-By Harsha Chaturvedi, COO (Vantage Agora Inc.,)
As your organization grows you will find yourself having to do more and challenging yourselves in areas that will help you get ahead in your career by growing with the company. But the ground rules donâEUR(TM)t change. Unless you provide undivided attention to customer and projects you will not be able to get a 'Customer Delight' rating from your customers. Meaning, you have to do your today's job better than yesterday and do extra!!!!
Now you will be thinking, "How on earth can I do more and provide deep analysis on customer data and spend quality time with customer????"
There is a simple way. You are doing this to a certain extent but you are not doing it consistently enough. Let me tell you what and why?
I will give you the short answer to the 'what' first. Just follow the steps mentioned below:
1. Get organized internally as a professional. Meaning, you have to set up calendar appointments with yourself when you have to work on your tasks. That way you donâEUR(TM)t commit to this time to others. Remember, calendar appointments are not just for meetings. At VA we have given a hard cover âEUR~VA little black book' to ensure just this. We call this operating rhythms.
2. Whenever you meet an interrupt (Which you will, more than once in a day) please ask yourself, âEURoeis it an emergency (Important and Urgent (IU)) or important (Important but Not Urgent (INU)--These are good interrupts)?
3. When the interrupt is a IU just show leadership and take decisions. Call whoever you want, whenever you want. Act like it is your baby! Stop if from crying. No time to hold back here.
4. When the interrupt is an INU please create a task your company tracker (âEUR~Club VAâEUR(TM) in our case) and make sure that you inform people in advance about this so that they can be prepared during the call. Then make a decision as a team in your weekly call.
If you want to know WHY this is the best solution read on...
Now, stop reading and just jog back in your memory on the number of times you had an unscheduled conversation (over the phone, email, or in person chats) about a issue that had cropped up in your organization.
Was it something that had to do with people, was it an emergency, was this something that you were just keeping your management in the loop, was this something that is time sensitive that needs all of us to be on a call to sort out? If the answer is âEURoeYESâEUR