World’s worst question: “Are you sure?”

This is my least favorite expression in all of consulting. “Are you sure?” Built into the question is a lack of trust, glibness, superficial concern with accuracy over meaning, and honestly, a bit of disdain.

It’s a superficial question. It’s the kind of question that is asked out of (bad) habit and does nothing to really add value other than adding stress. It is the medieval idea that slaves work better when you crack the whip a few times. It’s silly and if you are doing the kind of work where that kind of motivation works: 1) the work you have is boring 2) your people are probably more of a liability than an asset 3) it’s not management consulting.

It drops the conversation to the lowest level.  It’s the kind of question you ask unprofessional people. People who are sloppy and have disappointed you before. Those who don’t care about the quality of their work, who don’t proof-read, take feedback, socialize their finding with client, or take initiative. It’s the find of question you ask a forgetful dog, or a stupid robot:

• Am I sure of what?
• How sure?  51% or 80% or 99%?
• Can you ever be 100% sure?

Yes, we need motivation. Don’t get me wrong we are all motivated by different things and it is true that many consultants are motivated by the “fear of failure”. Me too. That is what drives me to work until 2am, or revise a document endlessly. Professional services is more of an identity than a simple job. We are judged on the quality of our ideas and actions. It’s got your name on it.  You should care. If you don’t know what a great consultant should look like, look here.

No, there are better ways.

• Ask if specific items were included or tasks done
• Review the deliverable earlier; multiple revisions
• Build trust on the team, so everyone understands the mission
• Ask the author, “Do you like the work you did?”; put the onus on them
• Ask the author, “Walk me through the main points of the ppt (or excel model)”
• Ask the author, “What are the parts the client will have most questions about?”
• Ask the author, “If you had another 2 days to work on it, what would you do?”
• What parts of this do you need proof-read?

For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” – H. L. Mencken

Related posts:

• Saying YES to clients can get consultants in trouble
• Work with people you like and trust
• Links

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8 Ways to Create More Value for Clients and Become Irreplaceable

As a consultant you want your clients to call upon you. To see you as their trusted resource and advisor. Yet here we are, in a day and age where there is more competition, more options, more distractions all reaching to get a piece of our clients’ attention. What can you do about this? Two […]

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Sadly, 17 email tips

Surprisingly, many people use email poorly. They write long-winded email essays that are ambiguous, and often copy too many people. These sloppy people create more confusion, frustration and rework. In this case, more communication is actually worse. Email tip: Take 15 seconds to think before you send out emails.  What am I trying to say, am I sending it to the correct audience, what are my expectations, can I say it more succinctly, and finally – is this email even needed.

There are a frightening number of books on email (affiliate link). Seems like an inane topic to buy a book. Apply some common sense, think like an executive, and strive for the greater productivity of everyone – not just yourself.  Here are things I do, please feel free to share your tips too:

1. If you’re just forwarding emails, saying “FYI” or “See below”, you’re just a consulting mailman. At a minimum provide context of the email and action needed.
2. Add value on the email and move the conversation along to 1) a decision 2) clarity 3) end of the email trail. The goal of  your email should be to help everyone efficiently get the work done and STOP EMAILING. Any email that just perpetuates more email is a problem.
3. Write directly and clearly. Use bullet points. Write as if to a junior high schooler.
4. I use the phrase “no action required” for everyone who does not need to take action
5. Make the title clear.  All surveyors know this is the most valuable real estate.
6. Don’t send the email. Call or IM the person if the content is long or has nuance.
7. Address the email to specific people. Tom – ABC, Billy – XTC, Joan – No action required.
8. Ask specifically for what is needed.  (i.e., Please review excel and give feedback by 5pm)
9. When possible – delegate tasks to the right person, and also drop people from the distribution list (i.e., Jack – seems like you are the right person for this, can you follow up and then just report out to everyone on the distribution list that it is done?)
10. Do not REPLY ALL, unless desperately needed.  Pretend like it costs you $20 every time you do it.
11. If an email thread is “spinning”; take the time to super-summarize the situation like meeting minutes with background, situation, decisions needed.  This will become a “stake in the ground” that all the people will refer to and prevent more “pinging” of emails back/forth.
12. Develop relationships with the people you work with so you pick up the phone and effectively make decisions without email. As Bain says, become a decision-driven organization here.
13. Use email as documentation of decisions made – good reference for the future
14. Have your friend proof-read your emails for clarity before sending to many people
15. When sending documents (excel, powerpoint etc), explain what’s in the file, and specific things you want reviewed, or done. Do not just send an email with the file. It’s disrespectful.
16. Don’t show off.  If you are using email to show that you are busy or productive, it’s sad. As the Marines say, “Don’t go admin.“
17. Edit mercilessly. Cut out the fat of the email. Be a judge of your own work. Ask yourself the who. what, why questions shown below in red.

QUESTIONS TO ASK BEFORE EMAILING:

WHY

• Why are you sending this email?  What is the purpose?  Providing information, getting specific feedback, asking for a decision, or just CYA (cover your a@#)?  Depending on the purpose, you may draft the words and structure it differently.  In this one HBR study here, email takes up 23% of the average employees workday and the average email has only 32 words – basically useless
• Why use email?  Is this something better handled by IM or by a phone call?  Think like a marketing communications planner who has to allocate their marketing budget to print, radio, TV, and internet channels.  Each method has it’s benefits and costs.  Should this be an email, phone call, or in-person visit?

WHO:

• Who are you sending this to.   Can you leave them off the email?
• Who needs to respond?  Is it okay for the most of the people to just be aware and not respond?  If so, let them know it’s not urgent, or no action is required.

