultant who can give the expertise and depth of advice vendors are unwilling and unable to provide. For example, we can tell you which aspects of the vendor’s platform you shouldn’t use based on past experience and where the vendor has led past clients astray.
I’ve lost count of how often I’ve used some variation of that sentence over the past few years. It’s not only true but clearly draws a distinction between us and the vendor’s consultancy offering.
I don’t know if that single response has acquired us clients, but I know having a response I can drop with a second’s notice is handy.
Look For External Expertise Outside Of Your Industry
One of the most effective ways to improve is to look for people doing really impressive things in other industries and see how you can adapt those techniques to your space.
Whenever I’m doing something new or trying to improve, I look for examples in other sectors and then adapt them if I feel they can help. You don’t need to put out any poorly designed content when you can simply replicate and adjust what others have done.
Likewise, if you want to promote yourself, you can often dissect how others are promoting themselves. Right now, for example, there are plenty of mid-tier influencers (ignore the top tier) who have battle-tested countless promotional tactics and techniques which work well in the current environment.
If you’re going to engage in any new activity, spend time seeing how some of the mid-tier folks are doing it and adapt their approach.
I always ask for feedback, even early in any kind of activity or project, to the point that more than one person told me "You are already asking for feedback, but we've just begun!".
I do this because –with my past as a project manager- I know that any kind of project suffers from a general lack of timely feedback loops.
The earliest and more frequent, the better: people are in general wary of both giving and receiving feedback, so you have to be the first one starting the process.
Due to this general lack of feedback loops, people don't know what "good feedback" sounds like, so you have to set good examples – and yours are on point, as usual.
It's been hard for me to start this practice of asking for feedback also because I'm a natural born introvert, but so far the rewards have been on the positive side: very often I discovered strengths that I didn't know I had (e.g. clients telling me that they appreciated my timely communication style, which I always took for granted) or I have been able to manage expectations and avoiding to take it too personally (e.g. when someone tells me that what I didn't wasn't exactly what they expected).
I think that as consultants we should make peace with the fact that a client who is always 100% satisfied with what you do is probably a client that you are not challenging enough.
Facilitating and asking for feedback from big groups has been a great gym for me, the wider the audience the more likely someone will give you a less than positive feedback, and you have to learn to live with that.
As usual, so much value in your newsletter!
I like your response on the platform vendor offering consulting services.
Your first couple of points are spot on, and something that I have definitely experienced in my career having dealt with multiple tech platforms.
One additional point you might want to highlight:
Product company consultants come with a (more or less) strong knowledge of their product, but don't have the expertise nor the experience to contextualize that knowledge within a complex system integration environment.
They might understand the workings of a single organ but have no clue how it interacts with the rest of the body.
I wouldn’t want a doctor with such a narrow understanding to have anything to do with my care!