Confidence = space

In business I come across as a confident person. I've been doing what I do for a long time now so when I'm brought in to think about an issue I've got a pretty good idea of what the unspoken issues are likely to be and what solutions might fit.

I do everything I can to ensure that my clients have confidence in me because it lessens my workload. A worried client costs me time on additional phone calls or face-to-face meetings that are quite hard to monetise. I need my contacts to exude confidence in me when they're discussing the project at all those internal meetings that I neither get, nor want, to be invited to. When that goes missing I get the dreaded phone call asking for an early look at a draft and my timeline is shot, which can be disastrous for the overall project.

Generally I am paid to design and deliver training programmes. A large part of what 'design' entails is making intelligent decisions in the right order. My favourite example of this is deciding on the PowerPoint template design before anyone knows how much text needs to be displayed on the screen.  It creates unnecessary conflict and heartache every time. The motivation behind this rookie error is usually as simple as someone senior in the organisation asking to 'see something' as assurance that the project is on track and the slide template looks like an easy and uncontroversial thing to show the bosses.  A better response to the political pressure is to have a meeting and run through the development timeline, explaining what decisions will be made in what sequence and why

I see my clients' confidence in me as a tangible asset that allows me to run projects at the pace that best serves that project. As with any asset it needs to be protected: good communications, dressing well and face-to-face meetings early in the process.