One of the reasons I like being a consultant and coach is that my own preferences aren’t particularly relevant; what’s important is what my clients want to accomplish. The flip side of that, though, is that it’s hard to be my own client, so when I have to make decisions for myself, I can feel uncertain.
I relearn this every time I do a big project myself—a rebranding, a new website, my TEDx, and now my animated miniseries, Better at Work with Liz Kislik. (More information follows below—the third episode drops this week!) When I’m working with a client, what that client wants to accomplish becomes my goal, but when I’m making efforts on my own behalf, it’s often hard to figure out what’s actually meaningful, satisfying, or even a good investment for me.
It’s Easy Working on Someone Else’s Behalf
With a client, I’m able to stand back, zoom out, and see their perspective, which gives me more ideas and stronger options than what’s only in my own mind. When I understand that they want something different, it’s easy for me to shift my viewpoint and support them to go after what they want, even when it’s hard for them. It’s also easy for me to be tough-minded about keeping them on track and to be straightforward about helping them with managing teams, vendors, and entire organizations.
But on my own, if my suppliers or partners deliver something that doesn’t seem quite right to me, I have to make difficult decisions: Do I push? Do I criticize? Or do I accept what they’ve delivered as being good enough because it’s too time-consuming, expensive, or annoying to insist on doing things my way? My past is littered with small dissatisfactions and regrets about the things I didn’t ask for, push for, or require—all because I was nervous about the financial expense, losing time, or annoying my colleagues.
What If I Supported Myself as Well as I Support My Clients?
But if I were to act as my own consultant and coach, I would do things differently! Here are some of the lessons I learned while launching Better at Work with Liz Kislik:
- Real quality is often very expensive. Even when you’re paying for it, it takes sincere and repeated explanations to partners about what your designation of quality or “good enough” actually is.
- You won’t get the outcomes you want just because everyone agrees they would be wonderful. The client is always the one in charge even if others control the implementation, so if you’re the client, pay more attention all the way through, not just at the end. Others will make mistakes, and you’ll have to clean up your own errors while being on the lookout for theirs.
- Once you’re in the middle of a project, simultaneously working on different aspects of it, and particularly when you start multiple rounds of revisions, it’s normal and very human for you and your team to ignore some of the crucial details and drop your standards. We have a tremendous tendency to patch the patches—to revise the bit that needs to be revised without looking back to see how or if it still fits the whole or rises to the level of quality we demand overall. We can even lose sight of standards and focus instead on completion, asking, “Are we done with this section?” rather than “Is this wonderful?”
- Our own desires and preferences may change as we do more work, learn more about our audience or target, educate ourselves on fundamentals, and come up with new ideas. Making the decision about whether to go back and improve things or continue with them the way they are is stressful and confronting, no matter which role you’re in—even when everyone agrees that one way is better than another.
- You may find that a partner or colleague gets overextended in terms of their time or skills. Sometimes you can shift them away from a particular aspect of the project; other times you’re stuck with them even when you’re not thrilled with their performance. It can be very challenging to weigh the impacts of these situations on both the project itself and your relationships with your team members and decide which one you’re going to preserve.
- At some point, it’s time to say that something is now good enough for public viewing, even if you continue to make small tweaks in the background.
- Once the initiative is complete, it’s so important to take time to reflect on it and, if at all possible, document which aspects you’re satisfied with and which ones you would handle differently another time. Make sure you capture your final decisions so that if you go back to the project, you can pick up from the right place with the strongest versions of everything.
I’m looking forward to doing mostly client work for a while. But first, I want to announce that the third episode of Better at Work with Liz Kislik will be released on Wednesday, May 1, on both BetterAtWorkWithLiz.com and YouTube. And if you’re interested in even more content about how to build and manage complex work projects, you may want to tune in to Fix It to Grow It, a new podcast hosted by Dave Kislik, to be launched later this month. Dave and his guests will explore how to leverage process improvement, project management, and the value of the people on your team to grow your business.
Returning to serving others is a welcome shift for me. But there’s nothing like doing the hard work yourself once in a while, to refresh your understanding of what your clients go through.
Onward and upward—
LK