by Jared Belsky
Is the issue at hand truly about the content, or is the real issue a break in trust?
Might it be better to brainstorm with the client versus share slides (which tends to cut down conversation)?
Too many are taught too young to value a meeting by the number of slides in the presentation. The bigger the meeting, the bigger the PowerPoint deck, goes the thinking. The longer the meeting, the higher the slide count. It is something we are taught unconsciously, and it’s hard to unlearn. It also creates a barrier between you getting in a car or a plane to see your clients.
I was once meeting with an account director on a retail client heading into their Q4 season and I asked him, “We are a few weeks away from Black Friday. When are you heading out to see the client next?”
He replied, “Well, we don’t have any decks or presentations to give right now, so we had nothing on the books.”
When I picked my jaw up off the floor, I realized he simply had equated the threshold for seeing a client to having a large PowerPoint presentation to share.
This is the shortest chapter in the book, perhaps symbolically. The only lesson here is to recognize that there are a hundred good reasons to make the trip to see your client and walk their halls. Take them to lunch, ask them how their business is doing, ask them how their family is doing, and get a feel for stress levels in their halls.
Three Habit Changes
Visit your clients in person whenever the chance arises.
Don’t think of the threshold as having a large PowerPoint deck but rather a multitude of reasons.
Understand that the value of walking the halls at the client site allows you to have a better feel for the business you are working so hard to represent.
Your FROM → TO personal goal:
FROM a leader who thinks in PowerPoint first, TO someone who trusts their own voice and instincts as reason enough to see a client and walk the halls.
Part Two
Part Two: Getting the Most Out of Your Team
Lesson 11
11. Be a Servant Leader
“My job is to empower you all to reach your potential.”
—Tim Andree, Executive Chairman, Dentsu Aegis Network
The notion of servant leadership means adopting a style of leading that puts the team first and yourself second. You should have a mental state that recognizes you hold your office as a public trust and can get voted out if you don’t represent and respect those that work for you and keep you in office. Servant leadership is not a catch phrase; it should be as sacred as a religion. It is a vast subject, deserving of its own book, but let’s simplify it here and just consider what it means in terms of leadership behavior.
Before jumping in, it’s important to visualize what servant leadership looks like in its most simple form.
As illustrated, the notion is that, traditionally, the employee base of the company works for and takes orders from the leader(s). This is a command-and-control notion that is more effective in a military setting (though even that is changing). The servant leader illustration is one in which the leader works at the service of the employee base. To be clear, this is not to be confused with a twenty-four-year-old copywriter ordering around the CEO, but rather that the CEO views it as her job to work in the best interests and service of the copywriter. It’s not semantics, it’s a huge difference.
Ultimately, behaviors and actions speak louder than rhetoric and words. Accordingly, I have tried my best to outline some behaviors of a servant leader. You won’t do them all right every day (I sure don’t), but if you think about them and raise your level of self-awareness around them, you will be on your way toward creating a servant leadership culture, which is something that is sustainable and enduring.
Behaviors. Everyone is always looking at you for signals of your management style. Everything communicates, so what do you want to communicate as a servant leader? Here are a few things to focus on from a behavior perspective.
Sit on the side of the table in any room. When you enter a room and you see a long boardroom-looking table, the instinct as a leader is to sit at the head of a table. Resist it, and instead, sit at the side. This is less of a command-and-control posture and will set the room further at ease and allow everyone to contribute.
Put your hands on the keyboard. If you call a Sunday meeting to get ready for a big new business pitch, don’t just sit there and bark out orders for others to make the content. Ensure you grab a section. Even further, grab something unsavory and difficult, like the staffing model. Be a worker and a contributor, not just a talking head.
Help with the mundane things. This is exactly what it sounds like. When the Chinese food is ordered, and you are all working late at night, and the meal is done, and you are all wondering how General Tso is going to find its way to the garbage can in the corner that is simply too small…you be the one to step up, grab some dishes and get them in the garbage. Don’t leave it to the intern or office services. Take care of it and help.
Be equitable with reviews. Make sure reviews are 360 degrees in nature. This ensures that everyone feels like they get a say in the feedback that goes to your leaders. Beyond reviews, creating a culture that relishes feedback reminds people they are accountable to everyone, not just the boss.
Be generous at big meetings and invite the shy ones in. Be brave yourself and make sure junior folks get involved in big meetings, so it’s clear you believe in the entire team, not just your stars. This sends a message that everyone can make a vital contribution. Further, make overt efforts to bring those who are by nature more reserved into the debate by asking them questions directly. It is often the quiet ones who are sitting on some of the best ideas. Show you care about all ideas from all people, and you will receive an increased flow of great ideas.
