Professional urgency impacts how we behave with our clients. Often, our behavior sabotages our efforts to move sales, engineering, service, IT and Quality initiatives forward.
Why? Because our professional sense of urgency conflicts with our clients’ priorities.
Consider the factors impacting professional urgency. Go on. Make a list.
Often, professional urgency has a lot to do with “making our numbers” in some manner. Depending on our professional discipline, our numbers look different. However, these numbers have everything to do with fulfilling management and leadership KPIs and honoring professional obligations to our employer.
More often, our sense of urgency is heightened to a sense of panic when, in fact, we fall behind in meeting or exceeding our employer’s quarterly expectations. Have we closed enough sales deals with ideal customers, reduced our non-billable hours dealing with client issues and eliminated waste in manufacturing processes?
When our professional urgency morphs into widespread panic mode, we struggle NOT to communicate our discomfort to customers.
After all, we work for our employer and we work on behalf of our customers, not vice versa. However, when our professional mindset, habits and practices are threatened, our confidence is eroded. As a result, we begin to get desperate. Then, we start to let that desperation show its ugly face to our clients, the very last people we need to bother with our own issues.
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Consequently, we rush the sale, cut corners on design, pay less attention to details and let things fall through the cracks. We are “off our game” and realize we not only are letting clients down. We also disappoint ourselves. Because we know what we are doing: to ourselves and to clients.
Why? Because eventually, our clients tell us that we are acting differently towards them. Our priorities conflict with theirs. And, they do not appreciate it. So, we generate a negative customer experience. Ouch!
Professional innovation starts by challenging the variables responsible for our sense of professional urgency.
Think about it. If we are not paying attention to ourselves, our clients always are. When clients go dark, or become non-communicative, they may be telling us that we need to calm down and re-assess our own actions, not theirs.
This professional development strategy is more than just making a list, checking it twice, and deciding that we have everything under control: on paper, that is. Often, one or more KPI’s consistently create issues impacting our professional performance, productivity and profitability. How often are we ignoring these or dismissing these variables as insignificant or inconsequential?
What variables heighten your own sense of professional urgency? Is it time to develop a roadmap to move forward? Why continue to let KPIs continue to sabotage client relationships? Click here and let me know how you answer.
Take action! Start moving one millimeter forward beyond your professional comfort level, today.
- Engage me to speak or conduct an interactive workshop at your next corporate or association event.
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Babette Ten Haken, Founder & President of One Millimeter Mindset™, is an innovative speaker, strategist, and storyteller. Babette’s One Millimeter Mindset™ Workshops and Speaking programs leverage collaboration to catalyze professional innovation, workforce engagement and customer retention. Babette’s playbook of collaboration tools, Do YOU Mean Business?, is available on Amazon. She is a member of SME, ASQ, SHRM and the National Speakers Association.
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