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Communicating with Your Support Team
Published on 27 May 2007 at 6:33 pm.
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Filed under Business Development,Feature Articles,Savvy Marketing Tips.
Several weeks ago on my radio show, I invited Isabel Parlett to come on as my guest.
Isabel’s business is helping people articulate their Unique Selling Proposition out in the marketplace. I took a course with her a few years ago and the value was well worth the investment!
Recently she send me the article below. I wanted to share it with all of you. Enjoy!
Communicating With Your Support Team
On one of my recent Words for Your Business groups, we talked about getting support to both create our programs, products, and services, and to get our message out in the world. If you are on the path of sharing a big message with the world, you realize sooner or later that you just can’t do it all on your own. You need people who can take care of your books, your web site, your graphic design, or your paperwork. Whether they are employees or outsourced collaborators, these people become part of the team that’s brings your work to the world.
And yet, if you’ve ever been to a gathering of business people, you know that relationships with these support folk can be fraught with challenge, confusion, and yes, miscommunication. The wrong support can drain your energy, stress you out, and cost you many dollars better spent elsewhere.
So today, I want to talk a little about how to think through the communication that allows you to have the most positive, energizing and truly supportive relationships with the people who support you.
1. Get clarity inside first.
Just as in the rest of your business communication, the first step is to be extremely clear inside about what you want. I have learned the hard way that when I am ready for support, I don’t want to talk to anyone until I’ve made my list.
On your list, you’ll want to include the obvious: specific tasks you want handled and the experience or knowledge you want this person to have. But you also want to include the more squishy indefinable part of what you want. How do you want this person to relate to you? What do you want your working relationship to be like? Your insights might include wanting a bookkeeper who will be patient if you aren’t organized with your papers, or a graphic designer who doesn’t take it personally if you want something different from what they produce.
It’s bringing these less obvious hopes and expectations to consciousness through writing that sets you up for the best possible working relationships. If you know your expectations and commit to them through writing, you can look and listen with different ears to know when you’ve found the right person.
2. Look for a partner not a parent.
The biggest set up for disappointment is when we hire someone in hopes that they will relieve us of all worry, thought, or effort in some aspect of our businesses. No matter how brilliant the person you hire is, as the business owner, you need to stay awake and engaged. You need to hold onto your strength and capability in that arena, even when you are dying to abdicate and hand off the burden to someone else.
Trust is a beautiful thing, but not if as a result, you turn a blind eye to what is being produced. It’s easy to fall into a spell of hoping and wishing that the money you’re spending is a solid investment and much harder to stay awake and ask for evidence that you are truly being served. It’s tempting to say to yourself “oh, I don’t know much about ____ (web sites, marketing, bookkeeping)” and forget that your common sense can serve you well.
Several years ago, I contracted with a marketing team to produce a strategic plan, a logo, and positioning phrases to create more urgency for my services. Month after month, there was no strategic plan, the logos were wildly off the mark, and the only new language was new titles for my courses. It took me nearly a year and thousands of dollars to snap out of my fantasy of what this investment would produce and to pull the plug on our relationship. Ouch!
3. Speak up sooner rather than later.
On of the dynamics that shows up in fascinating ways in our interpersonal business communication is our sense of worth and authority. When we feel shaky inside (and who doesn’t some of the time when you are a pioneer?), we may fall into being the nice guy, and just smile pleasantly no matter what kind of work or results our support team produces. Or we may wait until we are at our limit, then stomp and squeal or worse, if what we get doesn’t match our expectations.
Just as we need tremendous confidence to take our message out into the world, we need confidence that our words can get us the support we need. If we believe that we deserve to be supported, it’s easier to speak up as soon as we get that niggling feeling that something is off track. From that place of worth, it’s easier to shift into the mindset of “nobody gets to be wrong,” to speak without judgment, and to ask for what we need without an edge.
When it’s time for those necessary but less than comfortable conversations, we need to love and accept ourselves even if we aren’t sure we’re right, and no matter how perfectly or imperfectly our words come out.
© 2007. Isabel Parlett. Isabel Parlett is a communication expert who helps innovative professionals to create simple, emotional language to express the ideas they are most passionate about. Get a free e-mail mini-course “The Secret Language of the New Economy” at http://www.parlancetraining.com.
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