Give everyone else credit and use “we” in all communications instead of “I.” This is simple. When talking, emailing, or texting, take pains to focus on the team. At first, it will feel forced, but it does wonders for team morale.
Don’t protect senior leadership. If you are reading this book and you have influence to make changes in the senior ranks, then take that responsibility very seriously and don’t hide the flaws of senior leadership. If someone needs to be removed, then do so. If you retain a senior leader who is flawed, it tells the rest of the team that those flaws meet your standards. Twice in my career I was guilty of this, and I still regret both instances.
Servant Leadership is truly a concept that, if embraced, can become a movement in your company. It can be a snowball that becomes something huge where the office and everyone in it becomes focused on the work and never on the ego. Truly, servant leadership is the engine of any Great Client Partner.
DO THE LITTLE THINGS, RELIABLY. Another part of being a servant leader is being accountable to others. And here, “others” doesn’t just mean being accountable to the client or your boss, but everyone you come into contact with.* Everyone needs to believe you will do what you say and say what you do.
Do the little things, consistently. Arthur Weinbach, the former CEO of ADP Payroll, told me, “Get in there and be the first guy to plug in the coffee pot.” While sitting on a patio outside his home, Arthur related to me the story of how, when he was a young accountant, he would come in early every single day and plug in the coffee pot. It was not a huge thing, but it was a gesture. It showed he was in bright and early and that he was the indispensable person who set the day in motion.
Arthur did this every day. It became a habit. Little things turn into big things. Little good habits turn into big habits and bigger momentum.
I see this play out all the time in account management, but sometimes it’s a silent killer. There was someone who used to work for me, who we will call Jim. Jim serviced one of our most important and largest accounts at our agency. Jim was a fantastic client leader in most regards, but he very often was
late on the delivery of his weekly report to the client. Each week, it seemed, there was a different reason and excuse. Compared to all the great things Jim was doing in terms of strategy and revenue delivery, this seemed like a very small thing to Jim. However, what was happening was that tardiness eroded the client’s overall trust in him. Jim just did not believe that the little things mattered. He did not understand that he was eroding his own reliability. Ultimately, Jim was moved off the account, which also hurt his standing internally within the agency. Jim came to understand that not doing the little things can erode the faith people have in you even if you are great at the bigger things.
Do-To-Say Ratio
Adam Bryant, author of The Corner Office, offered one of my favorite statements during the course of a CEO interview. He noted that he looks at leaders by evaluating their “do-to-say ratio.” As a leader, the most important thing for you to do in terms of increasing your reliability is to maintain a high do-to-say ratio. It is a signpost of a great servant leadership culture when people honor their promises to each other, not out of fear but because the culture demands it. This is not because you don’t want to let down the bosses but rather because you don’t want to let down each other. Finally, the leaders will ensure they honor their promises because they don’t want to let down those they serve.
It’s very easy to make promises like, “I am on it,” “I got this,” or the dreaded, “No problem. You will have it tomorrow.” The issue is that even though you might forget your promise, thinking perhaps that it was a small task and it didn’t mean anything, others remember and lose faith in you.
Make promises, sign up for deadlines, be clear on deliverables—and then actually hit those deadlines. If you need to be late, telegraph that early.
Three Habit Changes
Do-to-say ratio—keep a record of your promises. If complex, do it via shortcuts such as loading your calendar with meetings that are essentially critical reminders, or even your iPhone memo app. But keep a promise log, and then keep your promises.
Plug in the coffee machine—and by that, I mean, find your own small contribution and make it matter. Bring coffee to meetings you host. Print clean agendas on crisp paper each time.
Make a list of your most common behaviors as a leader—just the first habits that pop into your head. Do these exemplify servant leadership? Why or why not?
Your FROM → TO personal goal:
FROM being a leader who thinks their organization works for them, TO being a leader who wakes up every day trying to serve those around you and make them better.
* * *
*For more on this subject, I recommend one of my favorite account books, entitled The Trusted Advisor, written by David Maister (along with Charles H. Green and Robert M. Galford). Reliability is a key concept.
Lesson 12
12. Give Factual Feedback to Experts
“Don’t tell creatives that it’s easy to just turn a 6 into a 9.”
—Diahann Young, Director of Digital Platforms and Innovation at PulteGroup
Great Client Partners have to give feedback to great subject matter experts. They could be technical experts, creative experts, analytics experts, or really, subject matter experts of any sort—but whatever their role, they’ll have more expertise in their domain than the client leader or the client. Being able to convey feedback well, whether it’s your own perspective or that of the client, whether it’s a glowing review or constructive criticism, will make or break you, and by extension, your team.
