Professional Conduct & Reputation Ruin
Professional Conduct
I want to talk about perception and reputation ruin.
The actions, I want to get you to start thinking about the actions that you take and what that’s going to cost you down the road.
So here is a real-life example and one that I’ve actually suffered recently.
For you guys who follow my stuff, you know I do a lot of inbound stuff on the HubSpot marketing side.
I also do a lot of private coaching work as well.
Over the recent months, we’ve sort of taken a step back off a couple of private coaching clients.
Yeah, they’re good people, really doing well in business but sometimes they stop listening.
Sometimes that input that you put in doesn’t necessarily strike the same chord that it did originally.
That’s absolutely fine, as a coach or as a non-exec I see myself very much like a football manager.
I’ve got a limited period of time to work with an organisation, and the management team, too.
I get them to a stage, and then the newness wears off, it’s not as exciting as it once was
Professionalism
Board meetings become bored, or nonexistent in some cases.
Ultimately what I then find to do is if any of my clients stop listening and we’ve done a 12 month tenure that’s a decision to make whether we continue.
I had one of those recently and from a communication point of view I always try and stay in touch.
That’s not a sales pitch or anything like that, but,
- “Hey, how is everything going?”
- “You can still contact me, we’ll still have a chat”
- “Let me know how you’re doing”
Especially when you’ve got things to deal with.
I always believe it’s courteous and professional to do that.
I see so many times where people just say, “Oh, that engagement or relationship’s finished, so I’m just going to shut it down”.
The lost opportunity that is, failing to respond to messages, and not having the courtesy to just send a quick reply.
Think About The Impact On Your Reputation
In truth I don’t care how busy you are, I genuinely don’t.
I’m telling you what, you end up saying you’re doing 60, 70 hours a week.
You say you’ve got family pressures to balance, and again that’s super important.
I’m telling you what now, there is no way that you cannot find 10 minutes a week, whether it’s the beginning of the week, to respond to everything you didn’t get to at the end of last week.
At the end of this week where you can say “Hey, look I know I’ve not been in touch, but I’m a little bit busy, a bit of pressure to meet some deadlines”.
What does it take to send a quick email, a quick text message, Facebook message, for crying out loud pick up the phone and do it the old-fashioned way, just say, “hey I’m really sorry I’ve not been there”.
Ultimately think about the impact of not doing that, shutting that down.
Whether that’s a customer-supplier relationship, work-colleague relationship, an ex-employee relationship, it doesn’t really matter.
Think about the impact.
For me, when I try and help people, even when they’re not clients, I still want them to do well, I still want to do that.
When people just put their hand up and blatantly ignore you, I always think about the next time that referral comes through.
- Do you send it their way?
- Are they appreciative of it?
That costs a lost opportunity.
I did a bit of a vlog, it might be a year or two years ago now, about a lost opportunity case where we were doing a barn conversion and the conversion bill was around 350k.
I looked on Facebook at all my contacts that were in the building industry.
One guy was effing and blinding on his company’s Facebook page.
I’m not going to contact that guy straight-away.
I’m not saying that that guy would have got the job but what I am saying is that he had certainly lost the opportunity of a £350,000 property conversion because of the way he conducted himself.
So think about how he conducted himself, think about the impact that’s actually having, and finally, go put your house in order.
Be a professional, you never know when you need to call on that person in their hour of need.
