Written in collaboration with Naama Berkowitz and Nurit Stone
The bottom line is that we're all people. We all have better days and worse days. As consultants, we meet our clients on both our better and worse days.
A few weeks ago, we arrived at a significant meeting with one of our clients where decisions about future activities needed to be made. We did our homework, came up with a list of topics we wanted to discuss with the client, and knew we had to leave with answers. As soon as we entered the room, we saw that the client was "not with us." Given the difficulty in starting the meeting, we suggested taking a short break for a hot drink. As often happens on the way to that hot drink, an informal conversation developed in which it became clear that the client was going through a family crisis at the time, making it difficult for her to concentrate on the professional aspect.
Another case we encountered just this week was in an organization where central work processes were being documented. Team members shared with one of the article's authors that they felt there was a process of pushing out veteran employees. They expressed their fear that documenting their knowledge would only make it easier for the organization to do so. This led to a conversation about their shaken confidence at work and deteriorating relationships with the new manager.
These cases will illustrate the dilemma we often face between the need to advance professional issues, be a listening ear for our clients, and connect to their needs both as employees and as people. There is no dilemma, at least not from our perspective. The very fact that we are consultants invites clients to open up to us. Our position as external consultants to the company, the fact that we know the client's professional environment and the people operating in it but are not part of this environment, makes clients feel comfortable sharing with us the pressures, concerns, and tensions related to the work environment as well as their personal lives. Our client work spans an extended period in which we see a shared journey. As in any journey, there are more manageable and less easy sections, but we always see and aim for our shared goal personally and professionally.
Like our clients, we sometimes arrive on a day when, for example, we don't feel well or our minds are distracted, and it's nice for us to hear a human response from the client. Showing weakness doesn't make us or our clients weak, just more human. On the contrary, if done in moderation and accompanied by other behaviors, it demonstrates not weakness but human strength.
Therefore, one of the essential values we've inscribed on our banner is the value of human strength. We believe that our company's success lies not only in our professionalism as consultants but also in our humanity. This belief is expressed both in our conduct with our clients and in the emphasis placed in the company on the empowerment and personal and human development of every one of us. As part of this belief, we hold enrichment meetings every month. These meetings touch on the professional aspect, where we develop various methodologies, analyze case studies, and more, but no less importantly, on developing personal skills such as listening, empathy, handling objections, and more. Recently, in this context, we underwent a workshop dedicated to the importance of complimenting, both within the organization to each other and outside the organization to our partners. Empowerment and personal development are also expressed in the company's effort to identify the areas that interest us, strengthen them, and allow us to develop them as we see fit. Ultimately, we believe everything is part of one synergistic whole: our feelings as employees and our good feelings about ourselves as human beings permeate and influence our relationships with clients and are significant to the project's success.
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