Marketing Your Consulting Services.pdf - epiheirimatikotita.gr

How to Adapt to Others’ Styles
As you may have imagined, there are four basic ways you can move to be more
flexible. You can adapt your style to take charge more, be more easygoing, be more
task-oriented, or be more people-oriented.
To do any of these, first identify another person’s style and compare it to yours.
Are you more easygoing or do you take charge more than the other person? Are
you more task-oriented or people-oriented as compared to the other person? Once
you have answered these questions, you can decide which way you will need to
move to get into that person’s comfort zone.
For example, let’s say that you are a collaborator and you are dealing with a controller
client. That individual is more likely to take charge more and be more taskoriented
than you. If you place yourself and the individual on a grid, you can easily
see that to get into that person’s comfort zone, you need to move toward the “takecharge”
end and up to the “task-oriented” end.
Now let’s translate all this into behaviors you can adjust to your client’s preferences.
Moving to the left means that you may want to speed up your discussion,
be more decisive, and limit the details.
Moving up toward the task-oriented end means that you will want to get down
to business sooner than you may normally prefer and provide more logical discussion.
If you adapt to another’s style, are you being a fake? A charlatan? Not at
all. You are bending toward the other person, being flexible to ensure good communication.
Without flexibility, you will be less effective and less likely to positively
influence others.
Communicating with Style
You are your own best resource for learning specific ways to adapt your style to
other colleagues,’ clients,’ or friends’ styles.
How might this information help you as you continue to build relationships
with your clients? Figure 9.4 gives you some ideas about how each style communicates,
how each style makes decisions, what aspects of a project are important,
and how to know when each has bought off on an idea. Determine
your clients’ styles, then begin to build your relations with clients one style at a
time.
A Client in Hand Is Worth Ten in Your Plan: Will Your Clients Market for You? 203