As a consultant, your relationships with your clients are invaluable. Learn a few strategies for maintaining your client relationships.
Client relationships are the lifeblood of your business. Be deliberate about maintaining them. Regular contact will keep you top of mind. Beware of excessive contact; they’re going to ignore you or block you if you’re in their inbox too much. Find excuses to reach out to them like, “Hey I read an article and I thought of you,” or “I heard about a cool new technology and I thought you might be interested in it.” Send these notes and leave it at that. Don’t try and sell during these interactions. They know you eventually want to sell them something. Just focus on being helpful and good things are going to come.
Learn the importance of communicating what sets your consulting firm apart from your competition.
When you run a consulting firm, you have to answer one very important question. What makes you special? If you can’t articulate what sets you apart from all the other consulting firms out there, you’ll be hard pressed to win business away from them. You’re going to have trouble winning the bid when other firms are in the mix. Have a clear statement about why you’re differentiated. It’s that differentiation that will enable you to compete on quality instead of being in a race to the bottom on price. Read more
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Learn about the consensus-based decision-making style and the situations when it’s most appropriate.
The fourth style of decision-making is consensus-based decision-making. This is when decisions are reached with a cross-functional team. People from different departments are having their input, and buy-in is essential. You should reserve this style of decision-making for the biggest decisions you’re trying to make. However, recognize this can take a lot of time. You have to get everybody saying yes before the decision is made. You’re going to have individuals from multiple groups, multiple functions, all working together, coming up with that final perspective for the final decision. And performance of the individuals is measured by the team’s outcomes since everyone is involved in making the call.
Allow me to offer an example. At one point, we were launching a brand new website for our company. This was a major investment for the organization, and we needed to make sure we got it right. There was no urgency around making this call, and we knew there would be a lot of meetings and analysis that needed to be done. Ultimately, we needed agreement before we turned that website on. We needed to make sure that finance, IT, marketing, sales, operations, and customer service were all on board with that decision. Needless to say, the steering committee’s job of getting all those people together and driving the input from those organizations was a monstrous task. But in the end, because we had taken our time and gotten everybody to give their input, we had buy-in on the final decision. When we executed it, it went very quickly and very well.
As you think about situations where you’re going to use a consensus-based approach to your decision-making, understand it will take a long time and you’re going to get input from a lot of different groups. But ultimately, you will have that buy-in when you say go.
Want to learn more about decision-making strategies? How about taking an entire course on it? Go directly to the course and start improving your decision-making strategies. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!
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Learn about the democratic decision-making style and the situations when it’s most appropriate.
The third style of decision-making that you can use is democratic decision-making. This is when a decision is reached by a majority vote. Buy-in is desirable, but it’s not essential. These are the decisions that we just have to make and then move on with life. Individuals are going to interact. You may have a committee where people come together and form an opinion, but ultimately, we set a deadline, we vote, and we move on.
Imagine a situation where you’re trying to choose a new color and floor plan for the office. This is not a huge decision. It’s not a make-or-break call for the organization, but we do need to make the call and then execute it so we can get back to work. You may assign a committee of people to ultimately choose that color, and you’re going to put it to a vote. Now, not everyone is going to be happy because this is a matter of personal taste so many times. We want as many people as possible to be happy, but we want to make the call and get it done.
As you think about situations where you’re going to apply democratic decision-making, they should be for those smaller decisions that aren’t going to have a huge impact. You need to set a deadline for things to get decided so you can move on and execute.
Want to learn more about decision-making strategies? How about taking an entire course on it? Go directly to the course and start improving your decision-making strategies. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!
Did you enjoy this post? If so, I highly encourage you to take about 30 seconds to become a regular subscriber to this blog. It’s free, fun, practical, and only a few emails a week (I promise!). SIGN UP HERE to get the thoughtLEADERS blog conveniently delivered right to your inbox!
Learn about the participatory decision-making style and the situations when it’s most appropriate.
The second style of decision you can make is participatory. This is when you’re going to make a decision with input from the people who are going to be impacted by the final call. Participatory decisions are made when the decision is much bigger and there’s a lot more risk involved. Getting additional information from more people is going to reduce the decision-making risk. Also, by getting buy-in, you’re reducing execution risk because people have had an opportunity to give their input and have a say in the final call that’s made.
As far as that final call, in participatory decision-making, there’s still a smaller decision-making authority. It may be an individual or a smaller group. This aspect of participatory decision-making can feel a little autocratic, but we’ve gotten input along the way. And the individuals are going to interact with each other as this decision is being made. Getting all the people in the room so that they can hear each other’s perspectives is going to help you drive to a better decision.
Allow me to offer an example. Recently in my firm, we looked at raising prices on some of the services we offer. This is a really big decision and it has a huge impact on the financials of my firm. So I couldn’t rush off and just make an autocratic decision without getting input from the other people I work with. So we sat down, we had a conversation, and we weighed the pros and cons. People had their say and they brought up things that I hadn’t thought of. We highlighted some risks that we were going to have to mitigate along the way. Ultimately, as the leader of the firm, I had to make the final call. But I got input from the people who are going to be involved in executing the decision so that we get better execution on the back end.
As you think about making decisions in a participatory environment, remember you should be using this style when the decisions are bigger. You have a little bit more time to make the decision because you need to gather more input along the way which takes time and meetings. But ultimately, that smaller decision-making body is going to make the call.
