The Great Client Partner: How Soft Skills Are the True Currency in Client Relationships

Self-awareness requires the deft ability to pause and ask questions as to how your actions fit into the bigger picture and how they are being perceived.

Vision/Values—make sure you are either creating sensible vision and values if you are on the top leadership team or that you are sharing it out if you’re a supervisor. Don’t make excuses for why your staff doesn’t understand their roles.

As an aspiring Great Client Partner, one of your main jobs is to advocate.

Go find fifty random emails you have written to clients recently. Print them out and highlight every sentence where you know you sound like a bag of hot air. Circle buzzwords as well as every sentence where you say nothing but take thirty words to do so. Now, go ahead and see how much yellow you have. Is that how you want to sound?

Carefully consider what you know about your client and their specific personalities when evaluating each task in a project.

Make a game of it to keep jargon in-check. When someone on your team talks about “gaining traction,” for example, call them out politely. Words that should be pointed out might include (but aren’t limited to): circle back, marinate, stakeholders, strategic, missed the mark. The point here is that if you, as a leader, do not correct useless language

Ask better questions when interviewing. Use the above list or something that creates a bit of real-life pressure. And know ahead of time what you want to hear from every question you ask.

Next time you feel conflict between your team or with your client, use one of these drawings. Get up and draw!

How did you make money before the age of twenty-one?