Adapt to your Client's Needs

In this installment of the Work Your Way Learning Series, we're featuring consultant Nicole Brodeur - storyteller extraordinaire! Here, she explains how she adapts to her client's needs ever day to deliver excellence, and help her team achieve heroic success.

From Work, Your Way by Lisa Hufford:

“Being agile and adaptable to your client’s needs is a powerful skill…Harness your superpowers and understand the role you need to play for your clients at any given time.”

Common Roles:

• Coach: Listen, understand, and guide
• Advisor: Leverage your expertise to teach and do the work
• Influencer: Bring disparate groups together by understand individual motivations
• Doer: Get things done, make it happen
• Problem Solver: Always look for ways to help your clients overcome their problems – don’t contribute to them!

Video Transcript: I came to Simplicity after a long career as a journalist, and I'm using those skills as a storyteller in corporate communications. It wasn't a smooth transition. For a while there, I was swimming in acronyms, and the learning curve was steeper than the stairs next to a broken escalator. You know what I mean? But adapting my skills as a reporter to what my client needs has helped me get immediate and meaningful results. It always starts with listening, asking the questions that perhaps haven't been asked in a while, and not only have the client but of the people I'm writing about. I don't know if I'm an advisor, but I do help my clients see things in a new light and see the value of taking complicated concepts that they may be comfortable with, and making them easier for other people to understand. I also offer ideas for new ways to approach stories and how they might be received on the other end. My background also helped me with cross group collaboration. Just as I worked with editors, photographers and graphic artists in the past, I'm now working with managers and PMS, collecting stories, data, photos and graphics. And working in media made me a doer. I am organized, focused, adaptable when things change on a dime, and still able to deliver on deadline. It was just part of my DNA. As for being a problem solver, while being a consultant has given me not so much a license as a learner's permit to raise issues, recommend solutions and remain objective, while also wanting the best for my client. I want them to succeed so that I may continue to be part of what's become a pretty wonderful adventure. I'm learning something new every day, but I'm also learning that I bring value to the team, fresh eyes and proven skills.