A recent study from McKinsey focused on a slightly different, but related question: "what do shoppers (“important people”) really want from personalized marketing?" I chuckled, reading it, because it reminded me as an executive development specialist of what my clients (my “important people”) really wanted from me. The McKinsey stuff provides immensely transferable ideas.
Nearly all their suggestions apply by analogy to those of us who are taking care of our own career. Those who want the support of significant people, including bosses, or others inside or outside of their firm.
The McKinsey report set the suggestions up as though the client was talking to the marketing person and explaining their values. Their report assumes a background in personalized marketing which many professionals lack. But the tools necessary for fulfilling these values are quite learnable. Highly successful people from all disciplines regularly build these competencies into their toolkit. In fact, I found over the years that these values both enhanced my value to clients and provided me with new clients where ever I was consulting.
Typically, an external consultant is fortunate to continue with a firm for three years. By paying attention to these client values, they were part of the reason I was able to work with firms for five to ten years on a regular basis. I consulted regularly with one firm for twenty-plus years, with two others for more than a dozen years, and with still three others for more than five years. I also followed two info technology CIOs around, as they moved from firm to firm for nearly twenty years each. In fact, my marketing was more often done by my clients than by myself. So, I credit these values for a great deal of my success.
- “Give me relevant recommendations that I wouldn’t have thought of myself.” One COO at an international firm worked so many hours, including time on weekends, that his wife warned him that if he continued, his marriage would be falling apart. While I spent a month interviewing his colleagues, I suggested he take two weeks, and keep track of every half hour of work, laying it out in the form of a report. A very bright guy, MBA from a top university, yet he had never thought of that simple methodology. By the time we sat down to talk, he’d gone over his two weeks and found that an inordinate amount of time was spent daily on responding to emails from the people under him. He freed up nearly two full days a week by sending out an email to his entire workforce that they were not to stop by his office or send emails unless the information was either about a work problem or a new opportunity. I thought my strategy was obvious, but he never would have thought about it on his own. I worked for that firm a little over six years. And were recommended to two other firms by VPs in that firm.
One conclusion I drew from that experience is that what I know or think is obvious may be completely out of another person’s awareness. So, don’t be too quick to think that “he (or she) already knows that.”
- “Talk to me when I’m in a shopping mode.” Or ready to receive, think about, and perhaps open to my insights. Getting the timing right was always high on my list, even though it could sometimes be very difficult. I found that once I was working with one executive and he was providing feedback to his colleagues, that same executive could often tell me who was interested and who was not. It’s very difficult to get the timing right without some understanding of the person’s core values. Values can eventually be figured out by paying attention to various complexities that are revealed by emotions, talk and behavior. I learned how to be an effective “noticer” as a kid because of my family’s dysfunction. And amusingly, I began developing my “noticing” skills from their depiction by the detectives in the mystery stories I read as a kid.
Max Bazerman has a superb blog on “How to become a first-class noticer (Harvard Business Review),” a freebie that can be downloaded on the web. He comments that outsiders are often the best noticers. Though the skill can be learned, it takes time to learn. A warning about this specific skill: don’t make your expectations unrealistic. Recognize that there is no such thing as perfection in figuring out a person’s values. One of my biggest clients once told me that a 50% success rate in any behavioral skill was something he was very happy to pay for. I think that 50% accuracy in assessing a person’s openness to a service or new idea is a damned good rate. As a general rule, most psychologists’ counseling success rate is in the neighborhood of 40% and physicians’ diagnostic success rate is in the neighborhood of 60%, including those physicians who diagnose on the basis of physical tests.
- “Remind me of things I want to know, but might not be keeping track of.” Half way through my 25 years of executive coaching I began to keep track of things my clients needed to know but might not remember. I would occasionally shoot off an email, reminding them of something they’d expressed interest in. But I was very cautious about limiting such to one, or at most two times a year. Execs are very busy, so I always honored their time even though I was tempted to send relevant information more often. If you limit your contacts, clients will read it as important.
So, this is a behavior which I believe is best underplayed. And if I were a full-time employee, I’d be certain that my recommendation would be of high value to them. Something they’d asked about in times past. But I’d still limit an unsolicited behavior to once or twice a year. Overdone, it’s very easy to be thought of as a suck-up. And that’s death for most any person.
- “Share the value in a way that’s meaningful to me.” Keeping track of a boss’ statements about priorities (personal values) reveals their underlying values. So, I pay a lot of attention to a person’s word choice and ideas, as well as those words and ideas not used or important to that person.
In managing this issue, I tend to put the recommendation in a modified question form. “I don’t know whether this is a strong priority for you, but. . . .” Using that form on a rare occasion usually gives you a lot of information about values. The person will unconsciously share their values in response. “Actually, that’s not especially important.” Or, “yeah, I appreciate that info.”
After reflecting on the McKinsey article, I realized that my recommendations are all about “taking care of” your boss and colleagues. Taking care of people is essentially learned early in the family. And some men never have learned how to do that. It was a woman’s job. I think the notion of taking care of another person is very difficult for a lot of people. Because I was forced to “take care of” my mother as a kid, I learned how to do it in spades. It’s one of the characteristics that made me a fine pastor and then a successful executive coach. I simply learned how to watch for needs and priorities. But a caveat is appropriate here: I also learned how to control that behavior, putting limits on it. Still, some people really have difficulty stepping up for others—and in business that failure often limits one’s career future.
**Julien Boudet, Brian Gregg, Jane Wong and Gustavo Schuler, What shoppers really want from personalized marketing, McKinsey, October 23, 2017