I recently had the opportunity to be involved with the son of a colleague whom has been trying to break into the digital industry from high school. He had missed out on uni so I took it upon myself to give him the best chance i could to get his foot in the door. The first project I gave was to develop a simple iphone app for our dev team to test ad placements on.

What I thought would be a simple transaction turned into a multi-week hell of chasing where the project was at, when I would get the first draft, etc.

At this point I sat him down and tried to impart an important lesson to him.

It’s not how good you are. It’s how good you communicate.

Now please don’t get me wrong here. It does matter how good you are at creating results in your field but all of this means nothing if you can’t communicate to your client (me) when, where, and how this will happen.

Let’s take the example of a brilliant programmer who only answers his email or picks up his phone every few days but does some amazing work, only to deliver it two days past set schedule. Personally, while this may be a better result, it would be a heartache for any project manager if someone could not be easily be relied upon to deliver tasks on time. I would rather hire someone with less skill, delivering a less quality product but I knew when to expect them.

Good business is built on predictability. Any good manager will try to iron out any unpredictably in favor of slow sustained growth. This is why no manager likes surprises. Good or bad. They would prefer to be constantly pleasantly surprised.

Action Step

If you have a hard time remembering to follow up communication with clients of even friends and loved ones try an emailed follow up service like www.followup.cc or my personal favouritewww.followupthen.com. Since using these tools, my personal and professional communications have been a lot more consistent.

For the advanced level, this can be taken a step further as to how you can improve customer service in all parts of your business life.