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October 06, 2009
Ms. High Maintenance
Last night my busy client sent me an email asking if I could quickly create a few polling questions to get employee feedback about recent change communication.
“Sure,” I responded in an early-morning e-mail. “But can we talk first?”
A few minutes later, the client sent me a message via her Blackberry. “Gosh you are high maintenance for a consultant :-),” she wrote. I could picture her sighing, and then (reluctantly) agreeing, “Yes, we can converse. Be back in my office in 15 minutes. I’ll call you.”
Call me Ms. High Maintenance. (Obviously, this client does). But one thing my years of experience have taught me is that it’s rarely effective to plunge in and respond to a request without context. It’s so much better to pause, collect one’s thoughts and have a brief conversation that explores:
- What are your objectives? Why do you need this?
- Who is this for? What does that audience need?
- How will it work? Where will it be posted/distributed/located?
Another key question is: How does this relate to other things we’ve done or will do? In this case, that insight came from a colleague (we’ll call him “David”) who is also supporting this client. As soon as David heard “polling questions,” he suggested I look at other survey questions we’ve created for the client to see how those could be repurposed.
The result of five minutes of groundwork? The assignment took less time and resulted in more purposeful, on-target work than could have been produced by blindly implementing.
Remember: High maintenance can be a good thing.
Posted by Alison Davis at October 6, 2009 02:50 PM
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