So the first thing to do is get comfortable with the fact that your value is in the synthesis, the filtering, and the nuance of how you deliver the feedback. Convey feedback poorly, and you lose the team. Do it right, and you are on track to be CEO—or at least, certainly, a Great Client Partner.
As I learned from Vipul Kapadia, the founder of ThinqShift, a good friend, and a change management guru, there are three types of power, each of which colors feedback delivery. They are content, positional, and personal power.
Content—This type of power and influence is derived from your expertise and what you know. For a client leader, this is not media, analytics, or engineering. This is the knowledge you have about the client, their business, and their politics. Leaders must recognize that content power is knowledge, not just a skill.
Positional—This is the type of power you have over those who report to you. It’s a power type with a lot of impact, but it can easily be abused. It’s the least powerful of the superpowers because in most situations, 80 percent of the team does not report to you.
Personal—This power is derived from your relationships. Who wants to go the extra mile for you? It’s Friday, and you need your team to work the weekend to get the result that is required to win. If you have true personal power here, the team rallies and is excited to get to work. If you don’t have it, you hear excuses about their uncle’s birthday or the bris they must attend.
It’s critical to give feedback to SMEs using your personal power first, plus a bit of your content power (but only as it relates to your knowledge of the client and their business). Client leaders often complain that “it’s impossible to give feedback to the VP of analytics because he does not report to me.” But your ability to influence people with indirect power will likely define how successful you are at your job, so think about how to use these types of power to relate effectively to people who do not report to you—people like that VP of analytics.
At our agency, looking at ten years of data, I can tell you that individuals who are the most indispensable, the most highly compensated, and the most influential are those who are the best at having difficult conversations.
If you can follow these five simple golden rules of giving feedback to experts on your team, you will be an account person for the ages.
Five Golden Expert Feedback Rules
Never believe or think—always make it about facts.
Context: As a client leader, your influence, power, leverage, and usefulness come from your knowledge and your access to the client. You should write this down, say it in your daily affirmation, and commit it to memory. It’s the most profound and humbling thing I can explain in this book. If information is power (the good kind, not the Star Wars III type where Anakin goes all crazy), then client leaders derive their power from the information they get most directly from the clients. How you wield that power defines your ability to be great. To be clear, the only way to put that power to use is to make the work, and the team, better—not to lord over folks that you know something they don’t know.
In other words, it is more powerful to relay facts than conjecture.
When I was coming up through the ranks, I worked for a client leader who was very talented, but she often started delivering bad news by saying, “Folks, we need to work late tonight to redo the deck, because I just don’t think we have enough of an analytical bent to it…it just feels like we need more math and quant in there.” This always killed me inside. Had she started off by saying, “I just got some direct feedback from the client who expressed that they expect to see a ton of analysis behind each recommendation at tomorrow’s meeting,” then my desire to pitch in would have gone up tenfold. This subtle difference in wielding fact versus feeling can put power into each sentence you utter as a client leader.
Consider: The quickest way to annoy a SME is to start a sentence by saying “I think” or “I believe.” No team member wants to hear your opinion as though you’re the pope. While it is actually very good for you to have thoughts that lead (i.e., original ideas that move a client, industry, or team forward), beginning a sentence with “I believe” suggests your thoughts come from your gut, not your brain, and certainly not from your discussion with a client. Belief or feeling also makes it hard to distinguish your opinion from the factual information that is being relayed about what the client directly said.
Tip: Try c
ommunicating with specifics instead, such as:
“Jason, your work was great. The issue is the client has realized the margin gained on children’s dress clothes are superior to that of designer women’s clothing. Your work was thoughtful, but they are going in a new direction. I hate those facts as much as you do, but that is our new arena of battle.”
“Tameka, our client has asked that we put to the side the more youthful concept and focus 100 percent of the team’s energy on the designer looks with two new versions within ten business days.”
“The work you just produced is awesome, but based on the client’s new focus, we should consider a slight repositioning to align with that. Here are the two core elements to use as a filter based on the client’s recent briefing of their new direction.”
As you can see, in both role-plays, separating out fact delivery from opinion delivery is key. In addition, showing that you also feel the frustration will mean you get better at demonstrating empathy, which is a core trait of any Great Client Partner.
It’s always about the brand.
Context: The client leader should know more about the brand than anyone else. That is the core of your influence and expertise. The client leader should understand the history of the brand, the rules, the laws, IP issues, competitive issues, color choices, sacred cows, internal politics, and more. Use this knowledge for good; it is your North Star.