Want to learn more about decision-making strategies? How about taking an entire course on it? Go directly to the course and start improving your decision-making strategies. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!
Did you enjoy this post? If so, I highly encourage you to take about 30 seconds to become a regular subscriber to this blog. It’s free, fun, practical, and only a few emails a week (I promise!). SIGN UP HERE to get the thoughtLEADERS blog conveniently delivered right to your inbox!
Learn about the autocratic decision-making style and the situations when it’s most appropriate.
The first style of decision-making is autocratic, and this is where decisions are made at the top. Buy-in is not seen as an important aspect of making this decision, and actually, it may be counterproductive to involve a lot of people in making the call. Typically, in an environment where you’re making autocratic decisions, work activities and roles are very tightly structured, they’re monitored, and well-controlled, and command and control is a very important aspect of making these types of decisions. Performance on an autocratic decision is measured based on the individual’s execution of that call.
Learn the four decision-making styles and the factors that influence which style will be best for your situation.
When you make decisions, there are four decision-making styles that you can use. There’s an autocratic style, a participatory one, a democratic style, and a consensus-based decision-making style. Your choice of which of those four styles to use is driven by two factors.
The first factor is the urgency of making the decision. From low urgency (you’ve got plenty of time to make the call) to high urgency (we need a decision right now). The second dimension to consider is the size or impact of the decision, from small decisions that won’t have a large impact to big decisions that are going to have a huge impact. As you look at which style of decision-making to use, you need to consider both of these dimensions. Read more
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Learn about four of the most common obstacles to creating a high-performance culture and how to overcome them.
You’ll face many common obstacles on your path to building a high-performance culture. Legacy culture issues, associates who resist the new culture, and processes or behaviors that don’t yet exist are going to slow you down. You need to work through these counter-culture moments and issues if you’re looking to change the overall culture of the organization. The more aware you are of what these pitfalls are, the more quickly you’re going to be able to overcome them.
Legacy culture issues
One of the four most common pitfalls I see is the legacy culture. “This is the way we’ve always done things.” Read more
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The metrics you use to define ‘high performance’ will drive your team members’ behaviors. Make sure your definition leads to the behaviors you want.
To build a high-performance culture, you have to define what high performance is. What does high performance mean? How are you going to measure it? How much of your definition hinges on hard business metrics like sales, profitability, and growth, versus on qualitative metrics like morale, engagement, and customer satisfaction? The way you define and measure performance will dictate the practices you put in place to achieve it.
If you define performance by hard business metrics, you’ll get behaviors focused on driving those metrics. That won’t always get you the outcome you want in terms of building a high-performance culture. The focus ends up being on driving the number. And that can come at the expense of building a great culture.
If it’s defined by behaviors and soft metrics like engagement, retention, morale, and customer satisfaction, then you get those behaviors. The hard metrics like sales and profits should follow. Let’s look at a couple of examples of defining high performance. Read more
One of the first steps you can take to create a high-performing culture is to assess what is and isn’t working in your current culture.
An assessment of your current culture gives you an understanding of the starting point for your journey toward building a high performance culture. This assessment includes evaluating what your current culture stands for, how people behave, and the incentives you have in place to drive behavior. Defining and explaining your culture can be difficult. It’s an intangible set of behaviors and a general feeling of what it’s like to be part of the organization. Identifying when people are or are not behaving in a manner consistent with your culture is an important element of assessing the culture you have. Let’s look at what goes into one of these cultural assessments. You need to ask yourself several questions. Read more
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The caller ID stated “Mike.” The phone was on the fourth ring. I held it in front of me, watching the screen, mouth dry, sitting at my desk, thinking, “Here it goes again. He’s going to speak Chinese and I won’t understand.”
Creative Food, the vegetable-processing company I had started in China the year before, was on the verge of bankruptcy. Every project I initiated had failed. All the foreign experts I had hired had left. My operations were in such bad shape that my own customers, who included big fast-food chains like KFC and Pizza Hut asked my new recruits why they had come aboard a ship that was sure to sink. On that day, once I finally answered the phone, I had to ask Mike to repeat himself several times. Read more
https://i0.wp.com/www.thoughtleadersllc.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/20211114-Four.jpg?fit=1920%2C1280&ssl=112801920Trevor Joneshttps://www.thoughtleadersllc.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/logo.pngTrevor Jones2021-11-15 08:00:062021-11-14 23:26:33Four Ways to Become a Complete Leader
Knowing the behaviors you want from your team and how they link to results is one of the keys to creating a strong culture.
Leaders who create a strong culture of outstanding performance will find that performance strengthens their culture. By strengthening the culture, the likelihood of better results and performance increases. This is known as a virtuous circle.
You need to be careful though—the dynamic works in the opposite direction as well. Bad behavior begets bad performance, which leads to more bad behavior, and ultimately a bad culture. I know one senior executive who always used to ask people, “How much money have you made me today?” That simple question flowed through all the behaviors in the organization. Everyone focused on financials, but it was at the expense of creating a great culture.
Let me share an example of how to build a virtuous circle. Read more
https://i0.wp.com/www.thoughtleadersllc.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/20211110-Sky-Circle.jpg?fit=1920%2C1280&ssl=112801920Trevor Joneshttps://www.thoughtleadersllc.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/logo.pngTrevor Jones2021-11-10 06:30:452021-11-10 01:39:04Creating the Virtuous Circle
