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You are here: Home / Corporate Ladder University / Treat your clients like terrorists and you’ll have a highly successful career (this has NOTHING to do with negotiation)

April 17, 2019 by Eric Butts Leave a Comment

Treat your clients like terrorists and you’ll have a highly successful career (this has NOTHING to do with negotiation)

Here me out on this… it’s NOT about negotiation as some have guessed when I told them what I was planning on writing about.

So let’s get into it…

If you ever take public transportation in Chicago, you’ll hear a consistent refrain in their effort to combat terrorism. “If you see something, say something.”

It’s such a beautiful sentence. Not only does it remind you to pay attention but also to speak up if anything looks off to you.

It’s basically risk management for dummies, and I wish I would’ve come up with that. Maybe that’ll be a book title I use one day.

Anyway, if you’re in (or have any desire to be in) client service or any organization taking on large-scale initiatives, then you should know risk management (read: “PMO work”) is critical. To say it differently, you have to know when to speak up as you see potential risks and what level to raise it to.

Once you get past knowing when to speak up, the hard part begins — figuring out how to deliver that message. Deliver it too softly and you’ll be ignored. Come off too abrasively and people will fight you and become a nemesis for the duration of the project, which makes things unnecessarily difficult.

The clients are terrorists mindset has served me well for many years and I think it’ll do the same for you.

If you want to learn more about *how* to flag things up without having the entire project team turn on you, then you should join me in the Success Factory, which is as easy as moving your little fingers over to the link below:

https://ericpbutts.com/success-factory-v2/

 

Filed Under: Corporate Ladder University Tagged With: career advice, project management

About Eric Butts

I’m a management consultant, MBA and CPA who has a passion for helping others in their career pursuits. Grab my FREE cheatsheet on 12 simple habits of highly successful consultants.

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