This lesson is one of my hallmark observations. Copyright Me, a few years ago but… it never gets old. If this doesn’t get your expectations up high, I don’t know what will.
I’ll start with a direct summary of this key, and very non-obvious, philosophy of mine towards all client work, and in fact all of my work:
All clients just want two things: high-quality work, and high-quality communication about the work. If you give them both of those, they’ll think you’re the greatest thing since sliced bread. If you give them just one but not the other, they’ll be happy enough to not complain. If you give them neither, they will be very, very unhappy. Therefore, great communication is a hedge against the results of your work not being as great as you expect.
Let’s unpack that. Think for a moment about any job you’ve had. What’s made your boss happy? Just one of two things, or both: awesome work, or just lots of responsive, super-detailed, and thoughtful updates. Some clients would want you to spend 95% of the workday just documenting, and 5% doing.
Ha! We joke about them but… there’s a method to the madness. There’s a reason why all clients and bosses love updates and documentation.
Some of the reasons speak to other chapters: they can’t read your mind, for example. But it goes beyond those. It’s also because:
- For non-trivial tasks, documentation is the way they know the work is happening.
- For non-trivial tasks, documentation is the way they can track the progress to make sure it’s coming along on schedule.
- For non-trivial tasks, documentation is the way they can make sure the work is happening in the way they like and expect it.
- For non-trivial tasks, documentation is the way they can be sure that the rest of the team has an understanding of what you’re doing, in case you vanish into thin air one day (sadly, too common).
- Just like documentation is the way you justify your work to your boss or client, it’s the way that they justify their work to their boss or their client.
So, documenting every detail is important—so important, it’s probably okay if you go slower. Think about the above list, without those, the company dies. If the boss can’t justify your work to his bosses, or if the boss is worried you might disappear, or if the boss has no idea what’s happening or at what speed or if it’s any good, then it’s very, very hard for him to write the check to pay you.
But your clients don’t just want documentation, they want you to be responsive. Fast. They have a question and want to see a response, for the same reasons as the documentation. It shows you’re there and you’re on top of it and you’re paying attention.
Documentation plus responsiveness, taken together, is the heart of good communication practices. So, clients want good communication.
For some companies (we can call them “bureaucracies”), communication matters much, much more than work quality does. But let’s ignore that because you would never turn yourself into a bureaucrat, right?
Bureaucracies aside, the second thing every client or boss wants is awesome work—by their definition of awesome. Unlike good communication practices, I don’t have much to say on that: the work you do is either stellar in the boss’s eyes, or it isn’t.
A nuance here is the difference between “the boss’ eyes” and anyone else’s eyes, or objectivity. None of that matters, other than the boss’s eyes. Period.
Anything else I can think of that a client might want from you is either less important than these two categories or falls into them.
Now, what happens when a client gets both of these?
Seventh heaven. You don’t have a worry in the world at work, except for continuing to perform your work awesomely & communicate awesomely, both of which are hard.
What happens when you don’t have either of these?
Disaster. Think about it from your boss’s perspective: someone disappears (doesn’t communicate) and when they do appear, their work isn’t even that good? That’s always the first person to be fired.
With these taken together, remember the summary we started with: your client will want great work and great communication. With both, all great. With neither, all hell will break loose. But with one, that’s when you’re “just good enough” to keep around.
So, here’s a useful way to think about it: think about great communication as a hedge against possible problems or your work quality. Doing great work is hard, and sometimes, you run into real-world challenges that stumble you, delay you, or stop you. Maybe the people you’re dependent on aren’t as competent as you would like. Maybe there’s a bug that you just can’t fix. Maybe the complexity is above your head. Maybe the team politics get to you. Maybe just bad luck happens. If for any reason your work isn’t awesome, how do you stop the client from being unhappy? Communication—no, over-communication. Share every detail, show him the progress, work in the open, keep drafts open in real-time, and so forth.
Your client is human, and if he sees how much you’re trying, is following your trials and tribulations, he will empathize with your stumbling blocks—and give you a pass if your work is only good and not amazing. But when that happens in secret, well, he’ll never know what you’re suffering through. So, sharing and documenting your work will give you tons of points on that half of the scale, even if you don’t hit the 10 out of 10 on the work quality scale.
So, if you’re not naturally an over-sharer or over-communicator and don’t have the instinct to do every detail in public, you may want to consider adopting that stance, if only as a hedge against problems at work you might face one day in the future.