WHEN

• When are you sending the mail?  Are you one of those “over-email” people who respond within 2-3 min, clearly showing that you are not a busy person? Are you sending an email in the middle of the night? Are you sending a reply to an EARLIER email in the thread which takes the conversation off course?

WHAT

• What is the critically important to communicate?  Put it in the title.  Add bullet points.
• What result do you want from the email? Do you want a response? Do you want a decision? Are you asking for anything?  What are next steps?  Is it okay if no one responds?

WHERE

• Where is the next physical meeting? Is this leading to a physical meeting? Are there logistics / meeting details to cover?

HOW

• How distracting is your email habit to your productivity? HBR has numerous articles on the inefficiency of multi-tasking and poor email habits.

What email tips do you have?

Related posts:

• Clear writing – explain it to me as if I were a kid
• Madman, architect, carpenter, judge
• Links

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5 Stages to Measure the Growth of Your Consulting Business

As a kid I despised math. It wasn’t interesting and I never thought I’d really use it. Why? Because at that point in my life the only thing I really could see myself becoming was a professional athlete. You see, there are certain numbers that you should understand if you want to have a successful […]

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Consulting tip: Watch videos on LEAN

Lean. Toyota Production System. These are words and concepts that any business person should readily know and understand – even if you are not an operations consultant. Process improvement initiatives built on these concepts take out billions of dollars of waste every year – from every industry.

A typical LEAN consulting project will easily take out $1-5 million of waste – because honestly – waste is everywhere.  The Economist estimated that 1/3 of the US healthcare systems was waste and fraud here.

Even in this blog, when I talk about TIMWOODS, Poke-Yoke, Kanban, Andon, Muda, Kaizen, those are all words and phrases that have roots in the TPS.  Yes, I could recommend a few of the main books on LEAN here (affiliate link) . . .

• The Toyota Way: 14 Management Principles (2006) by Liker
• The Machine that Changed the World (1990) by James Womack, Daniel Jones and Daniel Roos

. . . but I think it’s even easier to just watch a few videos.  This does not make you a LEAN expert, but you will quickly get the point that it’s about 1) thinking through what the client values 2) getting rid of waste 3) pulling demand 4) reducing defects and 5) continuously improving.

Great 90 second video animating these concepts here.  Clearly, I love cartoons clearly.

 

Another healthcare video showing how Toyota’s lean manufacturing experts reduced the backlog of patients waiting for eye surgery by using Lean Concepts of value stream mapping, 5S, Gemba, CTQ here.

What other videos on LEAN / Six Sigma would you recommend?

Related posts:

• Lean means no waste. No TIMWOOD
• Six Sigma: Use the tools, don’t aim for perfection
• Links

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A Warning To Those Choosing Money Over Love

I’ve had several conversations with business owners in the last few weeks and there’s a dangerous common theme that keeps coming up. Both those who have ‘made it’ and run successful businesses as well as those just getting started are gambling with their most precious resource – their time. It’s about creating a lifestyle that […]

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Leading by example, with data entry?

Yes, this morning I did 4 hours of data entry.  Yes, data entry.  Our project was in a time crunch and we had major issues getting good operational data, so we begrudgingly took some print outs and manually typed them into excel. Yikes.  Yes, we did look at other OCR (optical character recognition) methods like ABBY, Evernote, Adobe etc. but nothing worked.

The early morning coffee and brain-dead work gave me these observations:

1. Small data. Depending on the industry, there is lot of unstructured data written, typed free form, and printed.  Lots of faxes and pdf.  To the consultant, this is painful, silly, and frustrating. However, as the associatesmind mentioned here, professionals (lawyers and consultants alike) attract problems – so, on some level we should be happy there are problems to fix.  A good friend of mine often tells me about big data and the potential it has to correlate disparate data sets to reveal new insights and solve problems. For me, perhaps a bit of a Gen-X Luddite, see an even bigger opportunity to get people to LEAN out all the paper-based and excel-based documentation and go to something more scalable.  Small data.

2. Lead by example. Did I have to do the manual entry? No.  In fact, if the senior partner found out, would be a bit of a laughing stock. Why are you doing $8-10 / hour work when you should be either selling work or billing out at $350+.  It’s a good point, well-taken.  And, I would say that we have to encourage the troops by not giving out work that we, ourselves, would not want to do.  So I see this a little bit like management crunches, of eating my management vegetables.  As Simon Sinek said, “Leaders Eat Last” here, (affiliate link).

3. Have hypotheses. My project manager asked that we enter about 8-9 data fields per transaction, customer name / gender / age / reason for visit etc.  While this does not seem like a lot, we were entering this information for 1,000+ customers. It made me wonder. . .so why are we entering the gender?  Why are we entering the age?  So, I pushed back and asked a question you should always ask at the data collection stage:

What is the hypothesis we are trying to prove?  How will this data prove / disprove that?

Because frankly, gathering data – whether automated or painfully manually entered, is silly without a purpose. It’s like the quote from Alice in Wonderland: ” If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there”

4. The Zen of Data Entry. A colleague pinged me by IM this morning while I was diligently pecking data into the excel file. As we chatted, she mentioned, “Yeah, data entry can actually be relaxing when you get in the zone.”  So true.  It’s perfect for Buddhist consultants, I am sure.

5. Be good. Yes, I was a good-guy senior manager and gave my hours to junior consultants who were doing data entry too.  They need the utilization more than I do.

Related posts:

• Links
• Consulting late night: 20 reasons a consultant might be up at 2am
• Work with people you like and trust

 

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