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To those who read “Stop Selling & Do Something Valuable” you know that the book is full of practical stories of professionals being more powerful through using tools. Know what else?  The most powerful tools are invisible… Many people in my circle are tired of my comic book and cartoon obsessions. I did get some great dialogue after “The Dark Knight”… including some email pinging between my wife, my friends and my kids in Australia and China… group effort to indulge my Batman fetish!) there’s another angle to behaving like a superhero with your clients.

No… don’t get yourself a rubber suit or a utility belt. The things I refer to are Invisible… qualities rather than anything you can slip on in a Bat Cave.

1. What are your values and your commitment to serve?  How do you demonstrate them in day-to-day behavior and process?

2. How do you demonstrate your mindset of personal accountability, integrity and care of others.

3. Be present.  Be in more than one place at one time.

4. Trust is in the small stuff.  Sweat the follow through and consistency.

5. Leave while you are still valuable.

Don’t outstay your welcome…exit (gracefully) when you’ve delivered what’s needed. Your focused intention to support your client in all ways, and then exit smoothly will create a feeling of trust that will zoom your relationship from transactional to trusted member of the inner circle.

P.S. If you’re wondering how to accomplish the third one without getting a cloning machine, it’s all in your added communication… your utility belt of tools… okay, yes I said these were invisible tools but sometimes you need back up.  An Agenda will make you present AND engage a client before you get there, and often - if not always - solve problems, clarify important issues and make the client feel cared for, even when you’re not in the room.

You will be moving the ball forward even when you are not there.

Need a little Wabi-sabi in your life?

No, that’s not Tonto calling the Lone Ranger; it’s a way of looking at the world wherein the very lack of perfection in something is what makes it beautiful and appealing.

Appreciated imperfection

Wabi-sabi (侘寂, Wabi-sabi^?) represents a Japanese world view or aesthetic centered on the acceptance of transience. The phrase comes from the two words wabi and sabi. The aesthetic is sometimes described as one of beauty that is “imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete”.  Characteristics of the wabi-sabi aesthetic include asymmetry, asperity, simplicity, modesty, intimacy, and suggest a natural process.  From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi_sabi

Go where no man has gone before

For me, crisp clean, perfect lines are totally appropriate in certain things … a chip for a pc, the manual transmission on my car.   I like “approaching perfection” when it comes to building an airplane.  But there are other things in my world that benefit from their imperfections.

Go where humans have gone before

For instance, when guests come over to my home, they always exclaim over the floors.  The floors are far from “perfect” - the wide plank pine boards are uneven and knotted in places.  But what the person who walks in the door sees is the beauty and richness of all that imperfectness: the brilliant luster of their patina and the “wear” patterns that celebrates everyone who has walked over them since they were first used in a homestead in 1856.

I’ve posted a photo of the floor in sunlight coming through the screen door.  I’ve also posted a photo of the front door, beautifully and imperfectly carved by an artisan long ago.  You can see out the door to the hand hewn timbers.

Appreciating others before us

Wabi Sabi is a powerful philosophy to carry into professional client conduct.

We can too often get hung up in a desire for perfection.  We try to appear as “clean lines” for our clients and end up coming off cold and distant.  If your practice is real and human your clients can be real and human too.  If we have a certain level of care and professionalism, it’s okay for the client to be able to see some of the wear, the rough edges. 

They’ll appreciate the involvement and be more committed.  You will have a more relevant solution.

Don’t forget others have gone before us.  Don’t forget that many client opportunities have been tackled before.  To great success, to modest success, to no success.  Learn what has gone before and build solutions that are targeted to address previous learning.

Fuzzy solutions create engagement and commitment.

Great leaders can see beyond the event, beyond the transaction they are involved in.  They can build and help others see that the event is part of a process.  They can see how to marshall and focus resources and collect the goodwill of others into that process and focus to align and execute.  They also - conciously or unconciously - use something called process knowledge to stay in tune with their team.

Process knowledge - seeing into the past and creating the future

When we talk about “process knowledge”, business people can interpret we are talking about that latest trend, holy grail…  business process outsourcing - i.e. sending your systems overseas. 

Process Knowledge refers to listening to more than the content of the meeting, but also paying attention to the behavior of the participants. 

Transaction based

We all know what to say in meetings that moves the ball along.  For now.

The problem comes when leaders aren’t paying attention to the subtle cues that all is not as it seems.  If we take at surface value what everyone is saying and then we don’t persist to investigate when there’s miscommunication on the team, we lose valuable knowledge that would have come from watching the “how” of an interaction rather than just the words being said.

For instance, an enthusiastic manager can talk about supporting junior employees become more leadership-oriented and initiative-taking in their work. 

Strategic line of sight

A leader who is observing the room however, might notice an eyeroll or a slight push away from the table by other people in the room, that might indicate that there is some disagreement or degree of discomfort with that statement.  Perhaps the leader would follow up with questions on specifics, or take the time to observe this management in action, and discover that while the sentiments are being mouthed, the follow-through is poor and junior employees are getting frustrated. 

Where are people coming from?

What is their self interest? What drives them?

What has been their experience with the business - or with others in the room?

Do they expect a lot or do they expect ” more of the same”?.

Process knowledge is a good way to observe if what one person is saying is causing an unspoken reaction in others.  If the client point person is talking deadlines and the technology delivery person is staring at the floor, it might be good to see if the deadlines meet real objectives.

The leader is looking for the subtle cues of body language, tone and attention that indicate the play of emotions and politics beneath the surface.  These fluctuations in communciation are normal - they occur in all workforces.  The trick is to dig benath the surface and get to the truth, to keep the flow running smoothly.  The other advantage of process knowledge is that the leader models the value of truth in communication, over accepting the words at face value. 

Balancing the art of the do-able with the ideal

Leaders are expected to have “enough” integrity and transparency.  No one (very few anyways) expect Ghandi in a corporate boardroom.  Just open your sight to what is not always visible.

It takes courage to see the truth in front of you…and further courage to act on it.  But with one eye firmly in the present moment observing the interactions at more than face value and a willingness to address the issues others find uncomfortable, pays off in productivity and healthy organization dymanics.