Right this minute I am standing at the front of a classroom, and I am watching my students write their final exam. This is my second last time that I will do this in this context, I have another exam to monitor tonight. My teaching days have to be behind me for the forseeable future as my workload at the agency is prohibitively large and with our growth track goals being surpassed with regularity, I have to be available to manage for all of our working hours. It is what it is. But that isn't why I am blogging from the front of the room, I decided to dish some goodies on preparation and what a difference it makes.
Perhaps the most notable difference in those who are prepared and those who are not is attitude. I see a few different brands of it on exam day and here is my observation:
Calm, cool and collected: This person is prepared. They took advantage of the study guide, came to class and are arriving to their exam in a good head space, ready to tackle the long form answers I have put out for them.
Nervy, anxious and unsettled: This person tried to prepare, they care about their grade and they are only a little confident in their ability to perform. Often these students crush their exams, so the nerves are an indication of caring a whole lot about the result. I dig that, and I get that. I was this person in University.
Don't care: This is usually the person that is acting standoffish, sometimes people call that acting "cool", and they are probably really unprepared and don't want to let on that this makes them uncomfortable.
So outside of dissecting the general demeanors of my students, why am I bothering to tell you about this? Because I see this in business all of the time. So I suppose the point here is to hammer home the importance of preparedness and how your demeanor reads at the various stages of.
I have this client that arrives insanely prepared to everything. I like to think he says that he has this marketing that arrives just as prepared, because he keeps me on my toes and that is good for my performance and their results. What I love about this client is that whatever is brought up, he has read up on it. It could have happened several months prior, even a year prior, and he is briefed and ready to discuss next steps.
The challenge of being this prepared is that you are so often disappointed by the other people you're meeting with. He calls our meeting bridge the "Bored Room" because he shows up ready to put plans into action and spends the call rebriefing the stakeholders. His commitment to growth isn't matched by his partners, so they readdress the same information with regularity and don't do much to move forward. Exhausting, challenging, stressful.
What is most interesting about this client is his reading of the room. When we debrief calls he points out that one person was speaking super quickly about nothing, they were unprepared, he wants to finish this project with them and never call them back. He notices people who are bringing up new ideas, concepts related to discussions past. He is perceptive, he keeps notes, he uses his CRM as more than a space to keep record of his clients, but also the track records of his subcontracted services.
So yeah, of course we all want to be prepared. You're thinking "no shit Allie, but who has the time." Honestly, you do. Getting into the jive of intelligent preparation is easy, it is only a matter of keeping notes and referring back to them. I have done a few things in the last couple of weeks that have really helped me next level of preparation game.
1. Digital notebook: It is a dream. I bought the Pencil by 57 and it is such a great tool to keep me on track. I am using this notes app on my iPad mini called Goodnotes and it lets you convert your handwriting into text. So this is my workflow: Handwrite my notes, convert them, airdrop to iMac, input into CRM. With this one small change I have noticed a huge difference in how many meetings are getting logged in the CRM, and as I refer back to items past, it is so incredibly easy to intelligently reference conversations down to the date and time. This is impressive in the meeting space.
2. Pre-meetings: We have taken the 15 minutes before every meeting in our office as our pre-meeting time. We are setting our gameplan, deciding who will speak about what and organizing ourselves so that our flow is good and our clients can feel how on the ball we are for them and their account with us.
3. Check-ins: We have always sat down as a team every Thursday morning, this is when we review accounts and get temperature on how things are going. We review and assign tasks, look for efficiencies and do creative brainstorming. It is obvious that we are a creative agency so we collaborate all of the time, but there is nothing like our meetings to get real conversations happening with all of the brains at one table. Beyond this meeting we have starting checking in. This is helpful because sometimes one person is stuck and then they start to drown under the pile of work, a check-in prevents it from getting too far. We try for daily, we don't review each account, we simply make a point of formally asking "how are you doing, are you managing okay?"
The truth of this ending is that the exam is written and my students have left and I am now in a hallogen lit room, alone, writing love notes about preparedness to you. These changes have helped our team immensely, and I hope you can find a tip or two in there to help you. I also hope that you take a moment to get real with yourself about how your preparation or lack there of is changing your relationship with your clients, your relationship with your team and your self satisfaction as it relates to your professional fulfillment. Preparedness matters. A lot.