A Reply to JD Hull's Post
Dan Hull has a good question about whether you need to like your clients or not to do a good job? His answer is yes, you need to like them (at least for his firm). Okay. I'm not so confident, but I do respect his opinion. Moving on, here's what caught my eye:
"....When we perform well, the client appreciates us and signals that appreciation. So then we like the client even more, and want to do an even better job or keep doing the good job we are doing so we can derive more real pleasure from the engagement, and obtain more work....We have never, ever had good long-term relationships with any organization client (1) which did not genuinely appreciate what we were doing for it or (2) which had disturbing corporate personalities (i.e., mean-spirited Rambo cultures, groups with employees given to blame-storming, or companies with disorganized, internally-uncommunicative or just plain lazy staffs.)"
I'm not taking issue with him on this statement. In the context of client service, however, we should at least ask the following questions:
Could it be the reason they don't genuinely appreciate us is we haven't earned it?
With the mean-spirited employees is it a matter of nature or nurture? (In other words, did we create the monster?)
I've been married long enough to know that if my wife is mad at me there's typically a reason for it. And "she's just plain psycho" isn't the right answer.
Sometimes we really do need to fire a client. Sometimes they are just plain nasty. But before we place the blame there, we should first honestly ask ourselves if we caused the problem.
I feel that you need to like anyone for whom you desire to do a good job or an excellent job. It makes the task or act of doing a good job so much easier, not to mention more enjoyable. Now this does not mean that you should only do a good/great job for those clients you like, as a service provider you should be doing a great job for every client. It may be your fault that you don't like them because you agitated them (like the bee in the grass that you were cutting; that bee didn't like you and got mad, in turn, you didn't like the bee.) Liking a client isn't part of the criteria for having a company or person as a client, at least not in the legal world. To me it's just like a marriage, if you don't like your spouse you won't be a good spouse in return.
Conversely, I find that when a service provider likes me, the client, they do a much better job for me than if they don't. I more than likely caused them not to like me though, they probably didn't give me good client service at some point and I got upset with them. This is really the dog chasing its tail.
I could go on about this, bottom line, sometimes you are the client and sometimes you are the provider which should help everyone to see both sides. Or a more synical way to look at it, sometimes you are the hammer and sometimes you are the nail.