Build relationships through
feedback
Relationships are built on solid communication and trust. To
make sure clients are happy with the work you are doing, get
their input by genuinely communicating that you want them to
be upfront and honest. But as simple as it sounds, it’s not easy.
Hays says you have to convince your customers that you are
sincere about getting honest feedback before you’ll get a true
picture of how well you are doing.
“You have to compel them to a place of candor with you — in
particular, when they’re talking to you about what you do or
what your firm does or what people who work for you do,”
Hays says.
“Explain your own commitment to responding to [feedback],
and credibly explain to them your own belief that their unvarnished candor is truly a great business value to you in the long
run. Once they see that and understand that you’re sincere,
that you’re unemotional and objective about the input, then
they, as people, are much more likely to be candid and objective in the discussion.”
Hays suggests not sending the person from your company
who is most involved with the client.
“Let’s say I am the person who does principle work for your company,” he says. “If you and I are friends, and I go up and ask you to
give me a candid review of what we’re doing and suggestions and
how you perceive us and people who work for me, even if you were candid — and you may not be — if it’s not flattering, it’s
something I don’t want to hear, I may delude myself about what
I’m hearing, and that information is not high quality and doesn’t do
us any good. People often hear what they want and then report it
even more favorably than they heard it.”
It’s also important to talk to several people at the company.
“You’re more likely to get the honest feedback,” he says. “…
What one person at the client may feel or know or see is quite
different than another one, but they’re both right because they
both represent a much larger enterprise, so you have to get
reports from all corners of that enterprise.”
Once you get feedback, you then have to determine what to
do with it.
“The world we live in is filled with opinions and advice and
often stated with great conviction in a way that would suggest
they’re never wrong, but they are,” Hays says. “There’s just a
lot of noise obviously in any business, and you have to be rigorous about your focus so that you block out a lot of that
noise.”
Go through the information, and don’t discard anything without careful consideration.
“You can often get diametrically opposed opinions on the
very same issue from seemingly knowledgeable people, so you
have to do a great deal of sifting,” Hays says. “Part of that is to
take your time with it. You cannot make snap judgments.”
The key to sifting effectively is to push back on those conclusions, and Hays’ trial law background helps him do just that.
“In the courtroom, you always question all opinions because
everyone has one,” he says. “As I used to tell juries, opinions are
useless. The only things juries should listen to is reasons for opinions — what are the (bases) for those opinions? Then the people
on the jury make a determination based on the validity of the conclusion.
“That’s not dissimilar to what you have to do here, to a degree.
You have to probe constantly. Push to another level of analysis —
why do you believe that? What’s your basis? You keep pushing
and pushing. Often people are sincere in what they’re attempting
to convey, but they’re just imprecise of their expression of it. In
that kind of a dialogue, you often get to a better place than where
you began.”
And once you begin to get to the reasons behind opinions,
look for recurrences.
“Almost nothing will you get uniform agreement on, but you
can find patterns,” Hays says. “If there are clusters of similar
responses and similar input, be it favorable or unfavorable,
you better pay attention to it.”
Those patterns tell you what things you need to address and
what things to keep doing. Without that feedback, you would
have no idea if what you’re doing is effective, and without that
knowledge, you can’t effectively improve and grow.
“We don’t produce widgets,” Hays says. “We are only the people, so that really involves two buckets of people — one are
the people internally here, who we hire and work together for
the clients, and the other are the people at the clients. You constantly have to be connected and listen to input from both
groups, and it changes, and it will continue to change.”
