When people ask: “What do you think?” are your recommendations fluffy and lightweight? Or is your response substantial: laser-focused on what people really need-to-know (and do)?
Do you consider this question a form of polite business chit-chat, which you deflect in order to play it safe? Or are you compelled to truthfully answer the question asked: what do you really think (will happen, is needed)?
When you stick with lightweight, comfortable recommendations, these ultimately have transient value. Also, your offer mostly benefits you (and your KPIs), rather than colleagues and clients. Consider, too, that lightweight recommendations are typically best-received by lightweight colleagues and clients.
Thus, this arrangement generates a mutually-beneficial symbiosis that keeps everyone firmly rooted in yesterday’s status quo.
However, when recommendations leverage what people really need-to-know, you move beyond yesterday’s potentially transactional solutions.
Plus, becoming the go-to resource and sounding board on what people need to know is transformational: for everyone. First, you become far more accountable and responsible to colleagues and clients. Next, as your role transitions into that of go-to resource, you perform different thinking and the type of new work fine-tuned to support your heavyweight recommendations. Also, these substantial recommendations inherently involve more risk. Thus, while what you have to say may not be what clients are ready to hear (or do), you develop the courage and purpose to deliver these recommendations. Ultimately, your recommendations come to fruition: perhaps not today but most certainly tomorrow and moving forward.
What you recommend becomes exactly what clients and colleagues end up doing to get to where they need to go: today, tomorrow, and moving forward.
If your professional goal is for people to ask: “What do you think?” instead of “Hey, can you do this for me?” then it is time to transform. Because remaining mired in existing status quo environments just plain frustrates you, doesn’t it?
Your purposeful choice carries with it the responsibility to discover the clients and colleagues who also seek to become more accountable and responsible to and for each other. If you do not currently serve these types of people, your purpose and values continue to be compromised.
As always on this blog, the choice is yours. To take your next steps with me as your sound-board, click on this link.
Well, what do you think?
I catalyze cross-functional, collaborative, profitable, and sustainable solutions across value silos. | Professional Innovation | Cross Functional Leadership | Complex Problem Solving | Speaker, Consultant, Coach |
- Need to stop spinning your wheels professionally? Searching for a speaker focused on doing the smallest things with the biggest impact to get you towards what is new and next? Then engage me to present a One Millimeter Mindset ™ program! Delivered virtually or in-person.
Babette Ten Haken’s One Millimeter Mindset™ programs catalyze people who solve problems differently to collaborate more successfully. Become more professionally visible, cross-functionally relevant, and strategically valuable as you create and implement innovative and robust business outcomes together. She is a business-oriented STEM professional, qualitative Voice of the Customer facilitator, PMI-certified Wicked Problem Solver, Duke Corporate Education licensed Strategic Agility practitioner, and Six Sigma Green Belt (Quality). Babette is a member of SHRM, PMI, the National Speakers Association (NSA). Her playbook of cross-functional collaboration, Do YOU Mean Business? is available in soft cover and digital formats on Amazon.com. Contact Babette here. Image source: Adobe Stock
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