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Dear Agents,
There’s a person on my team who is terrible in front of clients. I’m not her supervisor, but I have to attend client meetings with her, which is pretty painful for me. I’ve talked to her boss about it, but nothing’s changed. Should I confront her directly? Or suggest that she can’t come to client meetings any more? Help!
-YLS
Agent H1 says:
If there is any degree of trust you could approach the situation from several ways:
If you at all care about this person’s success, coming from a place of wanting to help her to succeed will help her see another point of view. If the insight comes from a place of wanting to help the person then it could be taken in a way that can be heard.
Put yourself in her situation. What are her needs, emotions during these meetings? What is important to her?
What is her personality like? Does she appreciate directness? Need sensitivity? Does she have a big ego? Want to help / learn? What negative self talk do you think is going on for her?
Another thing could be to think about what she does really well then talk about what you see in the meetings. Be honest but with a little bit of sugar. What helps is saying what you hope to see rather then all the things that are wrong. Ask the person if they are open to some suggestions to improving their success.
If there really isn’t any trust here you could ask to set a meeting to better the client results. Ask for feedback for what you do and/or bring up what you are working on. Then say some very specific things she could do that would improve the client interactions. Be very specific here because if you are generic she may not understand.
Remember everyone sees things through their own lenses: past experiences, values, saboteurs and perspectives. You have to look through their lens to see how they could be approaching things and how they need to hear it from you.
Agent M1 says:
Confronting her directly is probably not ideal. My suggestion is to first gauge how serious her client behavior is, i.e. is she rude or offensive? Maybe she is inexperienced and ever-wanting to prove herself and you feel it’s inappropriate, but it’s not deemed a liability to the company(with the risk of losing the client).
a) If it’s the latter, then perhaps you can break it down further and really dig deep to see how much can be addressed/potentially solved with her manager, versus how much of it can be forgiven and ignored.
b) If its the former, then be sure to meet with her manager immediately to pull her from the project temporarily or indefinitely, as needed.
c) A final scenario is to let her fail, even at the risk of losing the client, if you want to invest in her future success and this is a trial by error scenario!!
Agent N1 says:
Because you are not her supervisor, and are not a personal friend, you should not say anything directly to her. If you feel her performance is compromising your work or relations with clients, then speak with her supervisor, in confidence. Explain that you feel it is affecting the bottom line. Give specific examples. Be objective. And try to give constructive suggestions as to how things could be improved. Good luck!
Agent S1 says:
I was in a similar situation once… my colleague was simply a terrible presenter. He was always very nervous about presenting and was too quiet, stumbled over words, no eye contact, etc. I guess the positive aspect was that his behavior was NOT going to offend or alienate the client (probably), but it was REALLY DIFFICULT for me to sit alongside the person as a representative of my company. My coworker also KNEW that he wasn’t a very good presenter, and he really wanted practice to get better.
We were peers (in fact, he’d been at the company much longer than me and could have been considered my senior), so I had to be pretty sensitive in dealing with this. The way I did it was to suggest that we split up presentation duties, giving him a faster, simpler chunk of the work… I always took the opening and closing bits, which I think helped a lot. And you know what? Eventually he improved!
The situation is much tougher if your colleague is damaging client relationships… If you think that’s the case, you could suggest collecting feedback from clients. Maybe if the feedback comes from outside the organization, it would make an impact.
Some other agents and readers out there may have great suggestion as well…
What would you do if you were YLS? — please comment below!
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