As a nice person, you probably don’t want to annoy your client or boss. So, when you ask them to do things and they just don’t do it, you’re hesitant to keep on annoying them, right?
Well, that’s one approach. The approach of most nice, well-meaning people.
But here’s another approach, remind, remind, remind.
There are a few reasons why your boss won’t only not-mind if you do that, he will appreciate it.
The first is that he is probably doing a lot of different things and has hundreds of items on his plate, and a constant in-stream every day of more things to do. And let’s face it, your request for him is a really low priority in the universe of things he has to do. He probably just hasn’t sat down to think about it yet. If he’s like too many of my clients, he probably never will, until you pressure him to.
And he knows that. That’s why he is counting on you to push him if it’s important to make it happen. If it’s not important, then it’s not a big deal if he never responds. Right?
A second reason is, this is what differentiates the low-level employee from the high-level one. The lower-level employee hands work off to someone else and then, “it’s no longer my responsibility!” It happens when it happens. Your “CYA” is definitely CYA-ed!
But the higher-level employee does things differently. The higher-level employee wants to make sure the objective is achieved, and that waiting for a response doesn’t slow you down. He knows that the boss or client will be really busy. So, he pushes back until what is important happens. And if it isn’t important, he probably didn’t even ask in the first place.
Do you know what the difference between the two is? To a large degree, the difference is confidence. The senior-level employee has the confidence to push the client or boss, in a way the junior employee doesn’t.
And the way you get confidence is by practice—in other words—you become confident reminding your client or boss by just doing it. So that’s more of a reason to do it.
There are some tricks to make doing it easy. Here is my favorite one: ask them if it’s okay to remind them. “When do you think you’ll have this ready by?” “Thursday.” “Great, is it okay if I remind you on Friday in case you don’t?” I predict that 1000 to 1 they will say “of course.” They will permit you to be annoying because that’s what they actually want from you.
